Sizing up a candidate

To the Editor:

Every once in a while you meet an outstanding person, someone who welcomes you not as a stranger but with authentic interest. Someone who deals in realities and thus finds lying pointless. Someone who makes you feel they're with you in the moment. I guess it's respect — allowing another person's opinions and thoughts to matter.

Being religious without a hint of wanting to push their faith on others, much less needing to put it on display. Wanting to make things better. Wanting to help those in need, feed the hungry, care for the sick. And loving his family — so much so that when his small children disrupt a serious adult moment, those children are embraced with the same joy that they're bringing.

Ryan Campbell is such a person. From the first time I met him, I liked him. He's a young man with a lot of different experiences. He worked at our library and knows its value. He worked at The Union Democrat as a reporter — maybe that's where he learned to ask questions and listen to the answers. He worked in social services — perhaps that's where he met those in trouble and experienced common humanity. He was responsible for funding and confronting our pine beetle outbreak, helping Tuolumne County to out-perform every other foothill county.

With other supervisors, he's balanced the budget for the first time in a decade. Restaffed the library and kept it open more hours. Acquired funding for road repairs and the thinning of trees on our main fire egresses. Decades of neglect haven't been fully corrected, but there's a well organized start. And there are plans to refurbish the old county-owned hospital for county offices, saving over a million dollars a year in rents.

Let's re-elect him. He's the real thing.

Robert Carabas

Sonora