The Issues
If elected, I will work on the following policies to help fix the state.
Get our state’s out-of-control spending, under control
• Work to consolidate or eliminate many of our 500+ state departments and agencies to cut the budget and reduce overlapping regulatory jurisdictions.
• Apply caps on spending growth like many other states have– limiting it to population growth plus inflation or economic growth.
• Apply a means test to all regulations on the books and eliminate those that are too expensive to enforce.
• Work to repeal some of the hundreds of unfunded mandates from the state that are costing local cities hundreds of millions to comply with. Work to put in place a moratorium on new unfunded mandates.
Fix the state pension and salary system and ensure it is there for future generations:
• Support legislation to enable local municipalities more flexibility in addressing their pension liabilities.
• Work to curb “double dipping” and “triple dipping”- where pensionees receive more than one pension at a time and earn more in retirement than they did working.
• Help curb “spiking” salaries in the last year of service to raise pension payouts, change the calculation rules so that pensions are calculated based on the last three or five years of service, like almost every other state.
• Increase oversight and review of “industrial retirement” and “disability retirement” pensions and increase criminal penalties for defrauding the system.
Unleash our state’s economic innovation engine:
•Expand the tax and regulatory incentives that exist in State Enterprise Zones (SEZ) statewide and thereby attract hundreds of thousands of jobs back to the golden state.
• Return California labor laws on overtime to national standards and reform other employment laws to make us more competitive with other states.
• Simplify the paperwork required to start new businesses and eliminate the license fee for forming your own business
•Suspend AB 32 (the California Global Warming Solutions Act) until the economy is back on track– saving one million jobs from fleeing the state.
Eliminate the “one size fits all” model for education in this state:
• Empower teachers to teach by reducing the complexity of state standards and returning curriculum and disciplinary control back to local administrators and teachers. In the process, reduce state administrative spending and send the savings back into the classroom.
• Simplify the funding system for schools– reduce the number of buckets money is dispensed from the state to local school districts from 80+ to less than 5, thereby eliminating bureaucratic overhead and giving school boards the flexibility to spend money how they see best.
• Reform the Individual Expenditure Plan (IEP) system for special education to standardize it and help small school districts better shoulder the costs of special needs students.
• Work to reduce excessive standardized testing which is eating valuable class time. Reduce box checking and circle bubbling to give back instruction time to teachers.
Cut taxes, then keep them low by changing the way Sacramento spends your money:
• Exempt manufacturing and capital equipment from sales tax- like 47 other states do – to encourage job creation.
• Differentiate between capital gains and regular income to better reward “sweat equity” and give people more reasons to stay in California.
Work to address our illegal immigration problem
• Ensure that the CA Border Patrol have the funding and tools they need to seal our border and keep new illegal immigrants from entering California.
• Support enforcement of CA state and federal law and put an end to sanctuary cities.
• Mandate use of eVerify and other systems by employers to ensure those employed in CA are working legally.
• Ensure that those receiving state welfare services or attending state colleges on in-state tuition are legal US citizens.
Local Issues:
• Work to bring a dog beach to the South Bay.
• Work to extend the Green Line into LAX to help mitigate traffic and congestion in the LAX area.
• Work with local communities to balance LAX expansion and noise with the property rights of residents.
