U.S. Representative Richard Pombo (R., 11th) launched his district-wide campaign this week for re-election to his eighth term in the House of Representatives.
The Tracy congressman will face challengers in the Republican primary on June 6. They are former congressman Pete McCloskey, who represented the San Francisco Peninsula area in the 1960s and 1970s and now lives in Lodi, and businessman Tom Benigno, who has run against Pombo in the past.
In one of his first stops in his district campaign during the current congressional recess in Washington, D.C., Pombo met with editors of the Danville Weekly and Pleasanton Weekly to talk about issues affecting this region.
He said his priorities if elected to another term will be to intensify his focus on transportation and energy issues and, as a member of the House Agriculture Committee, to seek more federal assistance to help California rebuild its levees, already being tested for their endurance during recent heavy rains.
“Working with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), as I will continue to do, we will be looking for more appropriations to resolve the desperate situation these levees are in,” Pombo said. “Most of these levees really have not had any substantial work done to them in 100 years.”
Pombo and Feinstein recently toured the regions where levees have broken or been damaged with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. They were able to provide $50 million in federal funds for repair work.
Pombo said the House Agriculture Committee also will begin writing the next five-year farm bill in the next session of Congress, a bill that will have major impacts on California agriculture.
On transportation, Pombo plans to continue his support of federal funding measures to add more carpool lanes to I-680 and build new ones on I-580. He also would seek to accelerate the feasibility study he sponsored for a new freeway between Patterson in I-5 and east San Jose. Dubbed the “Pombo Freeway” because of his initiatives to gain appropriations from the House Transportation Committee to get the project started, the new roadway would provide an alternative for commuters who now travel on the 580 and 680 freeways between jobs in the Silicon Valley and their homes in San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties.
“The 580 has gotten to the point where it is much like the 405 in Southern California–congested all the time,” Pombo said. “Traffic studies show that between 20 and 25 percent of the traffic on 580 and 680 is pass-through traffic coming form the Central Valley, so there would be roughly that much of a reduction with an alternative route like we are proposing.”
As chairman of the House Resources Committee, Pombo views rising oil prices and increased foreign dependence as major challenges for the federal government to spur faster development of renewable energy sources. Already, he said, federal aid and incentives have helped develop more efficient turbines to produce more electricity from the wind, solar panels that are twice as efficient as the ones in use today, and a greater focus on national conservation.
Still, he said, continued development of new domestic oil and natural gas production is essential until renewables can assume a major portion of the country’s energy demand.
“When you talk about Alaska, the estimate of additional supply is about 10.5 billion barrels of oil, or about 1-1/2 million barrels a day, which is equal to what we import from Saudi Arabia today,” he said. “That won’t solve our energy problem, but it is that development amongst other steps that we need to take in order to meet our short- and medium-term demands for energy.”
Pombo also said that he favors establishing a guest worker law for undocumented immigrants so that they have an opportunity to become part of the country’s legal workforce.
“We just can’t go out and evict the 15-20 million people who are already here and working,” Pombo said. “But you also can’t let this problem go on as part of an underground economy.”
Undocumented immigrants, primarily from Mexico, have been a problem for Pombo’s 11th District for decades, and were a concern of the Tracy City Council when he was a councilman there.
“While we recognize the problem in the Central Valley, there are others in Congress from states that don’t see this as a concern and just don’t want to give illegal immigrants a chance to legally work and live in the U.S.,” Pombo said. “As time goes on, though, this will become more of an issue.”
Pombo said he recognizes that some of his political positions on natural resources, greater domestic oil development and national parks don’t please his Democratic opponents, but he believes he is making the right decisions for the country as a whole.
The Sierra Club is one organization that is taking out full-page newspaper ads and writing its members to oppose Pombo’s plan to sell off or redesignate unused federal lands. Last year, the organization opposed his plan to make it easier for developers to build windmills on Bureau of Land Management acreage, even though Pombo said the Sierra Club once supported wind-energy projects.
“To a large degree, it was the environmental community that moved the windmill projects forward,” he added. “It’s gotten to a point where no matter what I propose, they’re opposed to it.”
He also blamed Democrats for a widely circulated document that names Pombo has one of “the 13 most corrupt members of Congress.” Prepared by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the group charged that Pombo paid his wife and brother $375,325 in campaign funds in the last four years. It also claims that he supported the wind-power industry before the Department of Interior without disclosing that his parents received hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from wind-power turbines on their ranch.
Pombo said his Republican opponent in the June primary, Pete McCloskey, is listed as a source of the CREW project along with other leading Democrats. He discounted the report, saying that every complaint the CREW project stated in its report was either unsubstantiated or were trips, expenditures and actions the House Administration Committee had approved.
“Up until a year ago, nobody ever questioned me on my ethics or on breaking any laws or rules of the House,” Pombo said. “Now all of a sudden, the Democrats are targeting me as one of the 13 most corrupt members of Congress. They are trying to tie me to whatever the scandal of the day is.”
The winner of the Republican primary in June will face the winner of the Democratic primary for the 11th District Congressional seat. The candidates are energy consultant Jerry McNerney of Pleasanton, and pilot Steve Filson and electrician Steve Thomas, both of Danville.
