A high-stakes race is underway in California’s 1st Congressional District, which was formerly represented by the late Congressman Doug LaMalfa.
Chico Democrat and educator Audrey Denney is running in the special primary election to finish LaMalfa’s term, and in the regular primary to represent the newly drawn, Democratic friendly 1st District for a full term.
In an interview with NSPR’s Andre Byik, Denney laid out a platform that includes expanding forest management jobs, overhauling water policy and pushing for single-payer healthcare.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
This is a largely rural district with unique challenges. What do you see as some of the biggest issues facing the North State right now?
The thing that is making it harder and harder for people to survive is obviously the affordability crisis that we're in, as well as increasing healthcare costs and decreasing access, and wildfire insurance. But for me, all of these things come back to one central problem, which is that for too long, our government has worked for corporations and the wealthiest among us, and not regular working-class people, seniors and retired folks.
When our representatives focus on the needs of these powerful corporations and billionaires, they make policies that shape and lead to the benefit of those special interests. For me, the very first thing that we have to do to be able to actually make healthcare affordable for all Americans, to make housing affordable for millennials and Gen Z to be able to buy homes, is to tackle this corruption in our system by getting money out of politics.
That is kind of the overarching theme of everything that I talk about – is creating an economy that works for everyone, making sure that we can all have access to healthcare and housing by really tackling this corruption and money in politics.
That brings us to economic opportunity, which as you mentioned, can be limited in rural areas like this 1st District. How would you address economic opportunity in this district?
In our part of the world, in the new California's 1st District, the post-Prop 50 map, there's 41.7% federal land. For me, this is really the biggest opportunity to not only create economic opportunity for rural residents, but also to help keep our communities safe from wildfire and to restore our natural ecosystems. All of these kind of come together in our federal forest land. For me, I think it's really important to recognize that not everyone wants to go to college, needs to go to college.
What we need desperately is folks who can get to work in our forests, to do the forest management work, the ecological and watershed restoration work that needs to happen, and they can get one-year certificate degrees through programs — like at Yuba College, where they have a certificate in forest management and soil health that you can get in a year. And if we can get the workforce trained to do that work, whilst coupling that with a Forest Service budget that will allow it to work with RCDs [Resource Conservation Districts], fire safe councils, and our tribes, and then hire local contractors to actually get to do that work, we can really create a regenerative economy that's keeping us safe, keeping local, rural folks employed, and also restoring our ecosystems in our watershed so we can have and use the water and the natural resources that we need.
You're raising an important issue in this district, which is wildfire risk, wildfire safety. It seems some of these issues, like economic opportunity, are interconnected. What specific federal actions would you take to support wildfire mitigation, wildfire risk in the North State?
When I sat down with some folks who work at the Butte County Resource Conservation District, they said the number one thing we need from our federal representatives is to make it easier for the Forest Service to work with outside contractors like us to actually get this work done.
Our local RCD in Butte County is sitting on $31 million of PG&E settlement money that they have set aside to do this important work. They're working on a 20,000-acre landscape restoration project in the Plumas and the Lassen national forests, both on land that has already been burned but also on land that has not burned yet.
Getting into the forest to do that work is really the key thing that we need to do. It also has a climate change element in it too, that I want to tie in here really quickly because we know that what's leading to these megafires are three things. They're climate-driven because our fire seasons are getting longer and hotter. They're due to 100-plus years of forest mismanagement with taking fire off the land. And then they're driven by PG&E energy failures, and PG&E's failures to protect us from their aging infrastructure.
Bringing all of those things together in a succinct way, we have to make it easier for the Forest Service to partner with these agencies. We have to make sure the Forest Service has the budget, which is why I want to sit on the ag and the natural resources committees when I get to Congress, because those have key levers at play here. Then we can actually turn our forests into something that, instead of releasing a bunch of carbon dioxide when they burn, they can actually be sequestering carbon into the soil, which is helping us turn back the dial on climate change.
Lastly, just to address the PG&E thing, what makes it harder to hold PG&E accountable is when you take political donations from PG&E. I've never taken a dime of corporate PAC money. I never will. One of my opponents has taken money from not only corporate PAC money, but from PG&E. And so I think that the people who are going to hold PG&E accountable are sure not the ones that are taking money from them to get elected.
You raised pursuing positions on key committees in Congress if elected. In my mind, this conversation is sort of adjacent to water issues, it's a constant concern in this district across the North State. How would you balance local agricultural needs with groundwater sustainability and statewide demands?
California's water rights are famously so complex. We have Pueblo water rights that date back to before California was a state. We have 1914, pre- and post-water rights. We have SGMA, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, all making this wildly complex. Then we have the federal agencies and the state agencies and where they're interacting and what those power levers actually are. From a kind of overarching picture, California's constitution and law says that water is a public trust, which means that it should be used for the benefit of all, and so balancing our critical agriculture needs with the needs of people in our part of the world and our communities, is really, really important. Because even right here in Butte and Glenn County, there are folks that are on their own private wells, their residential wells. And their wells are running dry because of groundwater management issues right here in Northern California.
We need to make sure that we're working with our local GSAs, our groundwater sustainability agencies to promote policies that are recharging groundwater, but also working with external partners, like River Partners, who are also doing some of this ecological restoration work that is so important to recharge their groundwater. And from a statewide level really quick — I'll wrap this up. I could talk about water all day — but Southern California would not exist in its current form without water from Northern California.
The very best thing a member of Congress can do when they have almost 42% of their district being federal lands is restore that land to ecological health, so the snowpack can actually recharge the groundwater and get into the California water system. That is the biggest lever that I can press as a member of Congress, and that is why I really want to sit on both of those committees that I mentioned, ag and natural resources.
Moving to healthcare in the North State, access can be limited. We've seen a hospital closure in Glenn County. How would you address healthcare access in this district if elected?
Every single person who lives in our part of the world has a story about healthcare access. Mine is the first time I ran in 2018. I got diagnosed with a football-sized ovarian tumor, and there was not a gynecological oncologist in all of California's 1st District at the time. I actually had to go out of state to Oregon for my life-saving care to get that tumor taken out of me. We’ve all seen it.
Even right here in Chico, I have an 89-year-old friend who last week was like, ‘Oh, I had a cardiac event.’ I was like, Oh, my God, are you okay?’ And she's like, ‘Yeah, but I can't get in to see the cardiologist for six months.’ That's here in Chico. Even in our more quote, unquote urban parts of the district, we're experiencing the ripple effects of things like Glenn Medical Center closing.
Glenn Medical Center lost its critical access designation because it was half a mile too close to the Colusa hospital, and overnight, we lost not only 150 jobs at that hospital, but we lost care for an entire county. And now those folks not only have to travel farther for care, but people can actually die waiting for care because Glenn County only has two ambulances. Not only does it have a cascading effect, it makes it harder for people who live in Chico, but those folks just don't have care.
The only way to fix the rural health care crisis is to get a single-payer, nonprofit health care system. Because as long as profit is the central driver for the healthcare system, we're never going to be able to make enough money in rural California to pay for the services that we need. As long as 15-18% of every dollar people spend on health care goes to line insurers' pockets, we're not going to have a healthcare system that works. That is the system-change level that we need. And we have to elect leaders with the political courage to make that happen. That won't happen if they take donations from Anthem Blue Cross and Big Pharma.
If elected, how will you make sure that communities throughout the current 1st District and the new 1st District are heard in Washington?
I believe that the people with the best solutions, the best policy solutions, are the people that are closest to the lived experience of that issue. That's something that I learned in my work with food banking. You want to know who the people who know how to solve food insecurity are? It's the people experiencing food insecurity. They know why the system's not working. They know that they can't get to a food pantry in the middle of the day because they're working. They know how to fix the problem. They know that their paycheck isn't stretching long enough because costs are increasing. So my vision is – as an educator and an organizational strategist – like I know my job is not to be the subject matter expert on every single issue, but my job is to lift up the voices and the lived experience of the people in our communities.
For every single one of these issues, from wildfire insurance to rural healthcare to housing, I'm going to have a task force of local residents from all of the counties that I represent, because I believe, at the end of the day, to actually get the kind of change that we need to center people and real people, working class, retired people in our political and economic systems. If that's where we want to go, we need to elect leaders who will lift up those voices and who will make the table bigger.
We shouldn't be fighting for seats at the table. We should be making the table bigger. We should be making the table more representative of the communities it serves. That is the kind of leader that I hope to be for our part of the world.
