• Recruit and retain the best teachers by paying more.
• Make sure schools and classrooms are not overcrowded.
• Expand access to quality pre-Kindergarten programs.
• Tackle the achievement gap and high drop out rate.
• Make sure all qualified students can afford go to college.

While most North Carolinians have health insurance, 1.3 million of us do not. This number includes hundreds of thousands of children and is growing. For those of us fortunate enough to have health coverage, costs are increasing sharply. Every year, we worry whether our employers are going to be forced to reduce or eliminate our coverage.

As the director for the Consumer Protection Division of the Attorney General’s office, I oversee the Managed Care Patient Assistance Program, which helps health plan members secure payments from their insurer for treatments covered by their policy. I will continue to work to ensure that the dollars we spend on health insurance premiums translate into the coverage North Carolinians expect and need.

Governor Easley recently appointed me to sit on a panel to ensure that hospitals report infection rates properly. Once hospitals report statistics in the same way, we can effectively evaluate their performance and focus our efforts on improving their quality of care and reducing unnecessary deaths and disease. The public should have reliable information about health care services and providers. I will work to increase the availability of that information.

With double-digit health care inflation and too many neighbors under- or uninsured, our health care system needs reform. I will work in the Senate to do the following:

• Expand access to affordable health care and ensure that every child in North Carolina has health coverage.
• Control health care costs while improving quality.
• Ensure that health insurance companies do not deny health plan enrollees the coverage they are entitled to.
• Address the mental health care crisis.

Wake County is a wonderful place to live for many reasons – our strong economic base, good weather, decent cost of living, and cultural life, among others. People are coming from all over to enjoy what we call home.

Our county is experiencing explosive growth as a result. Fifteen years ago, Wake had 460,000 people. Today, there are 800,000 residents. In just over 20 years, our population will double again.

This growth is placing an intense stress on our institutions and infrastructure – our schools, our roads, our water and sewer, our social services and open space. It also contributes to long-term environmental challenges, such as worse air and water quality and global warming.

As an aide in the United States Senate, I helped Senator Edwards secure funding to deal with the environmental and economic catastrophe resulting from Hurricane Floyd and to preserve land around Lake James.

As director of the Consumer Protection Division of the Attorney General’s office, where I oversee the Utilities Unit, I have been working on the climate crisis. We persuaded regulators to stop Duke Power from building another coal-burning plant, this one at Cliffside. We believed that Duke did not demonstrate the plant’s necessity because it failed to give adequate attention to energy conservation.

As your state Senator, I’ll work to accomplish the following:

• Preserve Wake County’s quality of life.
• Protect our water, most critically Falls and Jordan Lakes.
• Improve our air quality.
• Preserve our open space, such as the Dix property.
• Address the climate crisis here in North Carolina by promoting energy conservation and public transportation, encouraging the development of renewable sources of energy, and reducing auto emissions.

We are blessed in western Wake County to have a strong economic base. We have the technology of Research Triangle Park, the reinvigoration of downtown Raleigh, the stability of state government, and the energy of five universities – NC State, Meredith, Peace, Shaw, and Saint Augustine’s, as well as Wake Tech. As a result, we have a relatively low unemployment rate compared to the rest of the state and the nation.

The factors that have created this strong base did not just happen by chance. Forward-thinking leaders made strategic investments in RTP, our higher educational system, and our infrastructure to create this success. We must make similar long-range investments today so Wake County can become an even better place in which to do business and work going forward.

I worked at the Self-Help Credit Union in Durham, the mission of which is to help small businesses grow so that business owners can create wealth for their families and their communities. I worked to convert an historic but abandoned hospital into a small business incubator, where entrepreneurs could benefit from small business assistance while they grew their businesses. I also raised capital for community development credit unions across the state so they would have more funds to lend to local small businesses at affordable interest rates.

As your state Senator, I will attempt to do the following to enhance our long-term economic prospects:

• Strengthen our public schools, community colleges, and universities.
• Improve our infrastructure and public transportation systems.
• Support small businesses, especially as they confront double-digit health care inflation.
• Make work pay by increasing the minimum wage and paying state employees fairly.