• Who I Am.
• My View of St. Louis County
• Rights of the People
• Labor vs Business
• Economic Diversity
• Environmental Issues
• Welfare Reform
• Foster Care Reform
• Juvenile Reform
• Elderly Issues
• College Students in our area
• Emergency Services
• My volunteer work and advocacy

• Map of District 1

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Economic Diversity

I look at the jobs here and I have to wonder why are we educating all these students and unable to keep them here once they graduate. When talking to students the biggest thing I hear from them when asking what they are going to do when they graduate is "Well I have to move to the cities or elsewhere because there aren't any jobs up here in my field" I find this disheartening because a lot of them would stay if the jobs were here.

In Duluth the two biggest things right now in my opinion is Medical and tourism. In the rest of St. Louis Co. it's timber and mining. Yet if you go down to the cities you see a lot of economic development. I think we need to go after things with more gusto than we have. Bringing jobs up here is imperative as we may survive with what we have but we are not thriving here. We have a growing elderly population but not a growing 20-40 year old population.

Ask yourselves this how many of you have children in school right now that you know are going to leave because they can't find work up here? I realize this has been going on for along time but maybe now is the time for change. Some of you out there are worried about environmental impacts and I will deal with that in my page on environmental issues.

We have increasing taxes almost every year if we were to get jobs up here and with that more people paying in we would not have to raise the taxes every year to make up for the deficits. Keep in mind this if the taxes keep going up we are going to tax people like our elderly right out of there homes. I don't believe that is fair and we need to do something about it now. Because as it is right now some of our elderly are choosing between food and paying taxes on there homes. They are on fixed incomes and don't want to leave there homes but if this pattern continues some will have no choice and that doesn't say much for us as a society in my opinion. I will deal more with elderly issues in my page on Elderly issues.