To the Point host Alex Bell sat down with California’s governor candidates to hear directly from them about their priorities and what they’d bring to the job.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — This June, Californians will head to the polls to help decide who could become the state’s next governor. While the final decision comes in November — for now, nine leading Democratic hopefuls and several Republicans are in the race.

To help you get to know them and what they say they’d bring to the job — Alex Bell sat down with the candidates at this past weekend’s Democratic convention and will do the same with the Republican Party.

To keep things fair, names were drawn at random for these interviews. Interview responses have been cleaned up and slightly condensed for easier reading, while keeping the candidates’ words intact.


Katie Porter

Q: For people that are meeting you for the first time, why are you deciding to run for governor of California?

Katie Porter: “I’m running for governor of California to bring down costs for regular Californians. Affordability has become a big buzzword, but people don’t need politicians telling them that life is unaffordable — they know. I’m a single mom of 3 teenagers. I push the grocery cart. I pay the bills. I fill up my minivan with gas, so I know what it’s like to see your expenses go up and dollars not just stretched far enough.

Affordability has been my life’s work studying families pushed into bankruptcy by medical debt or job loss, running a statewide foreclosure prevention program for then Attorney General Kamala Harris. So we need big solutions on affordability. People aren’t leaving California because they’re $5 or $10 bucks short. They’re leaving California because they are hundreds and hundreds of dollars away from being able to take care of their family the way they want.”

Q: And if you were to be elected, what would be your top three priorities your first year in office?

Katie Porter: “So we can’t nibble around the edges on affordability. We have to look at what are family’s biggest expenses. So they are housing first and foremost, it takes up most of people’s budget. So building more housing, building housing much more quickly. We build 2 years slower in California than in Colorado. We can do better. We’re the most innovative state in the world, in the country, so we can innovate in how we build housing, different construction techniques, and different materials.

So housing, because it’s the biggest piece of people’s budget, has to be our next governor’s biggest priority. It’s also going to help young people stay in our state and to that end, my second priority is free childcare for every Californian. You can talk to any kind of economist from the far left to the far right, and they will all say that bringing down the cost of childcare is the biggest thing we could do to make our economy grow and accelerate.

So child care isn’t just something we do for kids or people with kids, we do it for everyone because we’re all better off with a strong economy. And then the third thing is we talk about affordability and I’ve taken on big corporations and greedy corporations with my whiteboard in Congress, but one of the things we can do for affordability is change government’s role in it. So to that end, I will eliminate state income tax for Californians making less than $100,000. That is a real affordability solution. We can deliver it right away.”

Q: California has spent billions trying to address homelessness. What would you do differently to address homelessness?

Katie Porter: “It’s really hard to solve a problem when the problem’s getting bigger, so we have to focus on preventing people from becoming homeless. That is really important. We’re not right now. We’re putting all of our money in helping those who have experienced long-term homelessness. Those people are important. They’re Californians, and we need to get them into permanent supportive housing.

But homelessness and the path to get there, there are other intervention points that are much less expensive and much more humane, so things like rapid rehousing, eviction prevention strategies, these work. They’re cheaper and they stop people from ever having to live on our streets. Interim housing is also an important solution.

Nobody should be on our streets in California, so bringing down housing costs, eliminating homelessness, that’s a big long-term task, but we could stop people from ever being on our streets if we simply decided to invest in the strategies that work.”

Q: Do you think that California has gone too far, not far enough, or has struck the right balance when it comes to criminal justice reform?

Katie Porter: “We’re definitely moving in the right direction on criminal justice reform, particularly in terms of looking back at what are the consequences of our three strike law. What was the consequences of the sort of get tough on crime wave of the 80s and 90s? We’re definitely trying to think about what we do with people who are now 70 and 80 years old, and they’ve been in our California prisons for 40 and 50 years. I think we’re making good progress on that, thinking about can we release people to hospice care so that they’re not spending their last days in prison.

In terms of retail theft, which has been a big issue in terms of street crime prevention is always going to be the first strategy because it’s not just about catching the person and punishing them and they commit a crime. We all think that should happen. It is about making sure that people feel confident that they can walk down the street safely. They can go to a playground with their kids and be safe. So I really want to think about, we’ve passed Prop 36, that’s focused on punishment. We need punishment, but we really need to dig in on prevention and making our streets feel safe.”

More interviews with the candidates for governor will be posted as they air on ABC10.

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