|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Gus Mattammal, a Republican entrepreneur who last year vied for a seat in the U.S. Congress, announced Tuesday that he is running for a state Assembly seat that is currently occupied by Marc Berman.
A resident of El Granada, Mattammal is one of two recently declared challengers for the seat in the 23rd District, which covers Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Atherton, Woodside, Pacifica, Ladera, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Portola Valley, Saratoga and Campbell. Palo Alto Mayor Lydia Kou, a Democrat and a longtime critic of Sacramento’s housing mandates, announced last week that she plans to challenge Berman for the Assembly seat.
Mattammal, a director at the tutoring company Advantage Testing, isn’t entirely new to politics. Last year, he was one of seven candidates who competed for the District 15 seat in the U.S. House of Representatives that was long occupied by Jackie Speier. He finished third in the heavily Democratic district with 16.5% of the votes, behind eventual winner Kevin Mullin and runner-up David Canepa.
In his announcement, Mattammal said that he is running because he wants to make it easier for California to “grow and thrive.” He noted that the state population has been declining even as Texas and Florida are picking up residents and Congressional representation.
“The consequences of having so few Republicans in the state Assembly are real, and they are growing,” Mattammal said in the announcement.
He took a shot at Sacramento’s housing policies and said he wants to consider ideas for building housing “where it makes sense, rather than forcing housing on every community whether they want it or not.”
In his campaign last year, he similarly focused on ways to reduce government mandates. He opposed, for example, efforts by local jurisdictions to ban natural gas in new developments and favored giving people incentives to voluntarily make the switch.
He also supported creating educational savings accounts for low-income individuals in areas with poorly performing public schools and making additional investments in nuclear fusion and carbon-capture technology.
Mattammal said in his Tuesday announcement that he would like to talk about ways to make it easier for schools and nonprofits to spend money that they get from the government without “drowning in a sea of compliance paperwork and regulatory micromanagement.” He also said he wants to explore reforms to the permitting process and regulatory relief that would “enable real progress on climate and make it easier to start and grow a business.”
“Our state government has been far out of balance for almost 20 years now, and the result is that it’s too hard to run a school, too hard to operate a nonprofit, too hard to start or grow a business, and too hard to do the big things we need to do to address climate change,” Mattammal said in the announcement. “And now, Californians are beginning to pay the price.”
Sooo…what I’m getting from this story is that Mattammal has ZERO experience working in government, but he wants to START in the State capitol? Wow. That’s chutzpah.
Start at your city level. I want to see how you vote as a commissioner or Council Member. Demonstrate your values through government service. I won’t even look at you for this role without seeing a record of government experience. I have watched too many business executives implode in government roles which call for completely different skills sets.
I would like to see a more moderate and EXPERIENCED contender run against Marc Berman. I’m not happy with his support of radical Scott Weiner’s poorly written legislation. I’m watching to see how he votes on SB423. Though we needed incentives to build more housing, extending the housing legislation to 2036 without allowing time to understand its effects on public schools, transportation systems, community service, public works would be irresponsible. It is far too soon for SB423. It would be better to wait to understand the impacts of the still-very-new housing legislation on communities and to create legislation to tie funding for the support systems mentioned above to construction of new housing.
Many in Sacramento got there with no local government experience prior to their election to office. Given that California is in a downward spiral that is gaining momentum every day due to one party rule for decades, what we need are moderate Republicans and Democrats with real world problem solving experience in the business sector to work together to save the state. It’s time to reset and vote out every leftist Democrat and every Liberal/Progressive holding office and not vote in any replacements with the same ideology during the next election cycle. Hopefully, it’s not too late.
Fresh input in our political scene is surely welcome. Let’s keep an open mind. Otherwise, we have fully entrenched “representatives” who don’t seek to represent a range of views.
The state assembly is the lower house in the CA legislature. It’s fine to “start” with this office.
Those who go (first) on PA city council and aspire to higher office are then accused of using the council as a “stepping stone” to bigger and better things.
– So criticism happens no matter what.
Hillary Clinton held no elected office prior to becoming a US Senator in New York! That’s a very high status position. They moved to New York and planned closely with Democratic party leaders to make this happen. Obama later wanted her to be Sec of State for obvious political reasons – not necessarily congruent with voter opinions (as we later found).