“Don’t You Think It’s Time For New Blood In Nebraska?” Senator Carol Blood Holds Town Hall In Omaha
Gubernatorial candidate and Senator Carol Blood held the seventh of her town hall meetings with the public at the Firefighters Union Hall in Omaha last Tuesday as part of her boots-on-the-ground campaign in the lead up to the November election. Handing out campaign pamphlets, mock-up newspapers made by her team, and organizational charts outlining the Nebraska government, she had a personal and open chat with her constituents.
Opened by her running mate, former Senator Al Davis [2013-2017], he spoke on how the two came to work together over a resolution to help Mead, NE after the AltEn ethanol plant caused environmental damage to the area. Davis had been trying to get any elected official to work with him, as Senator Bostelman at the time was too concerned with “talking about why sex education was bad for schools.” Bostelman made news earlier in the year with his vocal belief in the unsubstantiated rumors of litter boxes for furries, those who dress up as animals, in schools.
The town hall, which had a light and conversational atmosphere as Blood would stop and chat with the people during her speech and would refer to everyone as her “friends”, covered the four pillars of her campaign.
Blood’s primary focus is “Prosperity for All Nebraskans”. Her plan is to deal with the high property taxes in the state; adding more aid to local government; and dealing with Unfunded Mandates, i.e. requirements on the county that they can’t afford to uphold and that continually put strain on the area. She also reaffirmed her opinion that simply building yet another prison without dealing with the issues that cause criminal activity is not enough, and as Nebraska is currently the state with the most overcrowded prisons in the country, we should be putting work into helping with mental health and access to resources to keep people from feeling trapped and forced to commit crime in the first place. Blood also showed the current problems with the Nebraska Unicameral, stating on record that several senators had told her when trying to get one of her Circuit-Breaker Bills (a bill that gives automatic property tax relief if your income is disrupted) passed that “We can’t pass that bill, no one would know who gave them the tax breaks.”
She believes in focusing on a pk-14 plan to help kids get into two-four (2-4) year colleges or trade schools after high school, which would help catch students with red flags so they don’t fall through the cracks; fully funding all schools in the state, as there are many schools that lack basic funding, and the funding is unequal across districts due to property taxes and unfunded mandates; and passing Universal Childcare, which has just recently been implemented in Colorado, and all without raising taxes.
Blood wants to invest in Nebraska’s infrastructure, such as by bonding jobs; increasing access to broadband across the state; and investing more in AI technologies, blockchains (which are a system that makes it difficult for networks to be hacked, cheated, or changed by someone outside the network), and “robots and cobots” (a term used for robotics technology that works in partner with a human worker in an industrial job).
She also wants to do more to improve public safety and health by improving mental health facilities across the state; increasing state licensing for medical specialties; and easing the burden most specialists currently have in the state. She also pointed out that, in many areas, “first responders are aging out”, and with no replacements for firemen and first responders, many rural areas are becoming unsafe.
Blood’s campaign is feeling confident as it gets closer to election day, stating that they are “within striking distance of victory.” Her focus has been on canvasing and poling, and not on running negative ads on her opponent or overspending. But she did admit that the last few months had not been without their stresses:
“I’ve lost my glasses…[and] wedding ring on the campaign.”
She also aired her frustration with opponent Jim Pillen, who has refused to debate her for the entirety of the run-up to the election. Pillen has stated that his team feels that debating would be “too risky”, and has chosen to only appear at locations before or after Blood will speak. Blood stated that she felt confident that she could defeat Pillen in a debate if he would actually chose to do so, and displayed how disrespectful she felt it was that he had continued to not be willing to speak on the issues against her.
As she told the people who had come to the town hall, drawing excited cheers and clapping, “Don’t you think it’s time for New Blood in Nebraska?”
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