Former mayor, former senator vie for Senate
admin October 21st, 2008
MARION - A former two-term state senator and former three-term mayor face off in the race for the 26th Ohio Senate District seat.Karen Gillmor of Tiffin defeated State Rep. Steve Reinhard, R-Bucyrus, in the Republican primary, while Tom Kruse of Marysville was unopposed in the Democratic primary. The winner Nov. 4 will succeed Sen. Larry Mumper, R-Marion.
Tom Kruse
Kruse, three-term mayor of Marysville, said a lawmaker must be able to work with his colleagues in the legislature.
“As I see it nobody goes into the legislature if they looked at this thing carefully and say, ‘I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that,’ because you have to have the cooperation of other people,” said Kruse, who chose not to seek re-election as mayor after his latest term ended in 2007.
He said political animosity has reduced the effectiveness of the statehouse to address the most pressing issues such as job creation, economic development, school funding, energy and health care.
“People are ready to see the Legislature get away from the polarized, divisive atmosphere that pervades down there and tackle some of these things,” he said.
“Everything dovetails” into economic development, he said, referring specifically to education and health care.
He said state lawmakers have failed to address the Ohio Supreme Court’s ruling that a school funding system based too heavily on property tax revenue is unconstitutional.
“We need to look at a way of funding schools in the state of Ohio that’s fair,” Kruse said, calling for a state income tax, “not a district income tax” to be the basis for a new school funding system. He suggested Ohio look to other states whose school funding systems work more efficiently “and take the good things that fit.”
He said while he currently would support a state income tax-based school funding system state lawmakers should not attach mandates on school districts.
“I think they should be audited to know what they’re doing with the money, but I don’t think we should sit at the state level and mandate programs and mandate curriculum,” Kruse said. Curriculum decisions should be controlled by the individual school boards.
“If we can come to a determination that this is how we define a good education for every student in the state of Ohio and this is what it costs to reach that, then it’s obvious to me it makes sense for the state to provide the money to do that on a per-pupil basis without adding additional mandates that dilute the value of the money (school districts are) receiving.”
He said some of what happens regarding health care in Ohio will depend on what the federal government does to address the issue.
“My personal belief is we’ve got to get to a single-payer system where we don’t have a situation where the low-risk are siphoned off by various companies, and the high-risk are left to fend for themselves, because there’s no way anybody can insure just high-risk people and make it affordable.”
“I do not advocate throwing out the entire health-care system,” he said. “I think we’ve got the best system technologically in the world. The problem is accessibility for everybody at an affordable price. Once we deal with that issue, then we can tinker with the other things and fine-tune them.”
Kruse called for a comprehensive energy plan, saying, “I don’t think there’s any single answer to that. It’s not ethanol. It’s not clean-burning coals. It’s not nuclear. It’s all of those things.” He said public/private partnership is needed to resolve the problem, adding that Ohio has the expertise available to do so.
“We need to make our electric and gas companies not just producers and deliverers of electric and natural gas, they should be energy companies, and they should be involved in developing that.”
“All of these things could create huge amounts of jobs,” he said. He said as senator he would “surround myself with people that are smarter than me and give them the latitude to challenge me. It’s building relationships number one. Number two it’s fostering open and public discussion. Then number three it’s trying to build a consensus on an issue whereby we come up with a solution that’s in the public sector that serves the people that elected us. This isn’t about me. It’s not about political power. … It’s about how do we make this place a better place to live for the state of Ohio, in this case Senate District 26.”
He said state lawmakers can spur economic development in Ohio by reducing the “overlapping layers of government” that “are taxing in some way and ultimately when you start adding all that up it becomes a large burden on new business, and we need to be taking a look at that.”
Kruse said as a former mayor he offers voters a candidate who understands the needs of small communities and how the legislature can help such communities. He said his ownership for 25 years of a building services business also provides him with valuable experience.
“I guess I feel I am more experienced (than Gillmor) in dealing with the needs of people in small towns and small communities and even individual families than she does,” he said. “I’ve accomplished a lot in the time that I’ve been in public service. And I just plain care. I can’t say it any more than that.”
Karen Gillmor
Jobs and the economy is the “overriding issue” in Ohio, said Gillmor, who speaks of introducing legislation that would give tax incentives to manufacturers refurbishing their production lines.
The two-term senator of the 26th District of Ohio, first elected in 1992, said she may address the state’s need for economic development and employment the way she did in her earlier statehouse tenure.
“I authored a bill that created a manufacturer’s tax credit, which allowed manufacturers who want to buy new equipment or retool old equipment for old product lines to have a tax credit, and that bill brought $2 billion of new money into Ohio in its first two years, which went to local schools and local governments,” Gillmor said.
She said she was told that when the Commercial Activity Tax took effect, the manufacturer’s tax credit was eliminated. A conversation with officials at Cardinal Health, the state’s largest employer, informed her that the C.A.T. tax “is not helpful to” the company “so if it’s not helpful to Ohio’s largest company, I think somebody should have looked at it before it passed. I’ve heard the C.A.T. tax is not doing what Ohio lawmakers had intended it do to.”
“I think people are particularly interested in manufacturing flourishing again in Ohio because that industry provides a living wage for its workers as opposed to the service industry jobs,” she said.
Noting the state’s dependence on the automobile industry, Gillmor praised Honda as “truly a success story. That’s partly because it’s responsive to what the public wants as opposed to the American automotive industry.”
She said her experience as a state senator provides her with valuable insight into the workings of government and how it can help Ohioans and her experience as wife of the late Congressman Paul Gillmor provided her with insight into the experiences of other nations.
Gillmor, who cited term limits as a factor in her leaving the Senate during her second term for a position with the State Employment Relations Board, said she has helped constituents in pursuit of funding by accompanying them as they pleaded their cases with influential bodies such as the Track Committee, which prioritizes projects in the state.
“Of course, nagging behind the scenes is real helpful. I’ve had a lot of luck with road projects,” she said, referring to her efforts on behalf of a U.S. 42 bypass around Plain City, which ran out of construction money before it was finished. “I went to the governor and said, ‘You can’t do that because Honda needs it and Bellefontaine is the highest point in Ohio and has fog most times of the year. … At the top of one of the mountains is a truck depot of semis. When they turn onto two-lane 33 there can be terrible accidents.” Funding was transferred from another project in Cleveland, “and the road was able to be finished.”
Gillmor, who was principal co-sponsor for the bill that created the Ohio School Facilities Commission, which has spent $6.9 billion to assist school districts in building new facilities, said Ohioans will hold Gov. Ted Strickland to his announced intention to find a more effective way to fund school operations.
She said she has attended one of Strickland’s listening posts about education and did not like what she heard.
“As the mother of three children in public school, no, I really didn’t,” she said, adding that legislation must be initiated to ensure funding for gifted students.
She said, for example, when the No Child Left Behind act went into effect, in order to fund the mandates of the law Illinois “was completely wiping out any gifted funding. So in most states the funds are going to the learning disabled to the detriment of the gifted children, and that’s a great concern of mine. Learning-disabled children have their own set of hurdles that may be different than those of gifted children. … Learning-disabled children have their own categories of funding, but I think (the teaching) of academically gifted children should be funded.”
The rising cost of health care must be addressed, as well, but likely won’t be completely resolved, she said.
“We’ll always have more health-care need than we will dollars to meet it, but I do know from traveling to over 75 countries with my husband while he was in Congress that nationalized health care is a sure way to bankruptcy for the country,” she said. She said the two tiers of care, one private pay and the other nationalized care, that exist in England, France and Germany “wouldn’t fly here. But you want to meet the needs of as many as you can at the highest level as you can.”
She said the United States doesn’t want to sacrifice the high quality of medical research and development it has in an effort to resolve the health-care cost and coverage issue.
Gillmor points to her performance as state senator as reason for voters to choose her over Kruse on Nov. 4.
“I would vote for me because I have a proven record of accomplishment in state government, and I have brought tax dollars back to the community, which I think is very important,” she said. “You pay (taxes) to Columbus. You should get the benefit of it and not have it go to Cleveland. And I have a good record of solving problems, and I emphasize in my office good constituent service to help citizens solve their problems with government. I also think my values more closely align with the majority of voters in this district. … I’m fiscally conservative and socially conservative, and I think most voters are in this district.”
