Candidate for
Member of the State Assembly; District 40

• Economy/Small Business:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

• Supporting Our State's Peace Officers:

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.