Claudette Konola
 
My housemate joked that I was working harder now than I was when I got paid for my work. I think he’s looking at the hours that I’m spending either brushing up on issues, or writing in my blog, or meeting with campaign volunteers, or meeting with voters. Some days I’m up by 3:30 a.m. and not calling it a day until after 9:00 p.m.

But it isn’t just me. And I chose this path.

This morning in the Sentinel there was a story about schools facing more budget cuts because of the continuing recession. Part of the solution was to encourage some teachers to take early retirement. Teachers who are left are going to have to work a lot harder.  Because of oil patch workers moving out of the area, enrollment could be down. But losing experienced teachers will place new burdens on those who are left. They won’t see compensation increases keeping pace with the new duties.

The Delta economic development organization asked their executive director to leave. Now the organization’s secretary is single handedly running the day-to-day operations. She’s working harder, without any commensurate pay increases.

That’s the price we pay for living in a boom and bust economy. During boom times we are flush and giddy with new found wealth. During bust times we all have to tighten our belts and work harder just to stay even. We can do better. We need to create a more diverse economy with sustainable growth and jobs.

Homework:

http://www.gjsentinel.com/news/articles/6_million_could_be_cut_from_sc/
 
 
Yesterday was the official launch of my campaign. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to deliver a message about my values that might resonate with people living in House District 54. The largest local newspaper was not present. That wasn’t the surprise. The purpose of my press release was to announce that I was running, and they had already printed that story. In fact they did a pretty good job of getting out the word that I knew something about creating jobs.

The surprise was that despite filming my entire speech, which included lots of information, all three stations chose to focus on the fact that Republicans and Independents outnumber Democrats and will, therefore, have an easier time raising the cash to run a campaign. Given that the Supreme Court threw out all laws that were designed to give people an even playing field with corporate interests, I was probably naïve to be surprised.

The good news was that the cameras of all three stations panned the room. The images of my supporters looked different. Somehow they managed to edit out the wife of our Secretary of State, but they got the beautiful face of ethnic diversity. For the first time Grand Junction and Delta can see that Native Americans, Latinos, Bikers, and old grey hairs like me care about who represents them in government.