Key Campaign Issues

By Beth Rogers

I am a person of action. My husband and I built our business in the Central Coast, and we know the pressures a small company must face in trying to keep open and provide jobs to our community. I also understand the role of government, and more importantly, I know how to make it more responsive to the people it serves. As part of the California Competitiveness Council, I helped build the reforms that brought California out of its recession in the 1990s. As an appointed member of environmental commissions, I appreciate the importance of a safe environment and know how to cut through bureaucracy and red tape to make sure public dollars get out of the court rooms and back into clean ups.

I want to bring this same commitment to action to help resolve the critical problems facing the Central Coast.

Home ownership is at the core of the American dream, but the supply and cost of housing is now beyond of the reach of too many working families and the retired. Federal programs go elsewhere simply because of the price of homes in our area. These programs must be broadened to reflect local conditions such as we have in the Central Coast.

The cost and availability of health care is growing out of control. We need to make health care more affordable--I will support President Bush's proposals to allow working families to deduct the cost of health insurance and will work to expand this to cover elder care provided by working families as well.

I also support immediate addition of prescription drug coverage to Medicare. Our seniors cannot wait while Congress wastes another 5 years arguing over what is the perfect coverage. Our seniors need relief from drug costs now, and they need a program that does not bankrupt Medicare and the other critical health services it provides.

In education, we need to use limited Federal dollars more wisely. Federal dollars are only 10% of our total school budgets, but we can stretch them better if Congress stops adding more mandates and paperwork for our schools to get the same resources. Our communities must be allowed to decide what our priorities are--better teacher salaries, restoring music and shop classes, repairing our classrooms, or another critical local need--and the way they can do that is by moving federal funds back as block grants to be decided by parents and teachers together.

We also need to restore our technical and vocational training. Not every student will go to college--my own children have chosen different paths through university, community college, and the military--but our schools have slowly cut back on the technical training needed to offer another path to good paying jobs. Our businesses have a hard time finding technically skilled workers, and are so short of many technical skills that we now import labor from other countries through specialized visas. Our children are here now, and they can fill the need if our schools give them the skills.

The variety and stability of the jobs we provide lie at the core of the Central Coast's way of life. We provide a mix of agriculture, tourism, small manufacturers, defense installations, world-class research, and the cutting edge of technology. But what all this employment has in common is a need for regulatory, tax, and trade policies that reward work and that provide the conditions under which they and the Central Coast can continue to prosper. I have fought this fight to maintain the jobs we provide through our own business, and I have fought successfully for the Central Coast's economic interests on the state level.