LAURA WELLS: I WILL FIND OUT ANSWERS TO THE STATE’S BIG QUESTIONS
Q:
What in your background makes you the best candidate for this job?
A:
My campaign does
not accept corporate money, so I do not have the divided loyalties that are in effect whenever candidates and their political parties take money from corporations and billionaires. Unfortunately, in general, the more experience politicians have had, the more they have come under the influence of “big money.”
What’s missing in politics as usual in Sacramento are values, values that benefit the vast majority of Californians. Examples of these benefits include having world-class schools and universities again, not more incarceration; having a healthy and beautiful environment; and having a state-level Medicare for All.
These solutions save money, which is a controller’s job, and they save lives.
Work experience that has prepared me for the job of controller has been in systems analysis and management in the financial world, including mutual fund and pension fund accounting, union dues accounting, real estate mortgage loans and nonprofit development.
Q:
Assess outgoing
Controller Betty Yee. What did she do well or not do well?
A:
California would save
up to 40 percent of the cost of public infrastructure projects if we financed the projects with the wealth of California.
The Public Banking Institute was initiated at a meeting I attended in late 2010, shortly after my Green Party campaign for governor, a campaign in which a State Bank for California was a key platform plank. Since then, some state bills were passed, and some withdrawn.
The result is that this commonsense solution has not been achieved by Controller Betty Yee, in her eight years in the position, nor by other Democratic Party leaders, despite having a “super-trifecta” of the governorship and supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature in most of the last 11 years.
Public banking can help solve problems in California ranging from deteriorating schools and transportation infrastructure to homelessness and loss of employment and health care.
The controller is responsible for audits, and these failures certainly need to be audited and reported “to the boss,” which is the California public.
What Betty Yee has done well is that she led audits of state and local government that uncovered billions of dollars in misused public funds, and she worked to decommission the last nuclear power plant in California, a decision that is now being reconsidered and may be reversed.
Q:
California’s computer
payroll system is outdated, and prior controllers
have been unable to fix the problem. What, if anything, would you do?
A:
In my years as a systems manager and analyst, I have seen major conversion project teams begin with a lot of hope and complex strategic plans, and yet end up not accomplishing the goal.
It’s as if the project had become “too high a mountain to climb.”
Updating the state’s computer payroll system sounds like a job in which the approach should be to address the worst functioning part, and make that part work more smoothly, and then address the next worst part.
I have been hired to implement systems and have been able to make beneficial changes using that approach.
At some point, a transition to a new system becomes less of a “mountain” and can be accomplished.
Q:
What are three areas
in the office where you would make major changes?
A:
Public banking. Sacramento has been dragging its feet and not solving the problem of municipalities and the state paying too much interest to Wall Street banks, leaving less money for our schools and everything else that we’ve been proud of in the past. I would need to be “a broken record” to push for public banks to be implemented now, without further delay — speaking out in the public arena, and behind the scenes on the many boards of which the controller is a member. Assembly Bill 310 was created in 2020 that would have converted the California Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank (IBank) into a State Public Bank; however, public banking was dropped from the bill in 2021. California needs to get it done.
Medicare for All. In order to save public and household money, and save lives, there is no excuse for California not to implement an improved statewide Medicare for All system now.
Audits. I’d find out answers to the big questions about how the state borrows, taxes and spends. For one, what happened to our enviable public school system and our world-class public university system? Another question is, who pays state taxes, and why do the lowest income folks pay a larger share of their money in state taxes than most people with more money? And what economic or ecological reason would justify using precious water for fracking?