California State AssemblyCandidate for District 1

·      Streamlining permitting

·      Expanding accessory dwelling units

·      Incentives for up-zoning

·      Enforcement of affordable housing minimums

·      Community banking to put resources back into the community and help in offsetting affordable housing costs

·      Fund and manage a comprehensive effort to ensure every community has access to safe and affordable water through better planning, investment in innovative technology and research, and aggressively reduce pollution and contamination of water sources.

·      Locally- and regionally-specific resilience and reliability projects, such as preservation and expansion of water storage options, improve and innovate interconnections, and improve or expand shared treatment facilities.

·      Establish higher safety thresholds for chemical applications on agricultural land.

·      Encourage more sophisticated groundwater management and modeling, including connectivity to surface water.

·      Encourage and establish shared data and information systems among state agencies.

·      Support tribal self-determination and water rights commensurate with land use and development plans.

·      Improve mechanisms to ensure those who benefit and profit from the state water resources invest in preserving a healthy upland watershed, the source of California’s water.

·      Improved forest management

·      Increase incentives for renewable energy (biomass energy, tidal/wave energy, micro-hydro, appropriately-placed wind, battery storage, pumped storage, solar, gravitricity, heat pumps)

·      Expand incentives for electric vehicles and increased investment in public transit

·      Expand incentives Ethanol from biomass

·      Encourage local production for local consumption (decreasing transportation miles for food and other consumer products)

·      Increase incentives for passive solar buildings

·      Increase innovation in and use of hemp-based products

·      Putting a price on carbon emissions

Studies show that investments in early education can have a meaningful impact on crime reduction. These studies indicate that children that do not attend pre-school are 70% more likely to be incarcerated. Therefore, the most effective means of reducing crime is to invest more heavily in early child education, especially in communities with disproportionate shares of at-risk children. For those who are already incarcerated, prisons need to be focused on rehabilitation instead of just punishment. The Netherlands has successfully implemented prison programs that effectively reduce recidivism and assist in positive re-entry into society for those who have served their time. California should do the same.

Yes: California already exerts its considerable market power to drive down costs of drugs provided by Medi-Cal.  California needs to fully leverage its power as the fifth largest economy in the world, and use that power to ensure patients can get affordable quality life-saving medicines. The state entering the prescription drug market would take the power out of the medical/pharmaceutical community and put it into the people’s hands, increasing competition in an otherwise private market interested solely on profits.

Yes. California’s property tax system has protected individual homeowners – and this must be preserved.  However, multi-billion dollar companies currently exploit a loophole in Prop. 13 allows them to pay billions less in property taxes than homeowners.  To be absolutely clear, Prop. 13 must be protected for homeowners, and wealthy commercial property owners should be held to the same standard.

These don’t have to be mutually exclusive. California has some tenant protection measures in place, and those should be watched for a few years to better understand how they perform in the marketplace. What we absolutely must address is the lack of housing – especially affordable housing – throughout California. We know that California needs millions of new housing units: multiple market studies and analyses have told us this. And an “all of the above” approach must be used: enforcing current requirements for housing provision, easing planning and building regulations, making use of state lands and existing tenement structures, and synergistic use of existing and development of new housing programs.