By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
Voters in Overton and Mesquite have an important choice to make in the upcoming Republican primary election for State Assembly District 19. Running in the June 14 primary will be incumbent Assemblyman Chris Edwards of Henderson, and Connie Foust of Mesquite.
Because District 19 is a conservative enclave in the state, the decision for this Assembly seat will be made wholly in the Republican primary. No Democratic or other third party candidates filed to run in the general election for this seat.
District 19 takes in most of the southeast corner of the state. It’s northern end includes all of Mesquite. The boundary then zig zags to the south taking in Overton south of the Lou Jean alignment. Then it continues south to include a part of Henderson.
The PROGRESS recently took the opportunity to interview both of these candidates. The following is what we learned.
Commerce Tax
Connie Foust says that the Commerce Tax, passed in the 2015 Legislature as Senate Bill 483, is the core reason she is running this year. The bill instituted a tax involving businesses throughout the state on any revenues exceeding $4 million per year. Foust believes that the tax will be terrible for businesses throughout the state.
When Chris Edwards was running for his seat for the first time in 2014, Foust was serving as the President of the Virgin Valley Tea Party.
“When Chris Edwards came to our Tea Party meeting to campaign, I believed him when he said he was against taxes,” Foust said.
As a point of fact, Edwards did end up voting against SB 483. But Foust claims that he was still complicit in the bill’s passage. As the bill worked its way through the legislature, Foust said that she was following the proceedings closely over the internet. Just before the vote, an amendment was put forward to include the language of the Commerce Tax into the bill, Foust recalled. Edwards voted for that amendment.
“Then the very next vote; and I guarantee it was less than five minutes later; he voted against the bill,” Foust said. “He basically did a ‘John Kerry’: he voted for it before he voted against it. That way he could come back to the district and say that he had opposed it. In fact, he set things up for the tax to pass.”
Foust said that it was at that point that she decided that Edwards needed to have an opposing candidate in the election this year. She was unable to find another person willing to do it, so she decided to step up, she said.
Edwards emphasized that he has always been consistent in his position on taxes.
“I have always pushed forward that we need to pursue the lowest tax rate for individuals, families and businesses,” Edwards said. “That is what I have always said. But I have never said ‘No taxes ever’. I have never signed the tax pledge and I never will. To me, that is an unrealistic approach to an aspect of government that changes constantly. To say that it is always the same is just not realistic.”
That said, he insists that he was opposed to the Commerce Tax. He said that he voted against it for several reasons.
First, he felt that additional cuts should be made to the budget itself so that any tax plan forwarded could be minimized.
“I made some specific recommendations on that before the vote was taken and, unfortunately, they just weren’t taken up,” Edwards said.
He also felt that a gross revenues tax was not the best way to accomplish the goal. He had worked with the Chairman of the Tax Committee on a separate plan that he felt was superior to the Commerce Tax option, he said.
“It thought that his plan was a much more viable and better option and I would have favored that, but that was not what ended up before us,” Edwards said.
About his support of the amendment that Foust faults him on, Edwards insists that it was merely a procedural issue. He highlights the fact that he had already voted against the bill in subcommittee, in committee votes and again on the floor.
“I don’t know how many other opportunities that there were to vote against it,” he said.
“There is a difference between amending a bill and adopting a bill,” Edwards explained. “In the amendment, I voted to put the pieces together so that there could be a vote against it on the floor. That is just a procedural thing and some people just don’t quite seem to be grasping the difference. But you really have to be able to grasp the difference if you are going to be in the legislature.”
Education
Foust expresses doubt on whether the revenues for the Commerce Tax, supposed to be used to help education, will ever make it down to the classroom level.
“We have been putting an awful lot of money into education over the years and we have found that most of it doesn’t get down to the kids,” she said. “Instead it is actually going to pay for more administrators. I find that abhorrent.”
Foust said that the layers of bureaucracy bring one-size-fits-all policies such as Common Core, comprehensive sex education including transgender issues and “anything else that the liberal progressive left wants to throw out at you’, and the “data mining” of school children through standardized testing. All of these things, she is adamantly against.
But Edwards claimed that the last legislature made more progress on education than had been done in the previous 30 years.
He began by pointing to AB394, a landmark bill to reorganize and deconsolidate power in the Clark County School District. Edwards said that this measure would bring the decision-making about education down to the local level to reduce the power of the central bureaucracy and temper many of the problems that Foust was most concerned about.
In addition, a bill providing for Educational Savings Accounts would allow parents choices in where their children go to school. This again would bring decision-making down to the parents and local community, Edwards said.
Edwards went on to name off more accomplishments the legislature made for education including Opportunity Grants, Career Technical Education funding, expansion of the Millenium Scholarships, more money for charter schools, full day kindergarten, early childhood education, and Zoom and Achievement schools.
Furthermore, Edwards stated that the legislature had been concerned that additional revenues meant for education might be eaten up by administration. So they had put tight controls on how the funds could be used.
“The education dollars were placed into categorical grants that specify precisely what the purposes would be and they would have independent monitoring so that we could make sure the money is spent correctly and well,” Edwards said. “I liked that aspect of it.”
Edwards points out that there is still work to be done in education. He would like to see specific focus on higher education in the next legislature.
“There is a need to pursue building up community colleges as a fantastic option for getting a good education at a cheaper cost,” he said.
Edwards said that he has been working with the Mesquite Regional Business, Inc. to bring workforce development grant funds to expand the role of College of Southern Nevada in Mesquite and Moapa Valley. This would provide job training for opportunities that may be opening in the region through industrial projects like the Faraday Future plant being built at Apex, Edwards said.
“Hopefully in the next few weeks there will be very good news coming to Mesquite and Moapa Valley on that score,” he said.
Economic Development
Edwards is proud of the strides made in the last legislature in the area of economic development for the state.
He said that the recent deal made with Faraday Futures for a huge electric car plant to be built in the Apex Industrial area of North Las Vegas was a “fantastic deal for many reasons.”
First, if it builds to expectations, it would bring 4,500 workers to the area, he said.
Secondly, the deal promises to bring important infrastructure to Apex allowing other businesses and industries to move into the area. That would happen whether Faraday pans out or not, he said.
And thirdly, other businesses will be moving to the region to help service and supply the major Faraday plant, Edwards said.
“For Moapa Valley and Mesquite, it will be a huge opportunity to put a whole new industry within reach of a good paying job,” Edwards said. “It offers young people who want to stay in these communities a chance to have a good job and live in the communities where they want to be.”
In the next session, Edwards said he would like to see some work done on helping existing small and medium business throughout the state.
“I’d like to look at how the state can streamline operations and eliminate rules and regulations for the businesses that are out there,” Edwards said. “We have dealt with things like Tesla and Faraday. Now I think we need to pay attention to the businesses who have struggled through the downturn to survive. We need to find ways we can make them more profitable so tha they will hire more people.”
Foust had a less enthusiastic response to the state’s deal with Faraday. She said that she has a problem with government at any level subsidizing businesses to come in.
“I feel like we need to create an environment for healthy businesses, through low fees, making sure the roads are good and so on,” she said, “but I am a free market person. I don’t think that the government should be involved.
“This state is broke,” Foust continued. “So when they take a risky thing and put it on the backs of the taxpayers; well, if it fails, they have done a huge disservice.”
In the end, Foust said she was not opposed to how the Faraday bill turned out. Rather she was opposed to the way it had been done. She happened to be in Carson City during the special session at the end of last year and she made some observations.
“It was all done in such a rush!” she said. “The assembly people were actually getting all their information from the lobbyists and the unions. They were not making educated decisions. They got the 700 page bill on the morning that they were voting. I know for a fact that most of them did not read it. They couldn’t have!”
Foust said that, with more than $300 million of taxpayer dollars on the line, someone should have insisted that the process slow down enough to be able to read the bill.
“There should have been pressure put on the governor that said, ‘We are going to oppose this until we have had a chance to read it.’” Foust said.
Biographical Information
Chris Edwards was born and raised in Sleepy Hollow, NY. He graduated from Notre Dame with a Bachelors degree in Government. He was then commissioned into the US Navy as an ensign where he served 7 years on active duty.
He received a Masters degree in Public Adminstration from George Washington University.
He then worked for a time as program manager for the Secretary of the Air Force, Chief of Staff for director of Parks and Recreation in the city of Washington DC, and then in the office of Contracting and Procurement for Washington DC.
He moved to southern Nevada in 2002. Shortly after that he was called up from Navy Reserves and was mobilized to Iraqi Freedom. He was deployed in the Middle East during 2003 and returned to Las Vegas in 2004.
The Navy then asked him to serve as Chief of Staff for Navy Regional Command in Southwest Asia. This turned into a contractors position working on anti-terrorist efforts on the horn of Africa.
He returned to Las Vegas in 2011. He first ran for Assembly in 2014.
Connie Foust calls herself a political activist in an array of conservative causes.
She comes from Montana where she got her early political involvement in the 1960s. As mother of a handicapped son, Connie engaged with her legislator and ended up authoring bills on behalf of disabled people in Montana. She wrote, and adocated for, the first anti-discrimination bill passed in the state.
She later lived in Wyoming where she owned and operated a personnel agency which serviced hiring needs of coal mines, banks, hospitals and other businesses in the boom town of Gillette.
Later in life, she resided in Arizona, near the border with Mexico. There she became involved with the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), eventually becoming the National Director of Border Operations before her involvement with the Corps ended. The purpose of the MCDC was to bring awareness to the American people of the dangers posed to Latinos crossing the border from cartels, drugs, and gun-running.
Under her management, the organization’s membership grew to 8,000 people who either traveled to the border or supported the efforts of those who did.
Her work with the organization earned her the nickname, “The Border Granny” by the regional and national media.
