elect Shannon Matson
Our financial recovery is going to take awhile. I think there are numerous ideas on the table that don’t result in taking a 20% pay cut away from State Workers that need to be examined first and I would support looking into all of those ideas and see which are the most viable. I don’t know the exact amount of projected budget shortfall and I don’t know where we can most afford to trim some of the excess, but I would be open the looking into may different ways we could make up that difference. As a successful small business owner, I have a lot of experience with balancing budgets and look forward to examining where we have unnecessary expenditures and can make some changes to benefit our overall productivity and fiscal responsibility. Also I would like to see a resilient HawaiĘ»i that is producing 80-90% of our own food, rather than importing 90% of our food. We need actions to increase opportunities for local farmers and small-scale sustainable agriculture to build and increase productions immediately, which will benefit us all in the long-term regardless of what other budgetary actions are taken.