Regarded as one of the top two contenders in this year’s race to represent the Third District on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, former State Sen. Sheila Kuehl hopes to beat out the other front runner — former Santa Monica Mayor Bobby Shriver — for Zev Yaroslavsky’s seat.
Also vying for the seat representing Malibu, among several other Westside cities, are West Hollywood Councilman John Duran and former Malibu Mayor Pamela Conley Ulich, who is running a campaign to bring attention to the problem of money in politics.
Kuehl is prioritizing foster care, transportation and health care as pivotal campaign issues and holds 14 years of experience in the State Assembly and State Senate. Since 2010, Kuehl has served as the founding director of the Public Policy Institute at Santa Monica College. She recently sat down with The Malibu Times for a conversation on her candidacy.
On opponent Bobby Shriver, and whether the county is more like city or state government:
He tries to make it a distinction because he served on a part-time [Santa Monica] City Council for eight years. He was mayor for five months. Part-time city councils meet every other week in the evening. And what he’s saying is, that’s local government, and therefore it is like a county. Why, because you sleep in your own bed every night? I mean, serving a district is local government as well. We were in our districts three days a week nine months out of the year, and then three straight months. What you do for your district is also local government.Â
On healthcare:
With Obamacare rolling out in California, it’s really a good priority for me to look at how that rolls out in the county, how we might enroll people beyond MediCal recipients in the public-private insurance plan called LA Care, which is part of the exchange, how we can improve the quality of services in the county, which I think are improving, how we can bring some of these things together innovatively.Â
On transportation:
I think we’re going to prioritize the continued expansion of light rail. But my concern is you have to make it attractive for people to use. They don’t have to use it… nothing anyone does is going to clear up traffic if people don’t get out of their cars. So the question is, how do you get people out of their cars? How do you get them to want to? There are a lot of people on my end of this world, including city of Santa Monica, Venice, Malibu, they don’t even go downtown anymore. What I’d like to do is make sure there’s parking at the end [of the line].
On the newly passed Santa Monica Mountains Local Coastal Program (LCP)
I supported it…I only heard tangentially about the concerns of wine growers and small agricultural concerns in the area. And it seemed to me that whoever was telling them what was wrong with it was not giving them the full story because current wine-makers, they were grandfathered in. And I hear from them, and tell them they were grandfathered in, and, first of all, I would say that people need to actually know what it is … But the wine concerns have drawn down the water table so much that actual farmers with wells are complaining. It’s happening in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo as well … I really supported having an LCP and not the Coastal Commission decide on everything that happens here.Â
On development in Malibu and in LA/California in general:
This is appropriately a city issue. The county can do a couple of things. One is … there are lots of unincorporated areas in the county, and the county is the city government for unincorporated areas. In the Third District, not so much. The Santa Monica Mountains are a big chunk of the unincorporated area. I do not favor development in the Santa Monica Mountains. [State Sen.] Fran Pavley and Zev and I worked very hard to buy Ahmanson Ranch, Gillette Ranch, lower Topanga … to preserve it for centuries. The idea is there should remain this resource — state park, federal, in the mountains.Â