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Faith/Constitution | Life | The Second Amendment | Marriage | Taxes | Immigration | Free Enterprise/Capitalism | Water
Each of these issues may not be important to you or be of any consequence to the administration of El Paso County, but they are asked of me and I offer them in complete openness and in the spirit of helping you get to know me. If there is an issue of importance to you which I have not covered here, I invite you to contact me and we will discuss it. –Amy Lathen I believe in the freedom upon which this country was founded. I believe that the men who formed our country were led by God. I am a Christian and so my beliefs are also led by God and by Jesus Christ. That is who I am. I say it because you deserve to know who you are electing and you deserve to understand that the principles which guide me are based upon the Constitution of this country and the God-given freedom protected by it. I am unwaveringly committed to fight for freedom from oppression by any government. We were all created to live freely and to have no limits to our ability to create, to innovate, to dream, to prosper. This is America !! It is no longer an experiment! It works! We can be anything we want to be and achieve only to the limits of our own minds. It is this human ability that makes us all so special and makes this country so sacred to the human spirit. I believe that life begins at conception and that any artificial means of ending that life is unacceptable and should not be a legal option in our society. I believe in protecting human life from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death. The practice of partial birth abortion is unacceptable in any way at any time - period. There is no realistic circumstance at which time partial birth abortion would be appropriate and I question the motive of any politician who would support this barbaric practice. The culture of life in this or any other country is not just about the abortion debate or even about any religious ideology, but it is about preserving the very foundation of mankind and human existence. Our culture depends upon respecting human life in a way that recognizes our uniqueness and sanctity above all other life on earth. I am a gun owner and I remember learning to shoot when I was just 10 years old. I enjoy teaching my own children how to handle and respect firearms in a number of ways. I am overwhelmingly thankful to our founding fathers for understanding the indescribable importance of protecting our rights to keep and bear arms and I will forever fight to preserve and protect those rights from infringement from any government or entity. The second amendment is not about hunting. It is about every law abiding citizen's right to protect themselves with arms without having to have special permission from the government (that permission has already been granted in our constitution). I also love hunting and recreational and competitive shooting and support those activities to their fullest extent. I support the resale of confiscated firearms by law enforcement. Destroying firearms which have been seized in the prosecution of justice is utterly fruitless and I believe that allowing the city and county to benefit from the resale of these firearms is not only logical, but as a fiscal conservative, it represents the most responsible choice. I do not support gun control measures for law-abiding citizens and I further support concealed carry and legislation which protects citizens' rights to protect themselves. I believe that marriage is an institution between one man and one woman - period. Marriage between one man and one woman fosters the most healthy environment for children and creates a more stable culture. The traditional family, including a mother and father, is a foundational building block in our American society. Further, I believe that the benefits of marriage have been proven in a variety of ways, from health benefits and lower stress to emotionally stronger children and more stable financial health. I do not support civil unions, nor do I recognize same-sex couples as equal to couples comprised of one man and one woman. Without the stability of the definition of marriage as that of between one man and one woman, marriage will be diluted to meaningless insignificance in our society. This would be disastrous to the family and to the social structure of this nation. http://nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200602030805.asp http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS04C02 http://www.heritage.org/Research/Family/bg1732.cfm Ronald Reagan said it best when he said that the closest thing to immortality is a federal government program. As an elected official, I recognize that every dollar spent is a dollar coming out of your wallet and mine, and that will guide my decision making process. There is a constitutional provision for taxes and our society could not be run without them. Our public safety, nationally and locally, depends upon our tax revenue. Our public infrastructure depends upon our tax revenue. Certain public welfare (I mean welfare in a hands-up and public safety way, not in way of life) depends upon our tax revenue. At what point do we realize that government has focused its ravenous fiscal appetite on our hard working backs and we say "enough"? Here in El Paso County , the most populous county in the state of Colorado , we are taxed at one of the very lowest rates in the state. I want to keep it that way! I also believe that it is fair to allow the people to decide what they want to “buy” with their hard-earned money. This is one of the benefits of TABOR, representing a responsible method of controlling government growth and spending and allowing the people to decide, not the politicians. Therefore, I will never vote to raise your taxes or support a tax increase. I begin every decision making process from the perspective of “prove it”. This means that I approach spending requests with a huge amount of skepticism and must be shown that existing revenue and fiscal management is streamlined and efficient and that wasteful spending has been rooted out first. Without out of control spending, politicians would not be rummaging around in your wallet for more taxes. Not unlike the way we handle our own budgets at home, if we cut the wasteful spending, we reduce the burden for more revenue. If people desire more services, I believe in letting them decide whether or not they want to pay for those services. I would never presume to make the choice for all the people of the district to increase their taxes – even if I could. That is what TABOR is designed to do – let the people decide. The people are the government, not the politicians. There is nothing which will even begin to solve our illegal immigration problem until the faucet of illegals pouring into this country at our borders is turned off. These porous borders make us exceedingly vulnerable to terrorism and weaken our economy through dramatically higher education, healthcare, infrastructure, administrative and law enforcement costs. Unless one enters this country legally, abiding by the immigration laws currently established by our judicial system, they are illegal and should be treated as such. People who are here in this country illegally have broken our laws and have no right to be here, let alone demand or receive services paid for by legal working Americans. I do not support amnesty programs of any kind. I do not believe that taxpayer dollars should be spent on illegals at any time, for any reason with the exception of legitimate emergency services and I intend to work tirelessly with El Paso County law enforcement and the Department of Human Services to ensure that our El Paso County dollars be spent only on legal American citizens and workers. To do any less is acceptance of illegal behavior, not to mention completely irresponsible to the taxpaying citizens of this county. I would support tougher penalties for businesses which knowingly hire illegals and intend to do whatever I can to make sure that current laws are being enforced. No government or elected official can actually create new jobs in the private sector. The only job creation that can come from government is more government jobs paid for with your own tax dollars. What government CAN do is create an environment of low regulation and limited intrusion so as to foster a thriving free market of innovation, prosperity and job creation. I believe in this principle of keeping the government reigned in and promoting the ingenuity and thriving free market of the American people. I also understand the necessary roles of government and believe in preserving them as well. How do I define those necessary roles? I define them as our founding fathers already did for us in the in the preamble of our Constitution: …to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Prosperity… Every one of us has an American dream! Those dreams can be accomplished with hard work, a “can-do”, all-American spirit and a whole bunch of freedom!! As your elected servant, I intend to do everything I can to offer just such an environment for your prosperity. Water is the life blood of El Paso County . As a community we need to recognize the importance of protecting this resource for future generations while still meeting the needs of our community today. The 2,158 square miles of El Paso County represent a multitude of complicated water districts, each with their own special characteristics, shortfalls and benefits. Working within this diversity in order to plan long-term, intelligent population growth takes study, foresight and leadership in order to insure water availability for housing growth, agriculture and infrastructure far into the future. I am concerned about the ability of some of the smaller water districts to be able to provide for the needs of their constituents due in part to their increased per capita costs for storage and infrastructure. In some cases they do not have the financial resources for geological studies which are necessary for planning and infrastructure and we need to work with them to find solutions. The water issues facing El Paso County are extremely complicated and cannot even begin to be addressed fully in this brief statement. I would summarize by saying that the significant priority of smart growth planning and development in this county is largely driven by management of this most precious resource. We get no second chances to get this right and I believe that we all must work together, the city, the county and special districts; to insure the availability of water now and for generations to come. |
