By Larry Liang

On August 31st, 2014

PLAY (www.weidb.com/playclub) club had the wonderful opportunity of interviewing Dublin Mayor, TimSbranti. He is a democrat currently running for State Assemblyman for California district 16 against Catherine Baker. Tim comes from an education background, having been a teacher at Dublin High School, and then later on becoming elected to be Chair of the Political Involvement Committee of the California Teachers Association.  He was elected as Mayor of Dublin in 2008 and then reelected in 2010.We asked him several questions on what he thought about the critical issues in California today, including education, the drought, infrastructure, renewable energy, and how we should prioritize problems when funding is limited.

First on education, he supports several important actions that would be beneficial to reforming the higher education system. Specifically on SCA-5 he agrees that although access to higher education is currently skewed, just basing it on demographics is not the right answer. It is because while the number of students applying to the California UC system has increased, the school capacity has not in the slightest. Mayor Sbranti believes that we must put more money towards expanding the capacity of schooling available. He also thinks that we need to revamp our K-12 education, and he thinks that the newly implemented Common Core Standards are the way to go, because they encourage the necessary critical thinking skills that modern day jobs require. They also move away from just teaching to the test, and instead, focus on developing problem solving skills.

Next, we talked about strategies to solve the drought. He doesn’t think that just rerouting water towards other parts of the state would work. He thinks that it should be a community effort to try and conserve water, and that as a state assembly member, he would try to pass measures that would help improve California’s water infrastructure. Right now, the pipes are something like 75 to 80 years old, and that sort of age means that they are constantly leaking water. That means that more than 20 percent of water goes to waste every time they pass through the pipes.

Now, going onto infrastructure in general, he thinks that we need to improve infrastructure in and around the bay area. The fact is that infrastructure has generally been neglected and pretty much the same since the highways were first built.

The final thing that we talked about was how Mayor Sbrantiwould prioritize his funding a  a state assembly man, and he said that he would always want education to be first at the state level. When he was a mayor during the economic crisis of 2007-2008, he made sure to protect public safety, but now, at the state level, he believes that reforming the education system must come first to make the pipeline into jobs better. He thinks that community colleges feeding into local specialties are a must, and a great opportunity for people who are unable to attend traditional four year colleges.