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San Bernardino County, CA November 4, 2014 Election
Smart Voter Political Philosophy for Marc Steinorth

Candidate for
Member of the State Assembly; District 40

This information is provided by the candidate

  • Economy/Small Business:

As a small business owner for over fifteen years, the Vice Chairman of the League of California Cities Inland Region Legislative Task Force, a group which aims to advocate for policy decisions that positively impact businesses and families, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce Committee, I have dedicated both my life and career to the success of small business both locally and nationally. Not only do I run a successful small business, but also my company, Atlas Buying Group, Inc., specializes in helping local small businesses expand, create more jobs for our residents, and benefit our regional economy. Although I successfully ran for Rancho Cucamonga City Council and now seek the 40th Assembly seat, I will always be a small businessman who understands how to entice, operate, and expand local businesses for our future.

The lack of quality, long-term, high-paying jobs in our region, the overreaching regulations of state government, and our leaders' misperceptions of business-friendly, pro-growth policies, have all fueled my desire to represent our region in the Assembly. I understand the difficulties of owning your own business because I am a business owner, and I can no longer sit back and watch our legislators drive companies, jobs, and opportunity away with uneducated decisions. I have always taken a commonsense approach to the decisions that affect my business, and as an Assemblymember I will make informed decisions that restore jobs and economic promise to our entrepreneurs, families and residents.

  • Public Safety:

In order to facilitate Realignment and mitigate its detrimental effects on public safety in our local communities, I support the use of adult and juvenile local detention facilities for relieving the strains placed on prison and county jail facilities because of overcrowding. I would be willing to review funding proposals for constructing and renovating such facilities to meet those needs.

While I do not believe public safety services provided by the government should be privatized in any way, I recognize that given the very real effects of AB 109 and consequently the pressing needs that must be met by every county and local agency across California, using private services to support efforts to protect the public can prove to be a viable temporary solution.

  • Realignment:

I believe it would be wrong to call AB 109 and its policy of public safety realignment a success at this stage--wrong to California's communities still trying to respond valiantly to greater needs and responsibilities despite not having a full array of agency resources; and wrong to the victims and families who have been impacted by the early release of prisoners.

In the State Assembly I will remain open and receptive to feedback from the CPOA and public safety leaders in my district about processes and methods to better support their efforts in implementing realignment. To start, there are common sense improvements that can be made. Namely, ensuring that each county has the ability to meet the now much larger task of providing effective rehabilitative services to offenders, that those same counties are able to share relevant information about the offenders they are supervising across counties to protect officers in the field, and a reevaluation of local facilities roles in incarcerating offenders with longer sentences.

In the State Assembly, the most important action I can take to best support county and municipal agencies and personnel in their response to realignment is to secure necessary funding during the budget process. The Legislature has an obligation to the public to responsibly balance its expenditures against its revenues, so that it is able to allocate needed resources on a consistent basis for essential functions.

Through sound financial stewardship in the Legislature, in consultation with law enforcement groups, I will take the necessary steps to ensure resources get to the officers on the front lines, whether that is through direct grants for support staff, equipment, training, or otherwise--it will get done.

  • Prison Overcrowding:

There is wide agreement among those within the public safety community that California's past policies geared towards the mass incarceration of offenders have been less than effective at stopping the constant flow of offenders from moving in and out of incarceration facilities. Attempts to alleviate the strain of a growing prison population were never truly allowed to come to fruition and the problems faced simply became worse. Only recently has California embarked--albeit hastily and with little foresight--on its new policy of realignment through AB 109, which now seeks to confront what is a major cause of prison overcrowding: extremely high recidivism rates.

On the whole, the success of counties and local agencies in their attempts to implement programs that change the trajectory of California's recidivism rate will depend on the support they receive from the Legislature to carry out rehabilitative services like educational, employment, and vocational training in conjunction with treatment programming for offenders slated for release. Without effective and well-resourced rehabilitation programs, in partnership with sufficiently supported law enforcement officers throughout the state, California's prison overcrowding problem will never be fully addressed.

And though I believe elected officials should have made strides much sooner, before being ordered by the courts, I, too, believe the solution to reducing California's prison population size is rooted in strong enforcement of the law and evidence-based rehabilitation for certain, qualified offenders.

  • 2nd Amendment/Gun Ownership:

Lawful citizens must be guaranteed their Second Amendment rights. The strength and viability of our nation's Constitution depends on it. The right to gun ownership is analogous to our right to defend ourselves and our right to property, and despite the best arguments of the anti-gun lobby we must maintain the legitimacy and intent of the Second Amendment, without question. Unless a Constitutional amendment is passed altering the Second Amendment right to bear arms, I believe we as a society must embrace proper, lawful gun ownership as a basic principle of freedom in this country and in our state.

As a small business owner and Vice Chairman of the League of California Cities Inland Region Legislative Task Force, I understand what it takes to attract solid job growth and businesses to a local economy. I have worked for years in private and public organizations to build our economy the right way: by creating an environment in which companies and families can grow and thrive, free of burdensome regulation, unfair taxation and mountains of red-tape. Not only do gun-control laws impair the individual, law-abiding citizen's ability to protect themselves, they do further economic damage by banning the sale of multiple types of guns and ammunition regardless of the lack of evidence that such laws will curtail gun violence and criminal activity. We are paying the costs of hurting honest, taxpaying residents and businesses, forcing some to move out of state and others to simply go out of business, without incurring any of the benefits that anti-gun lobbyists have argued for. We simply cannot stand idly by as our Constitutional rights are chipped away from by this Democratic supermajority, one anti-gun law at a time. I will make it a priority in the Assembly to fight against gun control and to put the interests of California's taxpaying, law-abiding citizens first.

  • Taxes/Prop 13:

In the last decade, the Inland Empire has been plagued by political corruption, an economic downturn exacerbated by poor planning, and illogical policies that overtax and overregulate the hard working families and residents of the middle class. I am a business owner, family man, and dedicated community leader that is running for the State Assembly because I want to help restore our economy, attract investment for our communities, and incentivize business owners to locate and expand in our region.

The attempts by both legislators and interested parties to manipulate a law that has protected property owners for nearly 40 years, is the reason that California continues to drive business out of our state and create economic booms in neighboring states. We have a jobs problem, not a tax problem, and with the current issues in safety, unemployment, and education, the attacks on Prop 13 are both unwarranted and imprudent. It is law that has withstood the test of time, and offers the residents of California some stability.

As a candidate for the State Assembly, I will focus on job creation, economic vitality, and public safety, and in order to create more jobs and construct a sustainable economy, we must ease the tax burden on residents and protect commonsense laws such as Prop 13.

Our residents are subjected to some of the highest taxes in the nation, and we have to provide a conduit for taxpayers to express their rights as residents of this state and citizens of this country.

I support taxpayers' rights to vote on all tax increases because it permits our residents, hard-working families, and business owners to have a direct effect on the decisions made by our elected officials.

  • Government Spending:

One of the primary responsibilities of elected officials is to be wise stewards of the public's money. But the taxing and spending policies of our State government have crossed the line. By authorizing consistently high government spending outside of the crucial budget process, elected officials are not exercising wise financial judgment. In the Assembly, I will draw upon my extensive experience as a successful entrepreneur and businessman, as well as my experience in elected office managing public resources, to serve my constituentsthrough supporting public safety functions. As I've emphasized throughout my public career ,I will always be receptive to the needs of California's law enforcement and other public agencies, and I will work to empower and support their efforts during my time in the Legislature.

  • Supporting Our State's Peace Officers:

I was raised in a military family; my father served as an Officer in the United States Air Force for two decades. During that time, we moved around the globe to meet the needs of this great Nation. I grew up understanding early the sacrifice that service to your community--whether your country, state, or local community--requires. My father instilled that in me by his own example. And so, in a unique way, I have a deep respect for California's peace officers, for their dedication and commitment to serving our communities all throughout California.

As an elected official in the City of Rancho Cucamonga, I understand how important it is that my colleagues and I exercise sound financial leadership and make the proactive decisions that are needed to ensure resources are available for necessary services, like public safety.

In the State Assembly, I will largely draw upon those two significant experiences of mine, in addition to my time as a small business owner, to position the state so that it can entirely meet its public safety and other essential obligations.

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Created from information supplied by the candidate: July 16, 2014 10:39
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