 Yeah, I'm going to turn the slides over there, and that's just about it, so this is Silver C9, and then it just shows about how it's working. Good morning everyone. Hi, if you would like to take your seat, it would be great for us to get started because we have many candidates with us this morning. I believe, to my knowledge, all the candidates running for these positions, so we are very lucky. So we'll get started in like 30 seconds. Welcome everyone. My name is Jim Provenza. I'm a Yolo County Supervisor, and I also have the honor of chairing the Healthy Aging Alliance. I want to thank the candidates. We have all the candidates for both the assembly seat and the senate seat. I think we're particularly lucky in our county to have such good candidates, people that, no matter who wins, are going to do a good job representing us in Sacramento. We started the Healthy Aging Alliance in response to an understanding that there was going to be a rapid increase in the aging population. Sheila will talk about what we call the Silver Tsunami, but demographically, there are more and more people that are going to be over 60 years old and fewer and fewer people in the younger ages. That tells us a couple things. We need to plan for the future, and that's not just services, but making sure that we have advocacy so that there's a voice for seniors in the community and in Sacramento. And we need to educate everyone as to what they're going to be facing when they enter the years where housing is more difficult, where you have to make decisions about in-home support services versus nursing home care, and that everybody be aware of the services that are out there. The Healthy Aging Alliance was formulated out of a process where we had a community forum, much like this. We spent the whole day going over all the problems that affect seniors. We decided that a non-profit that would bring together government and private entities, people who work in non-profits to coordinate the services, make sure everybody's aware of the services, and then work as an arm for advocacy. One example of how that was successful was when in-home, when the adult daycare services were threatened with a loss of medical funding, we were able to intervene as an organization. We sent Don Perkey, we sent Sheila Allen to Sacramento, and we're able to be a significant factor in saving that funding. So that's the kind of organization we hope to be in. The reason for the forum today is to educate ourselves regarding our candidates, but also to educate our candidates regarding the needs of the aging population. And that's why I'm so happy and honored that they all are in attendance. I would like to thank the Volunteer Board of the YOLO Healthy Aging Alliance. Would the board members please stand up? They're back there. Wave your hands. They put in hours and hours of time. Sheila Allen, our executive director, started on my staff. She was assigned to this project because there was no money for it. She built the organization, went out and got the grants, and now she has a real salary. I'd also like to thank the sponsors of the event and the Davis Senior Center for making this facility available. And all of you for attending. I think the YOLO County and Davis, we have a community that is engaged and cares, and that's why we are going to be successful addressing the issues of aging in our community. And the one priority for the future, not that there are not many priorities, but one thing that we're going to take a particularly close look at is housing. Because housing is a real problem in our community and in the state, particularly for seniors and families with children. We need to address that in a systematic way, both locally at the state level, and we need to make it our goal to eliminate homelessness, not just to address it, but to eliminate homelessness. We need to work on that in the community and statewide as we go forward. So having said this, I would like to introduce our executive director, Sheila Allen. Thank you very much, Jim, and I appreciate you all coming out today to hear about healthy aging and aging issues in general and hearing directly from the candidates. So first of all, I'd like to thank all the candidates for be willing to participate. I know that you have very busy schedules, so we will try to keep this on time. I have asked the candidates if they're able to stick around for a few minutes afterwards to answer individual questions. We're not going to be taking questions from the audience today. We had a committee that created some questions that they'll be answering, but if you do have an individual question, perhaps you can catch them afterwards. I would like to point out that there are campaign materials for the assembly and for the senate. So if you'd like to avail yourself of that opportunity. And we have lots of wonderful snacks in the back that were provided by Colville Gardens, right? Okay, good. I want to actually give the right people. So thank you to them. There's some delicious healthy fruit and the most healthy donuts you've ever seen are back there. So help yourself. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and do a brief PowerPoint on areas that we've identified of concerns for older adults in Yolo County. And this is an educational forum, so you might notice that the candidates are in the audience because we thought we would educate them also. So we all start on the same page. So first, okay, we're already on the second page. So Yolo Healthy Aging Alliance, we are what the name says. And our tagline is that we attempt to be the unified voice for older adults in Yolo County. So here they come. I know that Mariko is the one who first started talking about this, the silver tsunami. So we all are aware of the baby boomer generation. My mom is the start of it and I'm the tail end of it. So we are the bookends. And there is a bubble of a population that's coming through now and services need to be there for them. So you can see some of the just, I know you can't see the numbers below, but it's clear that the number of older adults and oldest old adults are significantly increasing over the next 20 to 30 years. So Yolo Healthy Aging Alliance started because of the convergence of this statistic. So here's Yolo County aging population, where it is now or whether it was in 2010 when we first had our very first summit. And it's by 2050, it'll be 20 people, 65 and older will consist of 22% of Yolo County. So it was a significant change. And here's the other thing that made us want to start the Yolo Healthy Aging Alliance is that at the same time that the number of persons who required services was increasing was the same time when funding was going down. So there was a day long conference and we identified that we were not just going to have a conversation for one day, but we were going to work together as a community to continue to identify what were gaps in services and to address them. So this is our mission statement. It's that the Yolo Healthy Aging Alliance promotes the well-being of older adults through and then these are our three committees. We have an education committee, so that brings you this educational event today. Collaboration committee, which has now 72 providers of older adult services in Yolo County. So they're out there and that's one of the questions. There are services, but we have to make sure people get connected to them. And then advocacy is our other committee. So we had our first summit in 2010 and then we had a follow-up summit in 2014. And some of the people in the room attended that included some of the candidates. And it was during that time that the community came together and decided on what are going to be the four priority areas for the next three years that Yolo Healthy Aging Alliance is going to work towards trying to address these identified gaps in services. So those being one that Jim already identified, housing, transportation, mental health and dementia, and connection to services. So let's first talk just a little bit about housing. So we are really in a housing crisis right now. If you talk to anybody who's trying to get people into particularly affordable housing, it is just not available in Yolo County. And I know that those numbers are kind of small, but if I can direct you to the bottom one, it says what the federal poverty level will be is 10,000. And then the medium California, hi, I'm 42 and suddenly I can't see, I'm going to get my glasses. Well, not suddenly, it's been a slow process, but there we go. Okay, so the median California poverty measure for a single renter is 14,000. But yet if you live in Yolo County, so this considers everything that you would need in order to live on a daily basis. For one year, it would require one person $22,000 to live. So that's, you're a long ways from where for all the different things you might need, which is the next slide. So in general, older adults spend, no matter where you live, about 39% on housing, 23% on food, 23% on healthcare, and about 15% on transportation. But the problem is that there are those in the gap. So there are programs for people who are very poor and there are services and programs available for people who can afford it, but there's an ever widening gap of those who cannot afford it. And just as an example, if you happen to only be on SSI, and I know it totally, it's different for each individual, but in general, you get somewhere between $900 and $1,000 per month. But yet the average housing, if you rent, it's about $700 to $1,000 a month. So think about the rest of the pie where you're going to get the money for the rest of the pie. So there's a significant gap for income and particularly for housing. Next area is transportation. Whenever you talk about older adult services and needs, transportation always rises to the top of people's mind of what is needed. There is transportation in Yolo County, but it does not address all parts of the county and for all needs. So we have what we're calling transportation deserts. That's the new word, food deserts. So there are transportation deserts, and I don't know if you were aware of this, but most people, have you heard of the Yolo bus special for the people who are disabled? So there's that organization. So they can provide door-to-door service, but there's a federal law that only allows them to go during the time when buses are running and only within three-quarters of a mile of an existing route. So there are maps, if you look, that says, okay, here's where you can come get picked up is within the route. But so there are parts of Davis, in South Davis and in Mace Ranch that are not covered. And there are great swaths of land up in the valley that have no access to this transportation because they don't happen to live three-quarters of a mile from there. So transportation is a big issue. And we all know that if you don't thrive, or you can't thrive, then you have isolation. And so that people can't get to where they want to go and they become isolated. And another area for transportation, if you want to back up, John, one more time, transportation is just a lack of knowledge of the transportation because there is some transportation and you might be eligible for it. So getting the information out and then just really working on community planning. So not only for Yolo County but across jurisdictions. So if you need to get in to the doctor in Sacramento or down in Vacaville, that we have those kind of plans so that you can make that. Okay, next slide. Thank you. The next area that I'd like to talk about is dementia and Alzheimer's. And by the way, I'm a scientist and so I always hate putting numbers out unless I really feel good about them. So I've seen both one in three or one in six. But a lot of Americans will develop dementia sometime in their lifetime. So not just Alzheimer's but other kinds of dementia also. But it's a very big statistic. Millions of people in the United States. And in 2014 Americans provided nearly 18 billion hours of unpaid care. So it's not like these people are getting paid care. It's many family and friends who are providing care for people with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. And then I just wanted to, this is not the focus of this venue but I cannot leave this subject of dementia without speaking to the absolute need for Davis to have adult day care. In Woodland there's adult day health care which is a medical benefit that has both the social and the medical model. And there are people that go from Davis over there. But there's a wait list, what is it now Dawn? 56 people on the wait list to get into that program. And there's people on the bus for an hour and a half to two hours to get over to that program. West Sacramento has an adult day care but Davis does not have adult day care. So I think we as a community need to come together. It's a safe place for people to go during the day one to five times a week to be able to either relief to a caregiver or to let people go to do their job so that their person can be in a safe place. There you go, that's my advocacy for the day. Next, connection to services. As I've already mentioned we have 72 providers of older adult services in Yolo County. We are doing a great job of collaborating between us but the community doesn't necessarily know about the services that are there when they need them. So that's something we need to do. It's important that we have multiple points of entry so that a person doesn't need to know one thing or one place to go. They should be able to go almost any place, their senior center to their doctor and get connected to services. And we as individuals need to think about planning ahead because often it's not until somebody has fallen down and broken their hip. They're like, oh, now we need a plan. Planning a plan ahead of time is much better. So we as a community can work on developing that. And third is to what I've already mentioned to address the gap. So people who need the services but just can't afford them. So finally here, this is an example of the Yolo Healthy Aging Alliance website. It's called YoloHealthyAging.org. So you can go there sometime. And finally, last one. I always like to end on a positive note because we can do this together. So by the way, we are all aging. We've all aged a little bit since we walked in this room. And we want to make sure that we're getting the right services at the right time. That's a goal that we as all together can be addressing and that there are many gaps in services, but they can be addressed if we work together on it. So that's it. Thank you. Candidates. All right, our candidates will now come forward and I will begin with the introductions. And then they will each have five minutes to speak about whatever they would like to you. Each, there are, there's one microphone for two candidates. So be good shares. Show us how good you are at sharing. And the portable mics need to be turned on. So if you want, oh, he's going to come help him. Thank you very much. So your timekeeper is right here. Hello, Paige, right? Now what is it? Oh, sorry. The other one I've apologized. This is Hannah, our timekeeper. She would show no. And then everyone understands. Oh, did I land? Okay, let us see. Hello. Okay, this one's working perfectly. Okay. Now it's off. Okay, we're on. Great. So technology is always our friend. Maybe I can't move. I'll stand right here. Okay. So we are going to begin with the, we have the assembly and the Senate candidates here. So we are going to begin alphabetically with the assembly candidate. So I'm going to briefly introduce each of them. I'm going to begin with Cecilia. And I'm going to try really hard to pronounce this right. Egg you are. Egg we are. So close. Egg we are curry. Cecilia grew up around cutting apricots in the packing shed to helping her dad orchard. Cecilia learned about hard work and what it takes to thrive in the farming community. Today, she and her brothers are co-owners of the family's 80-acre walnut farm. After graduating from local schools, Cecilia earned degrees in business administration and accounting from San Jose State University. Her education and experience with agriculture inspired her to launch a consulting firm specializing in water, public policy and community outreach. In her off hours, Cecilia volunteers for her community. She's chair of the Yolo Housing Commission, vice chair of Yolo County Water Association and serves on the board of directors of Sacramento Council's government. She has been working to secure computers and bridge the digital divide by bringing broadband to rural communities, build a state of the art housing development and establish an egg innovation hub in Yolo County. Understanding that jobs are the lifeblood of our community, Cecilia helped bring a $75 million PG&E training facility to Winters. She also worked to establish the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument to protect environmental lands across five counties. All of Cecilia is the proud mother of two grown daughters and has one step-son with her long-term partner, Larry Harris. And now the time begins. Thanks. Go ahead. Thank you very much for including me today as well as all the candidates. Again, my name is Cecilia Aguero-Curri. I am a long-time resident of Yolo County and I'm here today to tell you I am totally work very, really hard for the senior community. You might say, well, so in Winters what are you doing? For a long time we did absolutely nothing. And just in the past three years under my leadership, we've brought in social services to Winters with the help of Supervisor Saylor and Supervisor Provenza. I found a location for senior citizen center. I have worked with a company called Domus. We are putting in a 63-room senior housing project in Winters. And what the benefit of all this is that not only are we going to have the housing, but we're going to have a senior citizen facility. We don't have a place for our seniors to gather. In addition to that, we've worked hard with our Winters healthcare. Winters healthcare is going to put their new facility on the same location as with our senior citizen center and our housing. What's important about that? We now have housing. We have a place for people to gather. We're going to have a place for healthcare. We also have yellow federal credit unions going to open up at the same lot. We have Dollar General, which many of you may not be familiar with and you may not agree with. But in my community Dollar General has answered the call for many of our underprivileged people in our community to be able to buy affordable goods at this store. So we've put together a whole complex. Everything is walkable. Everything is near transportation hubs. And so that's one of the things that I've worked on hard. And so you might say, so why have I got you into this? I'll never forget when Marika was an assemblywoman. She came and spoke to my city council and she said, don't forget the silver tsunamis coming and the light went on. And I thought, my God, I'm not that far off. And so being 62 years old, I want a place to live. Many of my residents in the winters have been there for their whole life. And the minute they don't have a place to live, they have to move to Woodland or Davis. And soon afterwards, they pass away. They pass away because of loneliness. They pass away because they don't have their friends and they don't have any transportation. So what's really important to me is to make sure I had a place for my community. We haven't asked anybody to help us out. We went out on our own. In a small community, sometimes you just got to stick your neck out, take some risks and that's what we've done. I have, my father passed away a year ago. I never thought that being a caretaker would be so difficult. It's a really difficult job. All of us in your room need some family member to help you out. I learned a lot from that experience. I learned a lot about loneliness. How lonely seniors are in my community. I was blessed that when my father did pass away, we decided my brothers and I had to do a foundation. The community came together for $10,000. That $10,000 we put in a foundation, we leveraged it for the community center. My father is shining. He is so happy that that happened. I want to thank right here, there's a group of men and women from Winters that have attended today. They have taken the ball and run. We now have a senior citizen foundation in Winters, California. They are taking the lead. They are working with Yellow County. They're working with Sheila. They're working with Peggy. They're bringing people together because they don't understand. In Winters, we don't have access to a lot of the things for seniors. We don't have transportation. My friend here, Patty, thanks a lot for Patty. She's had a lot of health issues. Six hours round trip to get to her doctor sometimes on a bus. Chemotherapy, how would you feel? In a rural community, all of you have to realize that we don't have access. You're so lucky to have this beautiful facility. I have people that right now that we're trying to put together with Patty. She's done trying to teach people how to ride the bus. She just told me driving over here today. Guess what, Cecilia? We're probably going to lose the bus if I don't have eight riders every day. She goes to neighbors, puts them on the bus and says, get on the bus because we need to keep our numbers up. And they ride around town. You think that's funny? It's not funny. I need transportation. And so housing, transportation, caregiver care, those are my top priorities. How am I going to get there? I don't know. I don't know how I'm going to do that. But you know what? When you have a wonderful network of friends, you collaborate. And when Sheila said you're going to sit down and do collaboration, that's exactly what we're going to do. I want all of you at a table as I sit and represent you. I get it. Been there. Done that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Now, Don Saylor. Don Saylor currently serves on the Yola County Board of Supervisors representing the cities of Davis and Winters and the campus of the University of California at Davis and the farming areas in southwestern Yolo County. Before joining the Board of Supervisors in 2011, he served as mayor and city council member for the city of Davis from 2004 to 10. And as a trustee of the Davis Joint Unified School District from 2095, in the future, 1995 to 2003. As supervisor of Saylor fights to strengthen our community safety net, he expanded health coverage to more than 2,000 low-income residents, strengthened mental health care and improved ambulance services. He launched Yolo Food Connection to Fight Hunger and strengthen the agricultural economy. He has worked to protect our communities through smarter crime policies, including improved jail facilities, increased electronic monitoring of those on parole, and targeting repeat offenders by providing rehabilitative drug and mental health. On the city, Davis City Council, Saylor helped establish sound fiscal policies that created a 15% general fund reserve and launched economic development strategies that brought new companies to the area and enhanced the vitality of the downtown area. Don is a key leader in the creation of the Woodland-Davis Clean Water Agency that will improve local water quality and reliability for 120,000 people. He pushed for a visionary affordable housing plan and championed the building of five housing projects with more than 230 units for seniors, mental health consumers, and low-income families. For more than 40 years, Don has served in local government and both the legislative and executive branches of the California State Government. Don currently chairs the Sacramento Area Council of Government, the sixth county agency responsible for planning and allocating over 35 billion in transportation investment over a 30-20-year period. He has also chaired First Five Yolo and is a member of the Statewide Leadership Council of Cities, Counties, School, Partnership. He's a graduate of University of Wyoming and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Don, a lifelong Democrat, and his wife, Julie, moved to Davis in 1987 to raise their children, Aaron, and Kate. Don? Thank you, Sheila. I think that took more than my five-minute talk. Yeah, well, that's why I'm going against you. You know, it's funny to hear all of that, and I think about the community chambers across the parking lot here at the Davis City Hall. And when I walk into that room, I see all these photographs of school board members and city council members. And I can watch myself age because I was, the eight times, let's see, it was four times the photos were taken on the school board, four times on the city council. Over a period of that number of years, you just see my little tiny bit of gray right here start kind of expanding. Now it's, I want you to know, I truly appreciate this audience because a lot of you are more salt than I am and I salt and pepper years. I want to find a lookout at you all and see what we can do together. Last time I was in this room was last week when I picked up my delivery for the Meals on Wheels program, and we then went around the community and this was kind of a big delivery last week. I had about 14 different stops that I needed to make. And there's nothing alike doing that to see the real-life situations that our neighbors and friends and family members live in here in the community. Oh, let's see. So it's about a family and it's about a community. We're in this all together, whether we're a baby, an infant, or we're in our advancing years. My grandmother, Dorothy Ruff, grew up in Northeastern Wyoming as she aged. She lived by herself. She outlived her husband. She was by herself and got increasingly lonely. Her health care needs were very challenging to meet. She lived in a fairly small, well, 500 people in the town she lived in. And finally, before it was time for her, she was relocated to a nursing home facility about 30 miles from her community. A few years after that happened to her, I went and shopped in one of my visits and took her out of the home, out of the nursing home, and took her back to the town that she had spent most of her life in to the place where her family had homesteaded in 1915. And it was the most incredible experience because here all of a sudden, after being in one place by herself, just kind of wasting away, she was back out in the world and her eyes lit up and her experience just was enlivened. Loneliness, as Cecilia has pointed out, incredible. And she passed away there and I think had she been able to live at her home in her own house, she would have lived longer. She certainly would have enjoyed her life more fully. But she couldn't because in that place, in that time, there wasn't an ability for us to provide somebody to come and be with her to help her with some of the daily chores. Her house became sort of crumbled around her. You could see every bit of it just falling apart. She could have used help in home health care. She could have used a place to go, a place to be with other people. She could have used somebody who visited her every day in the community that she lived in. These are all basic human needs. I'm going to be talking about a question on mental health in a little while, but I'll talk to you for just a second about affordable housing. Whenever a community allows someone to build in their community, to build a project that will enrich a builder, that will bring a housing supply to that community, we need to require that that builder provide affordable housing at the site because we don't want to have our communities divided up with the low income housing in one place and the places for the wealthy people in the middle class to be in another place. We want our seniors to have access to places like Eleanor Roosevelt, which we put in when I was on the city council, that allows for seniors of low income to have a place where they can be together, where they can have a garden, where they can have community spaces, where Carlton's Senior Living Center, which also came in when I was a member of the Davis City Council, where people with advancing challenges with their physical health, where they can live in a place that's safe and they can have, or the University Retirement Center, a place where I serve on the foundation board to make sure that people whose resources expire, that they don't expire at that point. We're in this together and we need to make sure that when we move forward with housing that we have policies like those that we had on the Davis City Council before I left, where every building project has a requirement to include affordable housing, and not an afterthought, but as a part of the basic strategy. So I'm looking forward to it. Thank you all. Before I stop with my last few seconds, I want to really thank my colleague, Supervisor Provenza, for his attention to the issues of the legislative years and former Assembly Member Mariko Yamada for her leadership on this topic as well. Our next Assembly candidate is Charlie Shaw. Charlie Shaw is a member of the Yolo County Farming family that has been farming in the area since the 1800s. He's a retired officer, Lieutenant Colonel of the United States Marine Corps, Iraq War Veteran, Desert Storm Veteran, former elected school board member and currently serves as the president of the board of directors of the Yolo County Taxpayer Association. Mr. Shaw earned an associate degree in agricultural business from Yuba College and a bachelor's in agriculture from Chico State University with an emphasis on soils, irrigation and drainage. He also studied hydrogeology and viticulture in a graduate program. In short, he knows how to deal with government regulations that are levied on farms, small businesses and individuals, and is an expert at finding ways to get things done. Charlie Shaw is a member of the Yolo County Taxpayer Association, commander of his VFW post, president of his Lions Club, chairman of the Yolo County Republican Party, and he was honored with the Silver Bear Award for Distinguished Service to Youth by the Yolo District of the Boy Scouts of America. Charlie and his wife, Kay, live in Asparto. Thank you, folks. I hope you can all hear me. You know, I'm Charlie Shaw. I hail from Asparto. I handle every vote counts, and we are all first and foremost Americans. We can differ in our views, but we got to work together because our future counts on it. I would just like to know, a show of hands, how many in here live in an incorporated city within Yolo County? The vast majority, how many in here live in the more isolated rural areas? Only a few. That's pretty much what I think is where our seniors are living now in the incorporated areas within the cities. Now, I'm running for the assembly because I want to be your representative, your eyes, your ears to bring your needs to our state government. This is a job interview. I have a long accomplishment of getting things done, whether it is a military officer, a community leader, or an elected official. By going to Sacramento, I want to fix the problem. I firmly believe that the best solutions are at the local level. We need to get the funding to the local level. The city council in Davis knows what's best for the seniors in Davis because they're able to work the zoning ordinance to provide. The people in the rural areas, the Yolo County, supervisors are. Can you imagine living in a rural area of Modoc County, where it's an hour and a half to the store? The supervisors in Modoc County need to help the people up there. That's what I believe. My job in Sacramento is to cut the red tape, get the money down to the local level, and let the local people do what's best for you communities. As I like to say, as we grow older, and I am older now, I'm in my 60s, I've got maybe 10, 12 good years left. I want to dedicate them to you before I get to where it's time to go fishing, to you to be a servant of the people. That's been my whole life. I went to Chico State, got the green agriculture, you said. I was expected to go home and run the ranch, but I decided I wanted to serve my country. So without telling my parents, I walked up to the officer selection officer for the Marine Corps, and I signed up. Never told my folks. I graduated from college. The Marine Corps was supposed to send all my correspondence to my Chico address. No, and behold, they sent it to my home and they put private rather than officer candidate. My mother goes, oh my goodness, we just sent you to college and you're gonna be a private in the Marine Corps. I didn't tell my folks, but my folks were darn proud. I went off to the officer candidate school, became an officer, 28 years in the Marine Corps. I was a reserve officer. I did 15 and a half years active duty. I kept raising my hands, say send me, desert storm, send me, Bosnia, send me, Fallujah, send me. I went. In many ways, I could have just gone home to the Chowk Farms and then a farmer had a nice new pickup at a nice Adobe home up on County Road 14. But I wanted to serve my country and I put my life at line. I didn't have to go in the military. I did it because I love this country. Now as we grow older, what's the most important thing to us? Well, I tell you, health is pretty important. I know when I wake up in the morning now, I know I wake up early. It hurts to lay in bed. I just can't lay there when I was like I was younger because bones hurt. You know, you just gotta get up. But health is really important. Our money is really important because that's how we provide, you know, food and safety and a roof overhead. Oh, that's important. But what's really the most important thing? I think everybody in this room is something called family. As we in our time, what's the most important thing we have? It's our children and our children's children. And what are we going to leave for them? What kind of America will they have? How can we pay our bills and provide for our aging populace and still make sure they have a bright shining future for themselves? That's why I want to get to Sacramento. We need fiscal responsibility in Sacramento that provides for our seniors, for our children, for everybody and the government works efficiently and properly and gets rid of the bureaucratic bread tape. Just these last few days, I was reading all this aging stuff from everything from the medical programs to the security programs, to the implement programs. I said, oh my goodness, this is worse than reading the IRS book. This is terrible. How can our seniors get their way through this? We need to simplify government. We need to make it simple. We need to make sure our seniors are taken care of. And we need to make sure while we do that that the next generation has a future too. I'm Charlie. I hope you get your vote on election day. I love this country because I know every one of you do. That's why you're here. It's a nice collaboration with the microphone here. Thank you gentlemen. And finally, the last candidate that we have here who's running for state assembly is Dan Wolk. Dan currently serves as mayor of the city of Davis and has been on the Davis City Council since 2011. In that time, he has led efforts to construct a regional surface water project pushed for greater investment in streets, parks and other vital infrastructure, promoted renewable energy initiatives and has passed fiscally responsible city budgets while restoring the city's rainy day reserves. Dan Wolk is a deputy county council for Solano County, handling public finance, public contracting and water issues. He's also a founder of the legal clinic of Yolo County, a legal services provider for low income families. Dan grew up in Davis and attended Davis public schools before attending Stanford University and receiving his law degree from UC Berkeley's Bolt Hall. He lives in Davis with his wife, Jemima. Yamima, I was like, I was like, I'm gonna look at that. Yamima, a former professional triathlete. I know her. I could find, I could picture, pick her out of any picture. And a professional triathlete and a small business owner and their two young daughters, Avery and Layla. So Dan Wolk. Well, thank you, Sheila. A lot of people get her name wrong, so that's okay. And I guess it's fitting that I'm sitting next to Charlie's left here, or sitting on Charlie's left here. But, good point. Well, thank you. Thank you, Sheila. Thank you very much, Jem. Thank you to the Yolo County Healthy Aging Alliance. I'm very happy to be here. As Sheila's, as the presentation indicated, the 55 and over age demographic in our community here in Davis is the fastest growing age cohort in our community. And so this issue, the issues that we're dealing with, there's something that I'm very familiar with as a policy maker. And I'm really proud of what we've done working very well with my colleagues on the city council and the community. We've adopted a very robust universal design ordinance in which we worked with builders and with members of the Senior Citizens Commission on adopting what I think is a very robust universal design ordinance. We also approved the Canary, which is obtaining eschatons, some of you may be familiar with, a seal of approval. It is unprecedented in the nation in terms of its universal design. And that's something that I'm also very proud of. We also, Maria Lucchese is here. She runs our senior center here. This council has been giving the senior, we've been very supportive of giving Maria even more resources for the projects that she, and the programs that she provides here. And then we also have a water rate assistance program as part of the water project that was very important, particularly for folks on fixed incomes. And so we've done quite a bit and of course, affordable housing is critical. I mean, we built a number of affordable projects, approved a number of affordable housing projects. And of course, we've approved some other projects that can also hopefully provide housing for seniors as well, including the Canary project and the Nishi Gateway project that we just did. And of course, I'm not just, I haven't handled these issues just as a council member. I've also done it as an attorney. First mentioning, the one that was mentioned was the legal clinic of Yolo County, which I found at Elisa Myers back here with legal services in Northern California. She was very helpful in that. But we actually started that in the West Sacramento senior center. So definitely handled a lot of those issues there and really helped a lot of seniors with a number of senior related issues. And second of all is what was not mentioned in my bio is that I handle mental health for the county of Solano. So I'm very familiar with our mental health system and certainly how the seniors interact with the mental health system and issues like probate conservatorships and LPS conservatives and the like. So very familiar with these issues. And as an assembly member, I'd like to take that experience, my ability to work well with others and bring that to the state legislature and get a lot done because as indicated, we have a lot of challenges with the silver tsunami. And there's a number of things that we need to be doing. First of all, we have to fix our longterm care system. It is fragmented and it is underfunded. And just to give you an example of that is that individuals are forced to spend down to the poverty level basically to obtain Medi-Cal LTC coverage as many of you know, which is really inexcusable in our state. And that's just one example of the underfunding that we've had in our longterm care system. But there's a lot more that we need to do. We need to bring back the affordable housing component of redevelopment, redevelopment funding as many of you know, supplied the bulk of our almost 100% of our affordable housing funding in the city of Davis. And that's one thing I've really had to struggle with as a council member is how do we then respond when that funding went away? It was pulled by the governor and the legislature because of the budget, you know, the budget decline. And how do we respond? We really need to bring back that affordable housing requirement. We have to protect retiree pensions, you know from social security to defined benefit pensions at the state level. We have to address rising healthcare costs. I am a supporter of a single payer system in California but absent that we have to ensure that ACA applies broadly and that the subsidies are sufficient for that. We have to protect Medicare. We have to do more for transportation, which is one of the questions that'll come up here. I think that universal access that I talked about has to be standard and I wanna praise Bill Dodd for having a bill AB664 on that very issue. We also need more longterm care professionals. We have to provide better wages for those longterm care professionals and we have to provide more training and I'm appreciative of the managed care tax that the governor and legislature look like they're gonna pass, which will provide more funding. We have to strengthen paid family leave to provide longterm care so family members can provide that longterm care. We need to be better about that in our society in California. So there's a lot that we need to be doing. I'm very excited to talk about these issues. Thank you very much. Thank you, Assembly candidates. And now we'll move over to the other table to our Senate candidates. And I see they are not necessarily in alphabetical order sitting down. I thought I had that in there, but we'll be able to, it is? Okay, good, okay, well, because I have Bill Dodd as first, isn't it? Or is it, cops? Oh, well apparently I didn't alphabetize here correctly. Let me go to that page. There it is, Craig. Otherwise known as Coach, right? We're gonna mention that to people. Coach Koppus. So, Greg is a resident of the Third District for 42 years. In that time, he has actively served his community in a number of facets, including his service in the United States Air Force, owning a local business and partnering with local nonprofits to provide veteran rights and mentoring youth through coaching. Greg previously served as commander of his local American Legion post. He's the founder of the Napa Solano Veteran Riders. He's an active sponsor slash volunteer for the North Bay Stand Down for Homeless Veterans. Greg worked with Senator Lois Wolk to put in place a self-funding mechanism for veterans organization, and with the help of Assemblyman Rocky Chavez, introduced a bill to give tax relief to active duty military. Furthermore, he fought and received funding for modernizing and repairing Veterans Hall in Solano County. Due to his efforts of making sure veterans' sacrifices and contributions are not forgotten, he was recognized as Dixon Veteran of the Year. Greg's deep concern for the water crisis facing California has prompted him to develop a comprehensive water storage plan that will benefit all of California's citizens, farmers, and help preserve the natural habitat of the Delta, eliminating the need for the twin tunnels saving the taxpayers' money. Greg is married to his wife Patty of 26 years and is the father of three and grandfather of four. Okay, go ahead. Okay, that's on now. First let me start out by, would all the veterans, fellow veterans in the room, please raise your hand. Thank you. Thank you for your service. I go through this list of questions and reviewed them extensively. And one thing is clear, funding. We need defined funding. We need to reevaluate our priorities. First, we need to get our spending on senior issues back to the 2008 level before it was stripped. The other item that I would like to bring up and bear with me, this is my first time on this side of the table, is the prioritizing of funding. When I see articles in the paper where things like rapid, the high-speed rail is going over budget by $236,000. Going over, for a train, in my opinion, we don't need. Where is that $236,000 gonna come from? It's gonna come from the people sitting in this room. Excuse me, like I said, bear with me. The other item is the Twin Tunnels. 26 billion, I got it right this time. $26 billion, which according to the Office of Finance and current estimates is $63 billion to come up with 834,000 acre feet of water. Where is that money going to come from? It's gonna come out of this room. It's gonna come out of other programs that we need. We need to prioritize our spending. The money is there for all these items on this sheet of paper. All these items, if the priorities are shifted. I promise you, I will do what I can do in Sacramento to reprioritize the spending in the state and to make sure that the seniors, which I am one, get what they have worked and earned. And so, being that this is my first time on the side of the table, that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you. Next we have Bill Dodd. Bill Dodd currently serves the people of District 4 in the California State Assembly. Bill has introduced legislation to deal with gender pay equity, work to designate the Barry S. Snow Mountain area as a national monument, co-wrote the law creating an earned income tax credit in California and help secure $400 million for career technical education throughout the state. Prior to serving in the assembly, Bill served on the Napa County Board of Supervisors for 14 years. He also represented the cities and counties of Napa on the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, including a two year term as chairman of this powerful regional body. In addition, Bill served as honorary commander for the 60th Air Mobility Wing at Travis Air Force Base. Bill graduated from Justin Sienna High School and California State University Chico. He went on to own and operate one of the largest full service Kulligan water operations in California. During this time, Bill served as president of the National and State Trade Associations. Through the years, he has been a member of the Justin Sienna High School Board of Trustees, Queen of the Valley Hospital Foundation, the American Canyon Chamber of Commerce, the Napa Rotary Club and the Queen of the Valley Healthcare for the Poor Committee. Bill was honored in 2014 by the Napa Chamber of Commerce as its citizen of the year for his work in raising over $3 million for local charities to help those individuals who need it most. As founder of the Wolf Center, a youth drug and alcohol rehabilitation center and founding director of the Napa County Children's Health Initiative, Bill has led many successes for these organizations. Bill and his wife, Mary, have five grown children and four grandchildren. Bill. Thank you. I'm proud to say that since that bio was on, we have not updated it, we now have five grandchildren and it's a lot of fun, believe me. Well listen, it's a great privilege and a pleasure to be here this morning and I thank all of you for coming out and I thank the yellow healthy aging for putting on this forum. I think it's a great opportunity for us to get to know you better and for you to get to know us better. But I think we're, I kind of want to just kind of step back a little bit. I was born and raised on a walnut ranch and I really learned from my parents the value of hard work and giving back to a community. And I think that as I, after I got through college, I went into our family business, which was the water business and upon a successful sale there, I decided I had a fork in the road, what can I do, I can go out and continue in the business world. But I saw an opportunity to bring people together in Napa County, we had a big problem between the environmental community and the agricultural community. And they had an election all lined up where the candidates were all lined up and I came in as a third candidate with the incumbent and I said, I don't believe that we have to sacrifice the environment for a productive business community. And likewise, business can coexist and provide opportunities to do better for our environment as well. And I think that that has really been the highlight of frankly my career I got in and very contested first race, won and then ran three times unopposed after that. And I really felt the opportunity to work in so many areas and use my expertise not only in business but also in the non-profit world. You heard about in my bio that I was involved in a lot of different things in the non-profit world. But it really was a woman by the name of Betty Rhodes, an activist, a senior activist in Napa County that really got me fired up about senior issues. And she brought to us and she brought our district attorney in and you can talk to your district attorney about this, Jeff Reising, who will tell you that seniors so often are the victims of just horrible elder abuse from financial abuse or physical abuse. And it was really with that vein and her pushing just tenaciously that I led the board of supervisors in Napa County with my colleagues to pass the first ordinance ever in the history of state of California in any of the 58 counties that would actually require licensing and background checks for people that care for our seniors. I kind of think you can't get a haircut at supercuts or you can't even get your dog groomed without going to a licensed person. But yet here is the most vulnerable people in our society, many that are having caregivers go into their homes and they have no idea where this person has been, what they have done. And I'm really, really happy. We ended up calling this Betty's Law in recognition for all the hard work that my appointee to the commission on aging did on this issue. But it's something that I decided that I was gonna make a focal point when I got to Sacramento. Last year was a little too early for that. I appreciate Mr. Wolk for bringing up AB-664, but there's a lot of services for seniors and there's just, there's no continuity. You have to fill out all of these forms and so basically it was a universal assessment tool. It was a trial program. And what I did is I passed the bill making that trial program available to all seniors and move that along in a manner that would allow people to get these services, multiple services by just filling out one application. And I think that'll go a long way. But one of the things that this year I decided to do is I'm running the background checks bill for any caregiver in the state of California. We have referral agencies that are referring people, seniors, a number of different caregivers, that the referral agencies has no idea where these people have been and what they've been doing. And I just think that's a crime within itself because I think seniors, by getting information from referral agencies in the back of their mind they're thinking they have to have been checked out. Well, they haven't. And so I wanna make sure that if those people have any background of physical violence or financial abuse that the seniors know about it and also the referral agencies know about it. Moving along, seniors, particularly ones that are on Medi-Cal that are in skilled nursing facilities, they were getting an allowance of $30 in 1981, $30. That's an allowance for personal care. The bottom line is, is my bill will give them $80 this year. It hasn't gone up once in all that time. I'm committed to seniors and I'm committed to serving you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Next we have Gabe Grease. Colonel Gabe Grease grew up in a farming community. His parents were teachers and he graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy. He was assigned to navigate C-130 Super Hercules aircraft and was deployed to Afghanistan. Gabe also completed two tours at the Pentagon where he managed U.S. trade policy for the Defense Technology Security Administration and served as the Afghanistan Country Director for the Secretary of the Air Force International Affairs. Gabe stood up and commanded a new squadron of 77 Air Advisors dedicated to building partnerships and partner capacity across Central and South America and the Caribbean. He is a board member of the Solano Community College Educational Foundation, rebuilding together Solano, Vacaville Rotary Club and a trustee with the local veterans of foreign wars post. Gabe is married to the love of his life, Christie, and they have three children, Preston H5, Makayla H4, and Harrison H1. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you, Sheila, for hooking to the Yellow Healthy Aging Alliance. It's an honor to be here today. Again, my name is Gabe Grease and I'm candidate for states in the District 3. And I'm inspired to see everybody here in the room and thank you for taking time out on this Saturday to come join us. I wanna share with you a little about me and kinda transition into how that applies to aging and how as a senator I can help improve your quality of life, because as Sheila indicated, both my folks were teachers and I grew up as a farm kid and I learned at an early age that I didn't wanna do that work for 40 years because it's tough and it's hard. And so I appreciated it, it weathered me, it taught me a lot. And then I went into the easy work of being in the Air Force, because basic training is pretty easy too for all the arms I saw go up a second ago. But where it really came out of was service. And you experience that when you grow up in a strong home with a strong family and have that nurturing. But something I think is missing in our community and I think it's missing a lot of ways because of the funding streams and the leadership at the state level is we aren't looking at our challenges strategically. And this is something I've been trained in at some of America's greatest leadership institutions is how to look at things in 25, 50 and 100 year plans. And instead, we look at things in quarters on the financial side or in election cycles as politicians. And what we need is to acknowledge that except for Charlie down there who's gonna be down at about age 72 if I did the math right, a lot of us are gonna be around for 80 or 90 years. And we, all right, good, good. And then I wanna read your book on that Charlie. But the thing is, is that we get a look at each other as part of a community, right? We're in this together and we succeed when we're in this together when we don't practice divisive politics. And so we get to look at the budget cycle from age zero to whenever the end date is, whenever the creator takes us. And we get to apply assets especially into the zero to eight timeframe. And I know that's not many people in this room, right? But that's the strategic piece because when we can start people off on the right foot, early pre-K, early care, what we end up with is a stronger, more capable society with a tax base that can support all the programs and all the needs that we're looking at. And so here's the thing. I don't have a get quick fix pill to solve these problems. But what I can do is I can help put us on a strategic path forward that in 20 years, all these challenges can be history. They can be lore. So what do we do in the near term? Well, I think we look at funding things at the local level because the source to the solutions exist here, right? You have the community. And I know this firsthand because as we talked about in the introduction my little girl, Mikaela, she had brain surgery the day before her first birthday and it took out about 25% of her brain. And for the nine months prior to that, my wife and I were in a complete battle for her life in and out of doctor's offices all the time. And so we came face to face with some very difficult decisions. And there's an amazing parallel between those decisions and the type of care and the commitment of community and bringing together of doctors and caregivers as people experience at the end of life. Now here's what we get to do. We get to empower partnership between the individual who's aging, their family or the most connected caregivers, the doctors and the services. I'm part of the senior aging coalition for Solano County and we're working on trying to create a single point of access in order for those folks either seeking help for themselves or seeking to help support one of their own members or loved ones, they know where to go, right? If I, so this is academic situation, don't anybody get scared? But if I cried fire or call 911, somebody needs help and we all know what to do. But we have the same sort of tragedy happening in our aging population, but there's no coalition, there's no bringing together resources. So there are a lot of people out there doing fantastic things, but we need funding and we need leadership. And leadership is exactly what I'm offering you. I've done it for 24 years. I've done it without regard to myself. I'm offering to continue to do it for as long as you will have me in the state Senate because I've solved countless difficult, challenging problems at the national level and the bureaucracy of Washington, DC. And I'm offering to bring that same solution set here. So I'm honored to be a candidate. I'm honored to sit here in front of you. I ask for your vote and to give it to know me a little more, visit me at votegave.com. And for the handful of you that are in social media, join me there as well. Thank you very much and thank you for participating. Hada is a former fourth district Yolo County supervisor and assembly member for the eighth assembly district and the fourth assembly district from 2008 to 2014. She didn't go anywhere, they just redid the lines on her. An area which includes most of the state Senate District Three. She is a professional social worker now in her 42nd year of public service with experience in Los Angeles and San Diego counties, a decade in Washington, DC with the US Census Bureau and the Office of the Secretary, Office for Civil Rights, US Department of Commerce. And for the past 21 years here in Northern California. During her nine years with the Yolo County Board of Supervisors in both staff and elected positions, Mariko was known as an outspoken advocate for the elderly, their caregivers and their families. She was established by Yolo County Ordinance, the first board level commission on aging and adult services in California. And in 2003 convened the first Yolo County Aging Summit drawing over 300 participants from five surrounding counties. In the assembly, Mariko served for six years on the Assembly Committee on Aging and Long-Term Care, five as the committee chair. Her legislation and committee oversight focused on improving training for nursing home administrators, removing the legal barrier in reporting allegations of elder abuse in institutional settings to local law enforcement and completing the hearing series, The Faces of Aging, addressing cultural competence in serving a diverse and growing California aging population. She also fought to improve working conditions and resident safety in our state hospitals and developmental centers. Mariko has been a strong voice for the protection of agriculture, water resources, veterans, the mentally ill and persons with disabilities and their caregivers throughout the state. She has been a consistent and insistent voice for social, economic, educational and environmental justice throughout her four decades in public service. If elected among her top priorities is the establishment of the first standing Senate Committee on Aging and Long-Term Care with jurisdiction over many issues currently heard in Senate Health and or Senate Health Services Committees. With California already home to the largest number of seniors in the nation, it is past time for a California State Senate's focus for Aging and Long-Term Care Policy. Mariko. Thank you and good morning to everyone. I think with the last name Yamada throughout my life, you know you learn to be very patient and you many times are at the end of the post position but I understand we're gonna reverse the order so I guess we'll even that out. Thank you Sheila for reading that introduction. I know each of the candidates have the opportunity to provide introduction to be read to you. And a lot of what was shared in that introduction is really about why I have decided to put myself forward as a candidate for the California State Senate. Anyone that has been working for 40, 42 years probably has a little bit of a choice as I know Gabe Grease also mentioned. You come to a certain point in your life in your career and you do have some options. You can choose maybe to not continue or you can choose to say there are many problems in our society and our state and our communities that still need to be addressed. And many of you in this room whom I've known and have been privileged to work with and on behalf of the past 21 years that I have lived in Yolo County know that my passion for this issue area Aging and Long-Term Care is real, sincere and a very long standing. Part of the reason that Aging and Long-Term Care issues have always been a top priority for me aligns with my own personal experience of caring for my mother for 23 years. And that was a family commitment as well. I want to thank a couple members of my family for being in the audience today. As we know, caregiving as has been referenced by some of the other candidates as well is a very challenging aspect of Aging and Long-Term Care. So while we are focusing on the individuals themselves we also have to look at the issue in a very holistic way. And I want to give a little shout out to my predecessor at the Board of Supervisors, Dave Rosenberg who is of course now Yolo County Superior Court Judge. Way back in the late 90s it was Dave Rosenberg who first established a task force under the Yolo County Health Council that I served on for a period of time before going to work for him. A subcommittee or a task force on older adult. And that was really the first time that Yolo County began to examine Aging and Long-Term Care under any kind of organized focus. Our office was always the liaison with the Area 4 Agency on Aging which is our seven county area PSA for Aging and Adult Services. And when I became the county supervisor in 2003 I continued to carry that assignment on which is certainly of course aligned with my own personal experience taking care of my mother for a pretty long period of time. And it was something that really brought home to me the struggles of individuals and how broken and fragmented this system is. You heard that one of my goals is to if elected and privileged to serve this community as well as the other 21 cities and five other counties in the district. The California State Senate has never had a standing committee on Aging. The Assembly has had a standing committee on Aging for probably about the last 18 to 20 years. But the committee itself on the Assembly side is not necessarily viewed as a committee where a lot of policy issues are first debated. I think that it is long past time for the California State Senate to establish a standing committee as a locus and a focus on public policy for what will be 20% of our state. By 2035, which is not too long from now, one in five Californians is going to be 65 years of age and older. That does not only affect us, but it affects the next generation. I wanna be in a position to help fix these problems before the next generation runs out of time to face them. I ask for your vote on Tuesday, June 7th and I look forward to answering the rest of the questions today. Thank you. Thank you very much, candidates. And I do appreciate your patience because I know that we are very pleased to have so many candidates here. But really, it's a good exercise in more listening than less talking. So that's, oh, it's okay to sometimes do that. So the next part of our presentation will be on the Yola Healthy Aging Alliance has identified those gaps in services and areas of concern. And we have developed questions that the candidates have done their homework and they're prepared for all. There were seven different questions that they could be answered any of them randomly. And so we will just charge into those now and they drew numbers so they were randomly assigned to it. So our first question is on transportation and it's for Assembly Candidate Charlie Shaw. Access to public transportation is a problem for persons in pockets of urban areas, let alone the large areas of the rural area without transportation. What can be done to increase access and use of publicly available transportation for older adults? And each candidate will have three minutes, up to three minutes to answer. Folks, this is important, really important. Remember when you were a kid, you were like five, six years old. You couldn't go any place because you had to walk. And then when you were seven, you got your first bike. That bike was freedom. You could now get on a bike and go up town. You could go places. Then when you turn 16 or 17, you got a driver's license. Oh gosh, the world was now your oyster. You could go anywhere. You could see anything. You could buy anything you wanted. You were mobile. As you get older, we start to lose our eyesight, our hearing, our facilities. We start to lose that driver's license. We start to lose that mobility. We start to lose that freedom. Liberty and freedom is what America's about. How do we protect the freedom of our senior citizens? Well, my grandfather was 91. He was still driving. He wrecked his pickups a bunch of times. We just simply fixed it. We bought him a new one. But finally he had an accident where the high patrolman said, you need to come in and get tested. And they had to take his driver's license away from him. Every morning, grandpa used to go to the coffee hut in Woodland where he lived and have coffee with his friends. That was the highlight of his day. To be able to be with his friends. When he lost that, he lost half of his reason for living. And a couple months later, he fell and broke his hip. And I went to see him in the hospital. And I said, grandfather, they're gonna give you a new hip. I'll be back in two weeks. I had to go to 29 Palms and do some military operations. And he said, no, I'm leaving now. This is it. I go, grandpa, you'll be fine. Two days later, I was down at 29 Palms. A chaplain came to see me. He go, are you then captain's shop? I go, yeah. My grandfather passed, didn't he? I go, yeah. How do you know? He told me. We need to protect people's rights to have liberty and freedom. That means we need to fund programs in the cities and in the counties to help our seniors stay in their homes if they choose to. We don't ever want a government telling us where we have to live, but we still need to get to the stores, to our social events, to have a life, to get to church. That needs to be done at the local level. We got problems in Sacramento with lobbyists and special interest groups making funding going where they shouldn't be, like high speed trains to nowhere and huge Delta tunnels and other things. Billions of dollars being wasted. They shouldn't be wasted. It should be to take care of our citizens. I don't even like the word seniors. I like citizen. We're all citizens and we all need to take care of each other. So what I will do is to be representative and assembly to make sure the money gets down to the Davis City Council, to the Yolo County supervisors to make sure the funds are properly spent to make sure our seniors keep liberty to be able to have a decent life. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is a housing question and this is for Senate candidate Bill Dodd. We have an affordable housing crisis in Yolo County, especially for older adults and persons with disabilities. There's an increasing need for affordable and appropriate housing with an aging baby boomer population, loss of state funding sources, such as redevelopment dollars and multiple years of no cost of living increase for persons receiving SSI. What can be done to address affordable housing now and in the near future? Well, let me tell you the loss of funding from redevelopment was a crushing blow for cities all throughout the state of California. I certainly understand why that was done during the toughest economic recession since the Great Depression. At the same time, I think it was a little bit short-sighted by not having a mechanism that would bring it back in some form because balancing the budget on the backs of local communities, cities and counties, I don't believe is ever a long-term effective strategy. Having said that, we are where we are so we can stop complaining about what happened and move on and try to find solutions for it. We're working right now in the legislature. The governor is not interested in bringing redevelopment back as it was. That component, 55% of the taxes that paid in that are going to education is not gonna be moved under his watch. I can assure you. And unless we do have backups to fill in that education, that's a risky move anyway. But he is indicating that he is amenable to bringing back the cities and the county shares of that redevelopment, which is pretty small, but for affordable housing. We've been talking in the California Democratic Caucus in the assembly about one-time monies this year, made perhaps even up to a billion dollars that could go to affordable housing. But we're also talking about impediments to affordable housing and addressing those before we invest more in that area. But I do have a long history of not only supporting affordable housing in my communities and in Napa County as a Napa County supervisor over the years. We have a long list of projects that we've actually completed. And the best way that we did to get this is every single winery that was built paid in to the Housing Trust Fund for Napa County. Every single hospital, every single home, everybody, because these are creating jobs, when they're out creating jobs, that creates opportunities or needs for housing. We could do better. And what we've been doing in Napa County for many years is funding city projects, each of the five cities. We've been funding projects there for a long time. But we need to do some things to, as I said earlier, to eliminate barriers. There needs to be focused sequel reform. The idea of people not in my backyard coming in and stopping a project, and what they do is they make it no longer affordable housing because the developer now has to spend a million more dollars to do whatever he needs to do. We need to increase the supply in our communities and the houses because it's a supply and demand issue. That's why the cost of housing continues to go up. We need to incentivize communities for transportation dollars with housing dollars, the communities that do that to help their communities have better affordable housing. And then finally, just streamlining rules and regulate, other rules and regulations that make the cost of housing so darn expensive. Thank you. The next question is for Assembly Candidate Don Saylor. And the topic is mental health and dementia. It is estimated that between now and 2030, there will be a doubling in the number of Californians living with Alzheimer's disease. Currently, there are 558,000, over 558,000 Californians, 55 and over, living with Alzheimer's disease. And by 2030, that number will nearly double to 1.1 million. The state defunded all of the older California Act programs beginning in 2008, including programs such as the Alzheimer's Daycare Resource Center and Dementia Research. Please provide some funding and program ideas to address this important need in California. Well, thanks. One of the things that has been a driver for me is when I see a problem, I work the problem. And I know many of you, you've seen how that unfolds in real time. So a few years ago, we had this terrible shortage that was hit because of just a discretionary budget act at the state, adult day health centers would no longer be funded. So what we did is many people went and testified. We started doing photographs of people who were participating in the ADHC program, putting a little sign in front of them, I am ADHC. And we started posting that all over the Capitol. And it was a significant part of the advocacy effort there. I do an annual benefit that we choose a different cause each year. We call it soups on. A couple of years ago, that benefit was for Meals on Wheels. In the last year, it was for NAMI YOLO. So the issue of finding ways to support things at a local level that you actually need in your community, see a problem, work the problem. That's why I've been a county supervisor, a school board member, a city council member. And why I think I can be an effective member of the assembly. You know, the issue that we've seen here of the absence of mental health professionals who specialize in geriatric care, we actually see across the board where we don't pay providers a rate that encourages them to actually be available for people who need the care. We're seeing that statewide. We're seeing that that means that people are lonely. We can do things in our communities. We can encourage them statewide to have connections. You can do matchmaking kinds of efforts. But all of it comes down to money. And when you look at our state budget over the past eight years or so, we see that we're no longer providing even a poverty rate for SSI, SSP. We've taken the federal funding that comes for the federal portion of the COLA. And we've instead channeled that to reduce what the state has been providing. So every senior, there's about, I think it's about 700,000 seniors in the state. They're living under poverty if they're individual because that's what we're paying. And we've starved mental health services. The basic issue is we need to continue Proposition 30. We need to modernize our state revenue structure. We need to look more closely at things like the non-residential portion of property tax. We need an excise tax for minerals. We need to really look at where our values are. Our my values are for people. My values are to work on issues that we together identify and focus our attention there. The issue here is Adult Day Center in Davis. Oh yes, we need it there, but we also need that kind of resource in our rural communities throughout Assembly District 4 and throughout California. Thank you. The next question is for Senate candidate Gabe Grease. And the topic is connection to services. It is important for older adults and their caregivers to know about and be connected to the right service at the right time. Aging and Disability Resource Connections, or ADRCs, are a proven national model adopted in California but without funding. Please speak to strategies to assure that needed community-based services and supports are available and how older adults and their families and caregivers can connect to these services when needed. Absolutely, thank you very much. And I think this speaks a little bit to some challenges we have in the legislators when you do adopt policies and don't apply funding, right? You'd never do that in your own home, right? You never would engage that way in your community. So it shouldn't be permissible at the state level. So some examples we're taking care of in Solano County in terms of connecting folks to services is collecting the contact, collecting the entry points to those services because there are so many different services spread out across the community, whether they're ones with respect to individual healthcare needs, whether it's transportation, whether it's access to nutritional food, and the list goes on. So many of those programs are small. So many of them are pilot programs. So many of them are run by nonprofits or public-private partnerships. And so bringing together a list so that folks have first a place to go to find the information. Because until we can index the materials we have available to seniors to ease the challenges they face, it's very difficult to look for new places to apply funds appropriately. And certainly there needs to be new revenues applied to the senior population, both for services and for housing and need and healthcare and as well as the daycare or adult daycare for them during the day so that their family members can work because we're moving into a multi-generational environment. The costs of so many things are bringing folks together. My mother-in-law lived with us for about four years, both partially because of the needs of our daughter after her surgery, but also because of the financial constraints. It didn't make sense for us to pay for two internets, two cables, the food that we waste. I mean, oh my gosh, when you look in your refrigerator as much as we try not to waste food, there are people out there that are really hungry and we continually don't seem to consume everything we've bought. And so what I offer is the leadership piece to look at these problems strategically, the ability to make the difficult decision to look at the budget and find the money necessary because how did our great state get to where it is because of your efforts, your leadership? And so the community owes you the respect that's due. I grew up in an old school family where there were lots of serves and mans and your respect to your elders. And by golly, you all earned that. And so as a senator, you've earned my respect and you'll have my leadership to ensure that we're doing right by you which should have been happening all along. So thank you very much. And again, you can follow me at votegave.com. Because we are the YOLO Healthy Aging Alliance, I want people to, if they are able to and want to, to stand up and stretch because we're more than halfway done, but I want people to feel comfortable and let's see if we can hold it. Okay, I didn't say wander off, I said just stand up. Nice deep breath in and out. All right, let's carry on then. Our next question is for Senate candidate Mariko Yamada. And oh, I didn't really mean for people to leave. We have more, we have to hear from the rest of our candidates. Okay, Mariko Yamada is going to speak to us on the issue, the very important issue of poverty and SSI. Here's your question. The lack of a cost of living adjustment or COLA for persons living with SSI payments for multiple years have eroded their ability to remain out of poverty and afford very basic items such as food, housing and medicine. In addition, only in California are persons who receive SSI unable to access CalFresh, the California food stamp program. What can be done to improve the state portion of SSI and address the increasing poverty rate for older adults, especially older women? Well, thank you. This is actually a very appropriate question as a professional social worker, a focus on people in poverty and people who are most vulnerable in our society has been my lifelong pursuit. Having been sworn in to the legislature in 2008 and just a few days later, having to vote on a budget when we were still in a two-thirds budget environment to cut $60 billion to get our budget in place was certainly one of the most difficult votes that we all had to take. And just a few weeks later, we had to take a vote again to reduce the budget by 42 billion. And so it went for a number of years and it went to 26 billion, then 23 billion, then 16 billion. So that was the budget environment in which I served the majority of my time in the legislature. Fortunately, things are getting a little better now. They're not perfect, but things are a little better. What has not changed, however, is the hearts and minds of some of our leadership, including our governor, as well as some of the leadership within our own party and also in the other party. The debate over the SSI COLA and the fact that there's a pass-through from the federal government that is then automatically reduced the state share, really it's an annual budget fight. There are all kinds of people in discussions about this all throughout the budget process. Sometimes you hear the labels, progressive Democrats versus moderate Democrats versus the Republican caucus. It's always a budget fight every year. What I would say first and foremost is that we need to recognize that the state should not be in the business of creating poverty amongst its residents. Whether it's employees or workers, IHSS or the SSI COLA, we should not be in the business of creating and contributing to the income and disparities that we see growing wider and wider each day. So I will just say that what I would do if I am privileged to represent you in the California State Senate as your representative is that I will continue to be a voice to fight for those improvements and to point out how we are harming our citizens and future generations by contributing to poverty. And I just think that that's objectionable and that we should not stand for it. Thank you. Thank you. The next question is for Senate candidate, Greg Capus, the topic is statewide medical and social care models. Many state initiatives fund medical and limited community care and attempt to coordinate the care such as the coordinated care initiative or CCI pilot and health homes. What do you see as a preferred direction to improve the quality of medical care while assuring access to community-based options to keep people out of institutions? The first thing that we need to do is bring back in-home and healthcare providers doing house calls. That needs to happen. But once again, we get back to what is the topic is funding. Like I said in my opening statement, we need to bring back before we start spending money on other programs, we need to bring back the funding we had in 2008. Then, like I said in my opening statement, we need to prioritize our funding. Something that doesn't make sense to me is, for instance, like I said before, the twin tunnels and the high-speed rail. Now, when they run out of funding, then you get a cost increase. Nobody votes on this, they just get an increase in funding. When the seniors run out of funding for any one of these seven programs, when the money runs out, the services run out. Something doesn't make sense though. I'm saying that we need to, as a state and everybody in this room needs to demand, that a reorganization of the funding in the state of California takes place. There's no reason why we can't fund all seven of these items with a realignment of our funding priorities. Thank you. The next question is for Assembly Candid Dan Wolk. And the topic is community-based services. Do you support moving state resources from long-term care that is primarily provided in nursing homes to more community-based services such as increased funding for home care, home-delivered mirror programs, increased and increased paratrend services, et cetera? What would you do to facilitate this change in funding policy at the state level? Thank you, Sheila. I was really appreciative of getting this question because I think it really gets to the heart of what we need to be striving towards in California. And that is providing for the greatest independence for seniors by providing long-term care in the community, as opposed to, say, nursing homes. That's an underlying issue, too, this morning's event. It's critical. And critical to this are two things. One is ensuring the connection to services. And the second thing is ensuring that we have community-based services. That's for the connection to services. And that was more the question that Gabe got at. I do think that we need to be fully funding aging and disability resource connections. And what's more critical is that I think we need to be as laudable as it is to have a principle of a single point of entry, which I think is, again, laudable. I think we have to have a principle that's more no wrong door. That is, anytime you try to access those services, at that point, you need to be brought in and be given sort of all the other services, wrap-around services and those things that need to be provided. So I think we need to be operating on our principle of no wrong door, as opposed to a single point of entry. But also, fundamentally, when it comes to the community-based services, and there are a number of these, we've talked about community-based adult services, or what was called adult-day healthcare. We have the area agencies on aging. We have family caregiver assistants. We have health insurance, counseling and advocacy. All these things are both, as I said before in my opening, we've got a very fragmented system when it comes to long-term care. And we also have a very underfunded system when it comes to long-term care. And that's really the big thing that the legislature needs to wrestle with. And there are great folks that are wrestling with that, but that's going to be one of the key issues, something I will really work hard on. Two issues that are also critical. First is transportation. And this is a question that came up before. That is an issue, there's two things there. First is that we have to provide more funding in the area of transportation. Absolutely paratransit is critical. We have to provide more funding. We have to provide capital trade funds. We have to get more federal funding coming. We have to look at reducing that two-thirds threshold for special taxes if local communities want to fund paratransit services, that's critical. Second of all, something that Bill Dahl brought up is to encourage transit-oriented development. And that's exactly what the Cannery project is. And it was able, Bill Dahl talked about secro form, SB 375 was one of those bills. And that was the first project in the region to come under that secro form measure that allowed it to take advantage because it was so transit-oriented. And that's really critical. Another thing is our mental health system. And up close I've really seen the devastating effect that budget cuts have had on our mental health system. And we really gotta reinvest in our mental health system along the continuum, not necessarily just in the conservatorship when you're sort of on that spectrum, but also on the prevention side. And that's where the California Active Aging Project, for example, is really important, so thanks a lot. And our final focused questions for the candidates is for Assembly Candidate Cecilia Aguiar-Curri. You get it right that time? You got it right. All right, and the issue is back to housing again. We're recycling that question because it is a very important issue. I'll read it one more time. We have an affordable housing crisis in Yolo County, especially for older adults and persons with disabilities. There's an increasing need for affordable and appropriate housing with an aging baby boomer population, loss of state funding sources such as redevelopment dollars and multiple years with no cost of living increases for persons receiving SSI. What can be done to address affordable housing now and in the near future? Thank you. So in winners we get things done. We don't talk about it. We try to figure out a way to make sure it works. And so what we've done is we've put in our housing. I just told you about it as a senior housing. It's 63 rooms with a senior citizen center. We didn't sit around and talk about it. We're doing it. It's gonna be groundbreaking in the next couple of months. That's really important. We also have a lot of other affordable housing in winters. Many people from Davis are moving to winters. Why? Because there's not affordable housing here, whether you're a senior or a student. I have many students that live here that go to school here in Davis that can't afford it and they're busing over in the morning to winters. We do have one route in the morning that's always full and that's the Davis route to go to UC Davis and the one that comes back in the evening. There's a reason for that, right? There's not housing here. There's not affordable housing for seniors. I will tell you that when we looked at the, visited with the developers that came to town, the first thing we said is that we wanted to make sure that we could have our aged people who live in winters continue to live there. I wanted one story home or be a building one story home. They're all now, I mean, universal design is an afterthought nowadays because part of the green building code, everybody has to have pretty much housing that's available to them so they can get a wheelchair and the grade into the garage and those kinds of things are important. That's already being done in winters. People in winters get up and they figure it out. We don't have food access for the seniors. Again, my senior group as well as the rise group got together and they've been distributing food to make sure that seniors have food. The lineup in the morning is pretty amazing. It's very touching to see how many people are doing that. Some of it's funded by the county. Some of it are funded by the people that are sitting here from winters out of their own pocket. They go to the food bank, they pick up the food, they bring it back and it's for the seniors. They help bag it. So you have to work as a community, we have to collaborate. There's no doubt about it, you can't do it on your own. And I have to thank many of the people in the community that do so. Transportation, it's a mess in winters. We are just working really hard with Yolo County Transit, the city council because we don't have a bus that goes around town. We finally secured two buses. No one helped us do it, we had to go do it on our own. Cap and trade money's out there. We're going after some money currently and we're gonna have a dialer ride. I didn't tell you guys that yet, surprise, surprise. But we're working for different, for many reasons for this community, for our community and all rural communities have the same problem. Those are the kinds of things I wanna help with. Those are the kinds of funding that I wanna go after for the state of California for all constituents. This district is huge. If you haven't looked at it, you should take the time to look at it. It's rural communities. We need to help everybody. A lot of the funding stops right here in Sacramento and of many times what works in LA and works in the Bay Area or works in Davis does not work in a rural community. Thanks. Thank you very much. Our sneaky plan was to have all of you prepared for all of those questions and to have this event early enough in the campaign. So now you are educated and know about what the questions are and maybe what some answers would be. So well done, you've all done your homework. We really appreciate that. I have a couple of announcements before we go to the final. And I was thinking that we would do three minutes instead of five, because we're just eight of you so I was doing the math. So the two announcements I'd like to make is next week Wednesday in the building right next door at 600 A Street, the Agency on Aging. So that's the local federal funds that come to this region. Are they redoing their plan and they're looking for input from the community? There are flyers in the back. So there's a public hearing next week Wednesday, February 24th from 9 a.m. to 10 30. So it's open. You don't have to have any reservations or anything. Come by and give us your ideas about what you think are priorities for funding for the federal funds that come through the Agency on Aging. And second, I would like to invite you all to the YOLO Healthy Aging Alliance very first fundraiser. It's, we're calling it Spring Into Healthy Aging and it is on Saturday, April 3rd from four to seven at the Davis Odd Fellows Hall. And we are taking sponsors. Hello, people at the front table. We're looking for sponsors and we invite you to also, if you'd like to just purchase tickets, we're gonna have music from Poodacreek Crawdads and we're gonna have farm fresh foods and a healthy living auction. So we hope you can join us on April 3rd and there's information in the back on that. Okay, this is time for our three minute rewind now. We're gonna go backwards and start with the other end of the alphabet. And Mariko, I really liked your comment because as Sheila Allen with an A, I'm like, my turn, I'm first. So we're gonna go backwards and actually we're gonna go all the way backwards and we're gonna start with Mariko. So we're gonna start with the Senate candidates and then Dan, you'll get the last word. So Mariko Yamada over there on the Senate side. Thank you very much. Well, I want to first say thank you again to YOLO Healthy Aging Alliance for hosting all of us today. I think it's very important for all of you who are going to be making choices about who you believe will best represent you in either the State Senate or the California Assembly to have this opportunity to hear directly from us. I also want to acknowledge the continuing leadership of Supervisor Jim Provenza. Aging issues have seemed to more reside in the District Four Supervisors column, not that the other supervisors aren't paying attention, but there's always gotta be someone that steps up to the leadership plate and I want to thank him for his continuing effort as well as the staff, Sheila Allen and all of the volunteers that continue to make this issue an important one and a top priority. You know, having had the opportunity to serve in the California State Assembly for my full six years, both in really difficult times and in times that have gotten a little better, I have great hope that we are going to make a difference and we're going to advance this discussion of aging and long-term care as a core issue for the State of California. I'm a little tired of hearing about what things cost as opposed to how we value those services and I think that's a discussion that needs to be also courageously advanced by your next State representatives in the Senate. I have made, as you well know, aging and long-term care a real policy focus for not just the last year or two, but the last 20 to 25 years. Fully one-third of my legislative package during my time in the Assembly was focused on aging and long-term care issues, whether it was addressing the life and annuity, consumer protection fund, addressing long-term care insurance regulations and ensuring the safety of residents and patients in some of our largest state institutions. I will continue to make nursing home reform a key portion of my legislative package and my work. When I left the legislature, there were 11,000 uninvestigated claims of abuse in our nursing home system, which is a $9 billion a year industry and I think that we need to imbalance, make sure that we have the services available for all the full range of our residents in California. With that, I respectfully ask for your support on Tuesday, June 7th. I believe that together we can make California the best that it can be, but it is all up to you and I do hope that we can count on your support in the coming weeks. Thank you very much. And Hannah, time to hear that was three, right? We're doing three minutes, great. All right, next we'll hear from Gabe, Gabe Grease. Hi, once again, thank you everybody for being here today and participating, but I can't help notice kind of the energy in the room. And the energy in the room for me has a sense of a little bit of fear and a little bit of hopelessness because we're dealing with very big problems. And the fear to me is that things aren't gonna change. And when we continue to do the same things and send the same people back to solve the same problems, Einstein called that the definition of insanity. And so it's time to send new leadership to Sacramento. And so what I wanna share with you in the closing here are some large policy problems I've worked in the past to kind of give you a little bit of insight about the breadth of experience I had when I was in Washington because ultimately the question is, is can I get the job done for you? And I think the answer is yes. So for the Secretary of Defense, I licensed billions of dollars of trade, stimulated the economies that came out of the Great Recession and ensured that our country's economy grew. And we also had the folks necessary, especially in Silicon Valley, to drive our innovation. For the Secretary of the Air Force, I had a really interesting problem to solve and I can give you the greater details of it later or on the side. But basically I got the Japanese to circumnavigate their constitution and sell me for some propeller blades that I later sent to Europe to have refurbished to get hung on some airplanes in Afghanistan so we could bring our sons and daughters home. And you're talking about multiple nations, millions and millions of dollars, moving parts in aircraft, high level policy, where along the way so many people could have said no. And there's a lesson I learned and I taught my airman as a commander and that is no is never the answer. The answer is always yes. Yes at what cost, but it's always yes. We are an innovative, powerful, creative people. You all have led us to this place, your leadership, your innovation, your hard work, your commitment to community, your commitment to your families and you deserve to be honored for that. And so as your next state senator with your blessing and your vote, I will honor you with that. But I'll also continue to drive our economy and prepare us for a long-term path forward where we won't face these challenges in the future because we get to be better together, we get to be stronger together and we get to arrive in the great sunny California we all know and love. And so I ask for your vote also on June 7th and for you to follow me at votegave.com and we'll stick around for a little bit and take your questions. And once again, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Now we're here from Bill Dodd. Well, once again, thank you very much for coming here this morning, now close to this afternoon anyway. I really believe that we have so many challenges in the state of California, senior issues not withstanding. But let's start with senior issues. I have a track record, not only in the county of Napa, which I referred to earlier of getting things done. Getting things done in an environment where you can't say yes sir or no sir. Frankly, it's an environment of collaboration and getting people to be able to work with you on really tough things. I have a track record now in the state legislature of getting a bill through the state legislature, through the Senate and the assembly and also signed by the governor for seniors. I have two more bills that I'm gonna get across the finish line this year to protect and help seniors. But there are other issues, agricultural issues. I'm very, very proud that the speaker of the house, both speakers in fact, a joint decision appointed me as chairman of the agricultural committee. And I'm apparently the first legislator ever as agricultural chair that came from north of the Delta. As I feel really proud that they thought enough of my leadership and my ability to get things done, that they put me in that spot. But there's other accomplishments that I've done both on the local level and at the state. And we also have water issues. And I've got a water issue this year that I think is very, very important that we're running a bill this year that would actually take from behind the shadows, people are buying water and selling water. Nobody knows what's going on with this, our water supply, where it is, how much it's going for. Imagine the stock market without telling somebody what's being sold and how much of it's being sold on a regular basis. So basically we're gonna create a state clearing house. We've already got the department, they can do it. And all of these transactions are gonna have to be reported to the state, whether it's agriculture, whether it's municipal, how water moves throughout the state of California. So that we can clearly start the first water market that needs to happen in the state of California with the terrible droughts that we are facing. Finally, climate change is a true and present danger for our future and we need to have policy that makes sense that doesn't affect the most vulnerable people in our society. And the final thing is on transportation. We've heard about local issues and state issues. Our transportation issues right now for cities and counties, it's about $71 billion, the deficit over the next 25 years. And for our state infrastructure, our state highways, it's $53 billion. That's a lot of money. We need to be able to find solutions to these problems. I've been chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission of the entire Bay Area. And I'm on the Transportation Committee, I'll continue to work hard each and every day for you and I hope I can get your support. Thank you all very much for your time. And the final Senate candidate we'll hear from is Greg Capas. Well, I'm not known as a talker. I'm known as a doer. I listened to the two officers setting up here. The one thing they didn't point out to you, they have all these grand plans, all these grand schemes and all these things that they're gonna do. But the one they come to to actually get the work done is the NCO. And I was an NCO. Like I said before, I get things done. I have worked with my legislators. I worked with America. I worked with Dan Walcoos sitting here to get things done. I'm a Republican and in a Democratic area and I have been working with Democrats for close to 30 years. And America and I were able to get through legislation to benefit the active duty military and veterans. I worked with Dan and his mother to get self-funding mechanisms. We didn't have to go to the government. They helped me get self-funding mechanisms to fund the veterans during the time when we were in the recession. Like I said, I'm an NCO and I will get things done. I will get your list of questions completed. I will reevaluate, I will get a reevaluation and a reprioritize the spending in the state of California. Thank you. Thank you. And I know Dan might have heard me say that he gets the last word, but no. Cecilia gets the last word. We're gonna start with the W's down at this end. So now we're gonna do our assembly candidates beginning with Dan Walco. We W's usually go last. I can relate to you, Marika. Well, thank you very much. I've really much enjoyed it. And I just wanna say, they're not gonna like me for saying this, but I just wanna give a shout out to Judy Reynolds and Myra Gable, who I grew up with in Davis and have a lot of meaning to me. It's really nice to see them in the audience and I really appreciate that. So this campaign is about everyone. It's about ensuring that everyone has an opportunity to succeed. It's about ensuring a healthy community because we are all in this together. We need healthy grandparents and we need healthy children. Everyone from my seven-year-old and four-year-old at home to healthy grandparents like my grandmother, who's very close to me. Unfortunately, passed away a few years ago who was a resident of Atria. We're all in this together. This campaign is really all about that and we've built a really broad coalition from advocates for seniors, including Betty Rhodes, the woman that Bill Dodd spoke about earlier and her advocacy. She's endorsed me in this campaign and Supervisor Jim Provenza is supporting me in this campaign. Two advocates for the very young, like State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Torlakson, the California Teachers Association, Solano County Supervisor, Linda Seifert, who many of you may be familiar with, who's a strong advocate for children. Two advocates for the environment, like the California League of Conservation Voters who's endorsed me in this race, Senator Fran Pavley, who's a real champion for the environment, particularly global warming. She's endorsed me. And two advocates for public safety. Actually, I'm happy to announce to you publicly, I think for the first time, that the Davis Police Officers Association has endorsed me in this race, as well as Congressman Mike Thompson who's endorsed me in this race. And we've talked about it today is that we have a lot of challenges in Sacramento. There are good things getting done, but we have a lot of challenges and we need folks who have experience, who have a track record of getting things done and we need to have folks who have an ability to work well with others. And I feel like I have those three. My experience, I've spoken about my role as a deputy county council, certainly here as mayor. And as for a track record of getting things done, I'm glad Greg brought up the work that I did in Solano County with him and the veterans and that was really fulfilling. But certainly, you can talk to Elisa Meyer with the legal services in Northern California about everything that we did with the legal clinic of Yole County to of course what's happening here in Davis as many of you are familiar with and the great things that are happening under this renewed Davis vision that I've put forward, including economic development, reinvesting in our infrastructure and addressing income inequality and advocating for marriage equality, those things that I'm very proud of of what we've accomplished here in Davis. Again, we have a lot of work to do, a lot of challenges, increasing reinvestment, extending Prop 30, we need universal preschool, we need to raise the minimum wage, we need to end homelessness. There are a lot of challenges and again, we need folks who have experience, a track record, ability to work well with others. I believe I am that person. Again, thank you very much. I've really enjoyed this. Thank you. Next we'll hear from Assembly Candidate, Charlie Schopp. I like to stand because I like to see people's eyes and I'm an action kind of guy. Folks, who do you want in Sacramento? Who do you want to send in that labyrinth to fight for you and do what's right? You know, they say that ethics, integrity, and courage are important. Ethics and integrity and courage are everything. We are being pulled apart at the seams by special interest groups on both sides of the aisle that are more interested in making a profit for their companies or their group than they are about taking care of you, the voters. I like to say that when you talk about politicians, there's two types. There's leaders and there's politicians. A politician will lick his finger, stick it in the air, and see which way the wind's blowing and that's the way he'll go. We're a leader and I'm a Marine and I pride on that. Doesn't care about which way the wind's blowing. We're gonna stand and do what's right, come heck or high water. We'll stand stiff in a strip wind and do what's right. Recently at the California Republican Convention, I got a very great accolade in my view. I'm kind of a tough firebrand in the Republican Party and they're starting to listen to me. I told the chairman four years ago, why do you have our headquarters down in Hollywood, La La Land? It should be up here in Sacramento where the fight is. Today, the Republican headquarters now is up in Sacramento. They're starting to listen to me. At the last convention, I'm walking down the hallway and here comes Charlie Moger Jr., his father is Bertha Hatchway, Bear Stearns, gives millions of dollars to Republicans. I'm walking down the hallway and he walks all the way to the wall to walk as far away from me as he can. I looked at the other guy and he said, man, I must be doing something right. I get things done and I'm mission oriented and I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat. I don't care if you're liberal or conservative. I care that you care about this country and our freedom and our future and that you'll do the right thing. That's why I am running for office. Let me put it this way. When I left the Battle of Fallujah in 2004, I had to come back to the United States after 10 months in combat and I got to Al-Assad Air Base and there were no airplanes. They called me in and they said, we got an airplane going this evening. Can you go? I go, yeah. I went out to this flight line, C-130. I got on that C-130, there's a big American flag going, what's going on? Seven of us are getting on that airplane to leave to go home. They bring up a Humvee. Three caskets. We got out, we came to a slow salute. Three young people didn't come home. They gave their last full measure of devotion for our country. I committed myself there and then to never forget what those men and women did. I will fight for you with all our might. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, from these honored dead, that we take increased devotion to the great task that remains before us, the government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish. I'm Charlie Shout. I hope I have your support on Election Day. Thank you. Thank you. All right, and now we're here from Assembly Candidate Don Saylor. Thanks, Sheila. This has been a wonderfully exciting opportunity to speak with people and when I came in, I thought, boy, I wish we could just listen. We could sit here and listen to all of the people here because you have full knowledge of the issues that we're dealing with. Thanks to the YOLO Healthy Aging Alliance for bringing this together and thanks for each of you and I owe many, many measures of gratitude for this is my eighth time seeking election in this community and you and other members of the community have supported me and we've been able to see problems and work on them. We built three new schools when I was a school board member. We dealt with tragedies. We dealt with kids who committed suicide and we came together as a community and moved forward. On the city council, we built affordable housing complexes at New Harmony and Eleanor Roosevelt and Cesar Chavez and we required builders when they came to us to commit to putting in any project a place where low income people could live. As a member of the Board of Supervisors, I've been committed to working on the safety net so a little blurb described that but one of the things that they didn't say is the safety net in California is more like a thimble. It's that you have to be really careful and targeted to not fall out of it. When you're right now SSI, SSP, we're paying at the 1983 level for SSP because that's the minimum we could go to and still be a part of the participation in the program at the federal level. That's abominable. We need to do much better for our people. Our communities thrive when we have a place to live for everybody, when there's a way that people can access food, when people actually have health care, not just coverage, but a place where they can go and actually get care. The senior population is not monolithic. It's not just frail people. It's not just as mentally ill people or not just the ones on the streets. We have multiple issues that we need to work on together to make sure that active seniors have a place to be, that active seniors continue to contribute to their communities. We have a big issue in California to smooth the boom and bust cycle of our revenue stream. That's one of the things that is really exciting to me about coming to the legislature at this point in time. We are going all the way like this. And interestingly, every time we go down, we take something more from the people who are least able to afford it, from those who have the least capacity to sustain themselves and move forward. So we need to smooth the revenue framework, modernize it in the ways that I've described. Have an oil severance tax. Continue proposition 30 further. Look at the property tax issues for non-residential properties. I'm so, I'm engaged in this community. I want to be engaged at the state level to work on the issues. I ask for your vote. I need it. And we're in this together, friends. Thank you. And before our final candidate speaks, I'm a smart woman, so I'm gonna let my boss, the chair of the YOLA Healthy Aging Alliance, have the real last word. So Jim, if you wanna make your way up here where our final candidate says her words. So, and you've all been a great audience, by the way. You can still probably say that. I'm really happy that we had all of you. Just one more favor from you, if when you're all finished, if you might just stand up and scoot down in front of our little YOLA Healthy Aging sign. I'd love to get a picture of you for our website. All right, our final candidate, Cecilia Aguiar-Curri. Thank you, Sheila. Thank you everyone for attending today. Really appreciate it. I have a history of regional accomplishment. So it's just not about winters. Although that's where I got my start and where I got my heart and my soul to get behind and get into political realm. And I really don't wanna call it political realm. It's part of giving back. And we're also lucky to have, I've had this opportunity to give back to my community. But also regionally, I work with the YOLA County Housing Commission and we have placed many of our seniors into some of our housing throughout the county. Also, I'm the vice chair of the YOLA County Water Resources Association. Well, why is that important? Water is number one right now. In the rural districts, that's the main conversation that everywhere we go, we talk about sustainable groundwater management plans and how we're gonna implement them, how we're gonna work with the farmers on that. We also have the discussions about the integrated regional management plans. So right now I'm already working in this district. I've already helped with Lake County, Napa County, YOLA County on water plans and issues. I've already helped with a $26 million economic report for the Gateway Cities of Winters, Williams, and Clear Lake. Why was that economic report so important? It helped President Obama sign for the Barry S. Snow Mountain Monument designation. I've done a lot of this regional. Also work with SACOG with my buddy here, Don Saylor. Don did great leadership for SACOG and continues to do that and continues to be involved. We worked on a project called RUCCS, Rural Urban Connection. Why is that important? It helps for economic development, for agricultural areas. And a study, a phenomenal study was done for the west of 505, for many of our friends that are left out, K-Pay Valley, Asparto, and Madison. That study shows some data and that data is going to be used to hopefully get a ag innovation hub or a processing center. Who knows? But there's a lot of investors that are out there from the Bay Area looking to invest some money in the region. And now having that data model, they can invest in good projects in the agricultural area. It worries me when someone says to me, I wanna be a farmer and I wanna go, have you ever farmed? That's a really scary thing, but if they have investment money and they wanna invest in some kind of project that's related to agriculture, isn't that a good thing? We can help them along. I've also worked with the State of California with the California, the League of California Cities. I was on the board of directors. And also was the chairman of the Environmental Quality Group. So we've talked about plastic bags. We've talked about greenhouse gas emissions. We've talked about many things. So I think I'll bring to the table a lots of proof of collaboration and how to work together. And I plan on helping the seniors. As I said, it's very near and dear to my heart. Again, please take the time, read about me, give me a call, look at my website. I'd love to share more about me. Thank you very much. I'd like to thank all the candidates for coming today, but in particular for running for office. As someone who has run for office myself, it is not easy. It takes a lot of time and commitment. And it shows a commitment on the part of each and every one to our community. I just want to leave you with one thought because I think it's important to link the generations. And in addition to being chair of the Healthy Aging Alliance, I also chair first five and Children's Alliance. And at a statewide meeting that we had recently, there was a demographer who looked at the numbers. And of course, we've already seen the increasing number of people who are going to be in the age of 55 and above and declining numbers of younger people. But one of the things that they looked at was how many of the younger people left are going to be going to college at current rates? How many are going to be going into the professions that we need to support California economically? And the conclusion was not enough. So for those who are going to retire in the near future, we have to also do better by our children, make sure that more get a college education and make sure they're more are trained in their professions or California will not be supported economically going forward. So there is a mutual interest at both ends of the generational divide. We need to work together and make sure that all Californians receive the opportunities that all of these men and women, I think are well equipped to provide when two of them go to Sacramento. So thank you very much.