Republican Assemblyman James Gallagher is one of the major candidates in the June primaries for California’s 1st Congressional District.
It’s a race shaped by both loss and political change. Gallagher is running to finish the term of the late Congressman Doug LaMalfa. He’s also seeking a full term in a newly redrawn 1st District that’s expected to now be more competitive for Democrats.
In an interview with NSPR’s Claudia Brancart, Gallagher emphasized his legislative record representing the area at the state level and said he wants to work across party lines in Washington.
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?
Number one cost of living. It's gotten way too costly to live in California, and you start with our gas and energy prices that have just gone through the roof. And they are largely a function of policy here in California that I want to change, and then I want to, at the federal level, try to get reforms so that we can lower those costs.
Then I'd say, waste, fraud and abuse. Huge issue right now. We're seeing vital dollars that we need for healthcare, for programs that are being wasted, either on boondoggle projects like the high-speed rail, or on fraudulent actors like a doctor down in Southern California who billed Medi-Cal $270 million fraudulently. Those are big issues.
And wildfire. We really need to, in earnest, continue the work of Doug LaMalfa to make sure we reduce dangerous fuels on our public lands that cause catastrophic fires. I've been a champion of that in the state Legislature and would continue to do that on the federal level.
Mentioning wildfire, we know risk and safety, these are such big issues in this district, what specific federal actions would you potentially be interested in taking to address this big issue that we have here?
I come to this with a record. When I came into the Legislature, we were not spending money on wildfire reduction. I helped quadruple the funding in 2021. We got about a billion dollars of funding for fuel reduction. Unfortunately, the governor has cut that funding every year since. I've continued to champion getting as much as we can into it. I've also said we need to reform the environmental regulations and laws that prevent us from doing prescribed burns and thinning, getting good fire back out onto the landscape. We've seen some of those projects that help save Cohasset, for example, here locally, and fuel reduction projects. I want to get more money into those programs.
Also, remove the red tape. I actually had a bill in the Legislature last year that was focused on vulnerable communities. For vulnerable communities, we should have a CEQA [California Environmental Quality Act] exemption. It was sort of modeled after an executive order that had been done by the governor. I wanted to codify it, make sure that it would be clear law that all of our communities could take advantage of. That bill died in Mike McGuire's Senate. He was the Senate leader and in his Appropriations Committee, where he has total control, the bill died. Didn't get to move forward. We need to stop that. We need real reforms. And so at the federal level, that's something I'm going to be doing.
We also need the firefighting force at the Forest Service to be focused on getting on these fires quickly, not letting them burn, but getting on them quick and stopping them in their tracks. So that's another focus that's being made. I'm going to stay very close to that. We have a new chief of the Forest Service who I think is doing a lot of good things getting the new focus there. And it's something that's really been needed for a while. We need to make sure our frontline people are protected. I'm certainly going to be very focused on that, because those are the people that help do the fuels management and the planning and all those things that help make those projects happen.
And then working with our partners like the fire safe councils, Butte Fire Safe Council has been a great partner, RCDs [Resource Conservation Districts] and others who really want to get on top of this and increase the pace and scale of management activities.
Another big issue here is water, a constant concern in the North State. How would you balance agricultural needs with groundwater sustainability and statewide demands?
The answer to that is water storage. If we store more water, we'll have more for farms and cities, higher-quality drinking water, and we'll also be better able to recharge our groundwater aquifers. I've been a big proponent of Sites Reservoir, that project is closer than ever.
There's been a lot of bureaucratic hurdles that have been put in its way. I think we could raise the Shasta Dam. I think there's some renewed discussion of Shasta. You know, just by doing a minimal raise at Shasta, we could get about a million acre-feet of water.
In order to get water into groundwater aquifers, you first have to capture it, and then you can send it to water banks and do like kind of flood flows that get that water back down in the aquifer. So you've got to capture it first, and so that's the key first part.
We do need to be responsible with our groundwater. We've seen far too many times where we've had overdrafting, and that's affected our rural wells. So it's a team effort, but I think it starts with making sure that we have new investments in water storage.
Healthcare access. It can be limited in rural areas like this district. The sudden closure of Glenn Medical Center for instance, in Glenn County, that kind of took people by surprise. How would you address healthcare access in this region?
This is another area where I have a record. Back in 2015-2016, I helped save Colusa Medical Center and Glenn Medical Center. I helped keep them open. They were about to close then, and then working with the private sector and the agencies and Congressman Doug LaMalfa, we made sure that those hospitals could stay open. I'm going to continue to do that. Make sure that our federally qualified health clinics have funding. Indian health, you know, that we equalize funding so that rural areas get their fair share of those dollars.
A lot has been made about the Big Beautiful Bill, and it did have cuts to Medi-Cal. I would seek to restore those. I think we do need to restore the Medi-Cal funding, but not for illegal immigrants. We can't afford that. In California, that's a $9 billion cost that has bankrupted the Medi-Cal system. We need that money, and we can't allow fraud to take place. We need to get to the bottom of that, not ignore it, not sweep it under the rug, like my opponents have been, quite frankly. We need to go after those fraudsters, so that we have those vital dollars.
Then our rural healthcare hospitals. We need to relieve some of the mandates that are on them. I mean, they are under some of the highest costs in the nation. They have to meet seismic requirements even when they're not in an earthquake zone. Our hospitals in our area have a greater threat from flood and fire than they do from earthquake, and yet they're having to spend millions of dollars meeting these seismic requirements. It's crazy. We need to make sure that we're doing reasonable things to cut their costs and make sure that we're getting that funding.
Doug LaMalfa in HR1 in the Big Beautiful Bill, helped make sure there was $50 billion set aside for rural healthcare. Now that's nationwide. We need to make sure we fight to get our share of those vital dollars. But that was work that he did. He worked with Adam Schiff to make sure that Glenn [Medical Center] got its critical access designation back. I'm going to continue that legacy, working across the aisle, finding ways to get things done, and I have that record, and I believe I'm the person best suited to really address those issues.
We're talking about hospitals now, and when a hospital closes, it's not just a healthcare crisis. I mean, jobs are also lost. And economic opportunity is something that I think can be a big struggle here. How would you address economic opportunity and trying to create more work for people in this district?
There's been a lot of good work done, I would say, over the last 10 years. When I was in the Legislature, we sort of refocused the career and technical education money, vocational ed money that we talked about and got into programs that are really working. For example, we have some really great nursing programs. To your point about healthcare professionals. Chico State is one of them where we're getting people trained to go into the medical field.
The logging industry. Shasta College – junior colleges – has a program that's designed to help get people into that industry. We have programs that are helping get people out into the forest, because we know we're going to have a lot of fuels management and forestry management work that needs to be done. We really need to continue to grow those programs that I think have been successful, and then we need to look for new opportunities with the technology that we have. I mean, clean energy, and it doesn't get talked about a lot. People talk a lot about solar and wind, but nuclear is actually, there's a new technology where these can be brought to bear and could provide a lot of power at an affordable cost. And it's zero emission. We should be talking about this stuff and we could start training people to go into this field.
We need to totally rethink energy. Right now, we've been bringing energy across transmission lines that go thousands of miles. And another downside is those transmission lines spark and cause fires. Why are we doing that? When we could maybe have our power generated locally, and then get right onto the grids where we need it.
I think there's a lot we can do on that front that would make power more affordable, and we could also train workers into this new energy. Working with partners in education. Our community colleges have been great partners, federal and state money to grow those programs.
How will you make sure that North State residents in communities throughout the current 1st District — but also the new 1st District that will be coming pretty soon here — are heard in Washington?
I have always had Republicans, Democrats and Independents who vote for me. It's a great honor when people come and say, hey, I don't care about party, I just I like what you're doing, and you're advocating for us, and you're fighting for the issues we care about, whether it was wildfire recovery or holding PG&E accountable or working on water issues that are so vital to our area.
It's not about party. And that was really the problem with Prop 50, right? Is Prop 50 made it all about politics, about fighting Trump, and then making sure we get as many Democratic seats as possible. Well, in that fight, it's a fight that just ends in destruction. Now we have all these other states that are drawing lines just based on party and who's getting lost in that? The people.
The pitch I'm making to voters, whether they live here in Butte County or they live in Sonoma County, is, hey, you need a representative who's looking out for you and who doesn't care about that, but actually cares about representing you. That's what Doug LaMalfa did, by the way. Every time he would make sure he was there at the State of the Union to talk to the president, whether he was a Republican or a Democrat, about this district. I want to do the same thing, and I'll work with anybody here. Recently, we worked with Congressman Mike Thompson. He is a Democrat from that area, to get some vital money for peach growers who just lost their contract when Del Monte went bankrupt. Doug did that with Adam Schiff with Glenn Medical Center.
We can work together in a bipartisan way and get things done for people. And I think when people see that record, I think they're going to vote for me and they're going to vote for representation over party. This is a definitely new time, a difficult time in our politics, but now more than ever I think we need real strong leadership for our rural North State communities. And I think I'm the person that can do that, and I'd be honored to be their representative in Washington, D.C.
