I’m running for State Representative because I believe Olympia can do better. Let’s get back to basics: get people back to work and fund our priorities in education, the environment, and transportation.

Jobs and Economy

Let’s build an economy that works for working people. This means jobs with health care and living wages. We need to help companies bring jobs in, help them keep jobs here, and support workers who want safe and respectful working conditions.

We’ve seen what happens when a few banks take huge risks and lose – we all end up paying the price. I had a front-row seat to watch the mortgage meltdown while I was building fraud detection models for the mortgage industry in 2006-2007, and I want to make sure that can’t happen again. We can’t rely on the private sector to protect us from their mistakes, this is a task that only government can do.

Health Care

I want to follow Obama’s historic healthcare reforms with steps to reduce the cost of healthcare, like encouraging market competition between providers and reducing the tremendous bureaucratic expense built into our current healthcare system. Rather than simply removing the $180 million from Basic Health that federal health care reform will save, we should invest it back into restoring the Basic Health system and expanding Apple Health for kids, which leverages federal dollars. As we think about healthcare, we must also remain aware that food security is still a widespread problem. Across the state, demand at foodbanks has been rising for children, seniors, and everyone in between. We must come together as a community to fight against the tyranny of poverty.

Environment and Sustainability

We have a responsibility to future generations to be good stewards of our resources, and we need to take responsibility for cleaning up problems left to us by earlier generations. As we develop effective ways of dealing with past and current environmental problems, we will be stimulating new green businesses which can take these methods to the rest of the country and the world. A key part of our environmental stewardship has to be the expansion of our use of sustainable energy sources – costs for wind, solar, and biofuels are coming down while costs for fossil fuels are rising. The recent oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico underscores the need to look comprehensively at the cost of our energy choices.

Education

I support universal public education, including early learning. We need to fully fund initiatives to decrease class sizes and give teachers COLA raises. I believe that public institutions of higher education in Washington are a major driver of our economy: they provide an educated workforce and they foster the growth of new ideas and new technology which lead to innovative new businesses in our state. I oppose efforts by some in the Legislature to allow the universities to unilaterally increase their tuition, as it will inevitably hurt working families.

Transportation

An effective transportation system requires flexibility and options. We can’t meet our needs with any one single transit mode – we need a mix of roads and rail, buses and bikes. Right now, we should focus on two goals: accelerating current capital projects, such as replacing the 520, and expanding the choices available, such as hike/bike trails and park & rides, so people have real practical options for transportation.