BEING GUY HOUSTON Hard at Work for East County
	January/FebRuary 2005

by Guy Houston
Photos by Russell Byrne

I’m a politician with a reputation of getting things done. I developed that attitude, in part, from my experiences as a high school athlete. I was a quarterback on a football team that took the East Bay Athletic League Championship. My dad was the coach and I learned from him some attitudes towards teamwork, aggressiveness, and dedication that I carried with me into the other parts of my life.

A person can’t make a difference in a ballgame or on the floor of a State legislature without being willing to make decisions based upon clear knowledge of the strategic situation. In other words, you have to know exactly what you are doing, understand precisely what you want to accomplish, and accurately know the resources available for getting the job done.

Once you get to that point, you have to take the next step that some politicians seem to have a problem with — you have to get out there and “just do it.”

I worked for President Regan’s 1980 campaign and he became my hero. Whether or not people agreed with Regan’s political position, everyone always knew what that position was. Regan was a politician who always conducted the affairs of office according to the principles he believed in. He was never afraid to make a decision and to do what he thought was right.

The small glimpse that campaign gave me into the workings of government was sufficient to attract me to a life of public service. I volunteered for a number of campaigns while carving out a career in the mortgage and realty industry.

I successfully ran for a seat on the Dublin City Council at age 32, was elected Mayor of Dublin in 1994, and became State Assemblyman in 2002.

I find that my passions in the Legislature have remained the same as when I was Mayor of Dublin. In both positions I turned my attention to issues with infrastructure, which is the rightful nuts and bolts of government when it is working most directly for the good of the people.

I believe that government is at its best when it works to create and maintain things like parks, schools, roads, water, sewer, and open space preserves.

It is no secret that the state is in a tough position these days. We simply don’t have money, but we dare not use that as an excuse for ignoring the needs pressing in upon us.

Tackling the Infrastructure Problems
My voice about some of the infrastructure issues is being heard since I’m Vice Chair of the Assembly Transportation Committee. Fixing the East County transportation problems is our most critical challenge. Of course, I’m talking about the issues with Highway 4 and Vasco Road.

I’m frankly getting tired of Task Force meetings. The fact is we can’t talk these problems to death, we need to actually get some things done. As I write this I’ve attended a recent meeting with Sen. Torlakson, County Supervisor, Millie Greenberg, Brentwood Vice Mayor, Annette Beckstrand, Discovery Bay MAC Representative, David Piepho, and citizen activists Joanne Flynn and Jeff Altman.

We’ve had these meetings before. We’ll have them again. The meetings serve the purpose of keeping the issues alive, but we need to get past meetings and into action. Let’s not do another study! We’ve been in the huddle too long, it’s time to play ball!

The frustration we’re facing is that we’re not getting the barriers in place that the Vasco Road situation so desperately needs. We know the solution to the head-on fatalities is to divide the highway. Other highways like 17 and 37 show that divided roads save lives, even though the barriers on neither meet CalTrans guidelines.

The County solution, which involved redoing the entire roadway, would involve widening the road at a cost of $90 million.

We could do this more cheaply by putting in $2 million worth of barriers in the most critical places before we can afford to make major roadway changes. Public Safety people have raised the issue of difficulties in getting to the scene of an accident if barriers were in place on two-lane stretches of Vasco Road. There’s a trade-off between slowing-down response times versus saving lives.

With concrete barriers in place, it might take an emergency vehicle longer to get to the scene of an accident, in some cases, but the people involved in the accident would have a much greater chance of actually being alive when help arrived.

Sen. Torlakson and I are committed to working together to solve this problem. There are ways this can be done. The Contra Costa County Transportation Authority, for example, has revenue. Also, Measure J, extending the sales tax, provided revenue that we can use for this.

We’re encouraged by Mary Piepho’s successful campaign to become District 3’s new County Supervisor. We wish her luck and hope that she can work to reverse the discouraging lack of progress from the County up to this point.

Another part of preserving infrastructure includes conserving and enhancing water resources, such as the plan for expanding Los Vaqueros Reservoir.

Everyone became aware of our problems with the Delta system when the levee broke last summer. The delta is an infrastructure hub of for Northern California. We should all be sobered by the fact that the break occurred in a period of good weather conditions — when no extra stresses were placed on the levee.

The break provided a grim example of how important the Delta is to the state. It goes beyond water, involving important rail lines, power distribution systems, environmental issues, plus a whopping big segment of our farming industry.

During the next legislature we will be looking carefully at the levee situation.

Working for Childhood Learning
Education is my other priority. We have been facing up to an ongoing challenge to equalize state funding of public education in our area. Some children in our state get much more money for education than others. This is a big problem in our East County schools.

I have faced up to the challenge of trying to move resources from the state into our schools to bring them up to par with other schools.

I’m delighted to report that Gov. Schwarzenegger actually did something about the situation.

I met the governor when he was still our governor-elect. During that first meeting I said to him, “I would like to work with you on an education issue. Some kids get more than other kids, referring to education funding in California.”

I’ll never forget Arnold’s response. He looked at me and said with obvious conviction, “That’s not fair!” That was really encouraging.

Arnold didn’t make the subsequent response that some career politicians I have known would have made. He looked at the problem as a businessman would have looked at it and became the first governor ever to do something about the problem by allocating $110 million for an equalization fund.

It would have required $450 million to actually bring all the schools up to an average, but I was impressed with how effectively he responded to my problem by becoming the first governor to actually “put his money where his mouth is” on this issue.

The Life of a State Legislator
The thing I like best about my job is meeting people. I love going into schools, for example, and introducing politics to young people and little children.

I like being an elected official because it’s a people job, and I’m a people person.

The worst thing about the job is that it forces me to be away from my family. There’s always some meeting to go to.

My job goes in cycles. In the beginning of the year the pace is slow, because the bills are all going through legislative review. There are 28 committees in the state Legislature. Besides the Transportation Committee, I serve on Banking and Finance, and Labor and Employment.

Things begin to ramp up in February. Beginning then and extending through May the committees are active with a lot of long days and late nights. This activity is followed by a lull in June in anticipation of the budget battles that come during the summer.

Even though the law states that we need to pass the budget in June, we don’t really begin really working on the thing until July. In August we’re up to full speed and are putting in a lot of late hours by the end of the session, voting on bills and sending them to the governor for his review. We begin stumping with our constituents after August.

We don’t get enough credit for what most of us do in our districts. We meet with many of our constituents throughout the year and help them work through problems they face. This provides me with invaluable opportunities to learn what the people are concerned about and what they think about the job I’m doing in Sacramento.

The Times, They Are A’Changing
A new wind is are blowing through our national political machine — and the wind feels like a really cold one to a lot of interests who had their hands in Uncle Sam’s pocket. The fact is, the government will not play the role of sugar daddy as much as it did formerly.

The change is taking place on the state level, as well. There’s a movement on the part of the state, for example, of turning responsibility for the roads back to the counties — making citizens more responsible at a more direct level for the condition of their own roadways.

Part of the impetus for the change comes from the sobering fact that the government at both levels simply lacks the money to do the work that it formerly needed to do.

People who get most out of government these days are those who are most willing to help themselves. It is easier, for example, to get matching dollars than it is simply to get a check to pay for almost anything.

The days of the government picking up 100% of the tab for most projects are over. Putting in seed money is the way to grow the government’s interest in a project. That’s why Measure J was so important — ensuring that the state and federall governments work as partners on our important transportation projects.

Petitioning Chaos
There were 14 propositions on the November ballot. In my estimation, that’s far too many propositions. The complaint underlying many of these could be stated as, “If the legislature did its job there would be fewer ballot measures.”

There was formerly some truth in the complaint. The Legislature really should have done a better job at creating trust. For example, it was wrong ever to siphon funds from one project to pay for a mistake made in some other area. Governor Davis broke trust in exactly that way by such actions as suspending Prop 42, thus diverting sales tax revenues from gasoline that should have gone towards transportation projects and putting them into the general fund.

But, on the other hand, voters need to be more educated about what they are signing when they sign petitions. A good principle is to not sign anything unless you know what you’re actually petitioning for.

Over the past ten years ballot measures have become a big business. For two million dollars a citizen can get anything onto the state ballot. The money goes to hire people to collect the required signatures. You might be faced with five different propositions on the way into Costco. Unless you are familiar with one of them and really care about it, my advice is to just go about your shopping.

Our run-away process of adding propositions to our ballots is introducing an unfortunate element of chaos into our already difficult system of state government.

We need to change things more rationally than we’ve done in the past. We need to plan ahead. During times of ample rainfall residents forget that we live in a drought state. People tend not to take action or to demand action until there’s an emergency. The expansion of Los Vaqueros might take a decade, for example. We’ll have droughts during that time, for sure.

We need to do proactive things to take care of infrastructure before our lights actually go out, our spigots don’t run any water, our kids sit in classrooms without teachers, and our traffic reaches complete gridlock.

A New Way of Doing the State’s Business
I’m encouraged by Governor Schwarzenegger. The difference in style between Arnold and Governor Davis has been a remarkable thing to observe. I never met Gov. Davis during my entire first year in office. In fact, his staff never communicated with my staff. My Democrat friends reassured me by saying, “It isn’t you, Guy. He doesn’t’ talk to us either.”

On the other hand, since taking office Governor Schwarzenegger has been with me a couple dozen times. And he communicates with my Democrat colleagues, as well.

Everyone wants to make the State of California a better place. Some of us residents with longer members than others long for us to return to the California’s Golden Era, when governors like Ronald Reagan and Pat Brown governed a state that lead the world in areas like infrastructure development and public education.

We need to protect our energy resources. We’re not out of the woods on this because we continue to live on 1960s infrastructure, which was the period when the first Gov. Brown built things up. Since his time, unfortunately, maintaining the power infrastructure has taken a back seat.

I’m a dad with young kids. I want us to get back to those old days before my children are grown. We have to be willing to face up to issues that are not going to go away. People have to work together. We have to do away with the partisan bickering that has been like cloying mud slowing down the forward progress that we might otherwise have been able to make.

I’m becoming more hopeful about our future.

I think the state now has a man at the helm with sufficient moral and mental fiber to begin leading us back to greatness. I admire the fact that Governor Schwarzenegger is able to make decisions and then and to act on them.

We all stood by helplessly during the energy crises and watched Governor Davis blow all his opportunities to save us from the disaster that came down on us. At the beginning of the crises he could have resolved the problems by choosing a course of action and then taking the appropriate steps. The man waffled and delayed taking action for month after month until the time for appropriate action was gone and the problem blew up in our faces.

We need to be proactive in facing problems in the future before they reach critical mass. Government has to become more than mere fire control; in the years ahead the governor and legislature must actually lead the state into change.

We understand what we need to do. I’m confident that if we all work together we can get the job done and bring California government out of the doldrums that we seem to have been in during the past decade or so.

Let’s start the ball rolling right here in East Contra Costa County! Let’s work on our own issues, become proactive in responding to our own local education and infrastructure challenges, and let’s create the future we want for ourselves and for our children. Let’s show to others how the government of the people really can solve problems for the people.

Now we’re first and ten from our own twenty-yard line. But we’ve got the football. We know what we have to do to return California to the golden times of the past. Let’s join together, get the team going, and “just do it.”

925-606-4990
Assemblymember.Houston@asm.ca.gov
www.assembly.ca.gov