The two candidates seeking to represent parts of Fresno, Madera and Merced counties in the California State Assembly didn’t have much to agree on at an Oct. 18 election forum.
During the downtown Fresno forum, incumbent Esmeralda Soria and challenger Joanna Garcia Rose gave their perspectives on a wide range of subjects including housing, rising energy costs, hospital closures, health access and the nursing shortage in the San Joaquin Valley.
Soria said she has a proven track record, referring to several bills she either sponsored or supported in the state legislature in the last two years, and emphasized her ability to secure state funds for the 27th Assembly District’s needs.
Rose spent much of Friday evening emphasizing how California’s legislature is run by a supermajority of Democrats responsible for pushing businesses out of the state and ruining California with new laws and regulation.
On housing, Soria said rising costs are impacting everyone, including those in small rural communities like Livingston and Mendota. She said she secured and protected $100 million in the state budget allocated to build housing for students at Merced College and UC Merced, alongside state Sen. Anna Caballero.
“My goal is to continue to bring additional resources,” Soria said, “not just to build more affordable housing, and also market-rate housing because I'm a strong supporter of first-time homeownership.”
On housing and its lack of affordability, Rose spoke to what she sees as a broader key issue: California Democrats driving businesses out of the state and doing nothing to change that. She said inflation is increasing costs for developers and businesses.
Rose also said the way to tackle housing affordability is to make all things affordable in general.
“If you make housing affordable, you do that by making everything affordable,” Rose said. “If jobs are going up, if businesses are prospering, if energy is affordable and not raising four times a year with no advocacy by the legislature to stop that, we're going to continue to see these problems.”
The two candidates butted heads on several subjects, including the factors behind the region’s nursing shortage. In July, Soria proposed AB 2104, which would’ve allowed community colleges to issue bachelor’s degrees in nursing — an alternative to getting the same certification at a four-year university.
Although the bill was approved by California’s legislature, it was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. It also drew opposition from universities in California, including Fresno State President Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval.
Soria said she was disappointed in the outcome and opposition to her bill when students in rural communities need programs and education to be more accessible, especially with an expected shortage of 10,000 nurses by 2030.
“I will tell you what is happening is that our students in the rural communities are opting to go to private universities, which are very costly,” Soria said. “They graduate with $70,000 in debt, and many of them not being able to afford to stay in the valley so they go to a bigger city where they're paying more.”
Rose said the regional nursing shortage is not because of a lack of educational opportunities or access to them, but because there isn’t much incentive to stay in the San Joaquin Valley after completing education.
“Wages here are terrible. Things are expensive. There's not a lot of opportunity,” Rose said. “So we really need to focus on building up the community and incentivizing people to want to be here in the Central Valley, rather than flee to some other bigger city with a bigger paycheck.”
Rose added that rural communities do not have “new housing opportunities” because developers are leaving California.
The candidates also weighed in on the growing issue of labor and delivery services going away at hospitals across the state. Soria said that hospitals do not get reimbursed the full cost of services provided in labor and delivery rooms by insurance companies.
“We need to revisit how we're doing reimbursements, so that hospitals have an incentive to continue to provide these services,” Soria said. “Again, a hospital has to at least break even in order to be able to keep its doors open.”
Soria also referenced co-sponsoring the bill behind California’s Distressed Hospital Loan Program, which extended $150 million in loans to struggling nonprofit or public hospitals.
Madera Community Hospital, which shut its doors in December 2022 and filed for bankruptcy in March 2023, was approved for at least $57 million in April from the state loan program.
Rose said she gave birth to her son at Madera Community Hospital, and also went there for cancer surgery. She said the state government fell short and should have kept the hospital from closing in the first place.
“The state should have intervened before it ever even closed,” Rose said. “That's why we have to have balance back in California. We need legislative balance where people can't just one-sided pass everything they want to pass and look over the Central Valley and the rural communities.”
Rose went on to say that there has been no change in leadership at Madera Community Hospital, but it does have new owners and leadership after lengthy bankruptcy proceedings in the spring.
Soria previously told Fresnoland that the hospital is set to reopen under new management by either the end of the year or early next year.
But to keep hospitals open, Rose said Medi-Cal reimbursement rates need to be higher, especially for hospitals with a majority of patients on Medi-Cal.
“There's a lack of efficiency in the state medical agencies and the federal agencies, and we need to clean that up,” Rose said. “We need to make sure that people are not slipping through the cracks.”
On rising energy costs, both candidates said the California Public Utilities Commission should not have approved rate hikes this year for energy providers across the state.
“They have complete control, and yet here they are leaving us for the last two years, the last 20 years, with crippling utility bills, and it's very frustrating as someone who has had high utility bills,” Rose said.
Soria said rising energy costs are hurting families and small businesses. She also pointed to how the Westlands Water District, which serves western Fresno and King counties, was authorized to convert some farmland to solar farms due to AB 2661, which Soria authored.
“We're exploring options like community solar to, again, lower people's energy costs, not just for the homes, but also for the small businesses that reside in these small communities,” Soria said.
Another issue that Soria and Rose saw eye to eye on was Proposition 36. If voters approve the state measure on the ballot, it would reclassify some misdemeanor theft and drug crimes as felonies.
The measure would also create a new category of crime called “treatment-mandated felonies.” Proposition 36 is an attempt to undo changes from Proposition 47, a state measure from a decade ago that sought to reduce overcrowding in prisons by downgrading some theft and drug crimes to misdemeanors.
“There were things in Prop 47 that we've learned from that could be modified and be changed so that our law enforcement officials have the resources and the tools necessary to essentially hold people accountable,” Soria said.
“I'm very excited about Prop 36 being a good first step as someone who's worked at California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, who's toured fire camps, who's seen the positives of rehabilitation, but also seen the burdens that we face by not having people be held accountable,” Rose said.
They both also said prevention is incredibly important. To Soria, that means investing in public education and communities. To Rose, that means having the opportunity of a well-paying job to avoid poverty, which she said could lead to a life of crime.
The election forum was sponsored by Fresnoland in collaboration with Valley Public Radio, the Merced Focus, the League of Women Voters, the Maddy Institute at Fresno State and CMAC. A recording of the forum is available here.
This article first appeared on Fresnoland and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.