As a Member of the Arizona State Senate, Brian Fernandez Wants to Work to Lift Families and Children Up

Since assuming his mother Charlene’s House seat in the Arizona State Legislature in November 2021, Representative Brian Fernandez has sponsored legislation to help children, lift families up, and move the state forward.

Among the measures he championed were:

• Expanding eligibility for children on KidsCare.
• Protecting and expanding the right to vote and access to ballot locations.
• Limiting the amount landlords can increase rent.
• Increasing the budget for public schools.
• A Parents Bill of Rights.
• Ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
• Scientifically and medically accurate sex education at appropriate grade levels.

In the new Legislative District 23, Mr. Fernandez would like to continue his work for the people as a member of the Arizona State Senate.

If elected, he would continue his work in the areas listed above as well as:

• Protecting a woman’s right to choose.
• Promoting the creation of high-paying jobs that include many benefits.
• Focusing on creating more technology sector job opportunities like computer engineering
• Pursuing a sustainability policy that deals with the water crisis.

Representative Fernandez graciously took the time to discuss his candidacy for the Arizona State Senate.

The questions and his responses are below.

• What are at least two reasons you want to run for a term in the Arizona State Senate in LD 23?

“The reason why I want to run is I want to make Arizona a place where families can raise generation to generation of their kids, and make sure that they have a good education and are able to have jobs and live in a great sustainable manner.

The second reason is education. I’m a product of public schools. My mother was a public school teacher. My sister is a public school teacher. I want to make sure that every child can reach their potential and that means treating our teachers as professionals, paying them as professionals, and giving the schools and the teachers, the resources that they need to take care of those students.”

• What are at least two reasons voters should elect you over any opponent in the legislature race?

“First of all, I’m a small business owner. I have been finding solutions to complex problems my entire career and know how to make things work. This leads me to the second reason, which is temperament. When you’re in a small business or any kind of business, you learn that you have to work with everybody. You won’t always agree with them that you’re not always going to like them. In fact, most times you don’t but you still do it. You make sure you do it for the good of everyone. As a person with those skills, with that experience, I think that I’m well suited to work with, folks in a state where we’re pretty evenly divided.

I think that we’re a 50, 50 state. Right now, the Republicans, probably because of gerrymandering are a little ahead of us but that’s not going to last for long. And we need to elect representatives that are able to work together towards what should be our common goal, doing what is best for the people of Arizona.”

• If elected, what are four issues you will focus on in the legislature?

“Education is my priority and wanting to make sure every child can reach their true potential. We can do this by fully funding schools, which partially means treating teachers like professionals. By that, I mean paying them well, but also giving them the resources they need. If you were building a jet or a car or anything else, you wouldn’t underpay people and ask them to do the job with fewer resources than they might need. You would give them what they need and you would pay them as professionals. We need to make sure that teachers are getting the respect and pay they deserve.

Sustainability is the second issue. I want to make sure that we are looking to the future. We’re living in the desert which is fine. We can do it, but we need to make sure that we are conserving water, we’re recycling water, and we’re using water properly. I think that we need to start with looking at our own backyard both figuratively, and literally making sure that we’re conserving as much as we can.

Jobs are the third issue. We need to make sure that we have great-paying jobs and that those jobs provide benefits like sick leave and personal time off. When a child is sick the last thing a parent should worry about is having to leave their child to go to work. That’s something that’s really important, especially in the days of COVID. Republicans wanted to make sure that we got back to work as a state, and that we should have a robust economy. But when your child is sick, when you’re sick, you should be able to stay home and not worry about how you’re going to pay your rent.

The final issue is access to choice. This is really important to me. I want to make sure that every person in Arizona is given the ability to make choices with their own bodies and that they’re able to make those decisions, not based on what the government might say, but based on what’s best for them and their family. I think that’s really the only way that we can have a free society, where people can live to their fullest potential. We need to make sure that we don’t tell people that they need to live their life a certain way or have children when they might not be able to or it might be detrimental to their health or wellbeing. So, it’s really important to me that everyone has the choice to have families whenever they feel is the best choice for them.”

Do you favor expanded Kids Care?

“Yes.”

Do you favor expanded universal pre-K and full-day kindergarten?

“Yes.”

Are you in favor of protecting access to the ballot?

“Yes.”

What is your position on funding the police?

“I think the police are very necessary. If someone is breaking into my house, I’m going to want to call the police and I hope that they respond in a timely manner. I think that the important factor for me is making sure that we have police doing what we need them to do and not what we don’t. By that I mean, if there’s a mental health emergency, the last thing you want is to call someone, anyone, including a police officer to show up with a firearm. You want to have people that are qualified to work with that person to do it, to de-escalate that situation, and make sure that everyone remains safe. That’s really important. And I think that a lot of that goes the same way if you’re working with children. You don’t need to have a police officer show up with a gun to deal with a child in crisis. You want people that can talk to the child and make sure that the child knows that they’re cared for and that they’re supported and that we’re looking out for them. I’ll be clear that when it comes to taking away funding from the police, I’m not in favor of that. I’m in favor of additional funding for mental health services.”

What is your position on comprehensive immigration reform?

“I’m for comprehensive immigration reform. I think that we’ve had four administrations, each with at least two years of unilateral control and none properly handling immigration. I think that we really need to sit down, work with all parties and figure out a way to make the immigration system work for everybody.

We have a labor problem in Arizona, but also in the United States, in general. We need to make sure that we are safely letting people come here to work. Right now, we’re talking about China and microchips, and you’re going to hear a lot more about that with Taiwan with the Speaker, just leaving Taiwan and, and China, threatening them.  About 30 years ago we started outsourcing our microchip production to China. And at the time we thought that was a great idea that it was going to bring them into the world. They were kind of a third-world country and we were going to bring them into the first world. Well, it worked in that sense, but what it did is it took away a lot of our economic security. What we need to do now is to make sure that we bring a lot of that to America. We should be producing those microchips here in the U.S. But there’s a problem and that is we don’t have the labor for that. We don’t have the trained engineers, scientists of that caliber to do that kind of work. And I think that until we do, we’re not going to be able to get to that point where we’re going to be economically secure and stable when it comes to technology. That’s going to mean, the old days of H and B Visas but maybe there’s going to be something new, in the way that’s going to work, whatever it looks like. We need a lot of people, in this country to do that work.

Years ago, when Trump was still president, there was a push to get Foxcon into Wisconsin. I don’t know if many people remember but the state of Wisconsin gave a several billion-dollar tax break to bring Foxcon. Donald Trump said that it was going to produce iPhones in Wisconsin and it never came to fruition. I don’t know, in terms of tax breaks, what was wasted or what was spent but I do know when I talked to people that were in the tech business about it, what a lot of them said is America doesn’t have enough engineers to build just iPhones and iPads. It would take 60,000 engineers just to run the production facility of that capacity.

That’s why education is a priority of mine because we need to train more students in STEM careers, but that is a long-term solution. In the short-term, we need to bring this very highly skilled labor to the United States, and make sure they’re working for us rather than people that might not have our best interests in mind.”

Please click on the below social media sites for more information on Brian Fernandez and his campaign for the Arizona State Senate in the new Legislative District 23.

https://www.briansfernandez.com