Not to be outdone by their peers in the 18th Legislative District of Washington, two individuals have declared their candidacies for a seat in the state House of Representatives.
Incumbent Vicki Kraft, a Republican, and challenger James Tolson, a Democrat, have both announced their decisions to run for the position one seat in the 17th District.
A press release last week announced Kraft’s decision to seek re-election. The release highlighted that Kraft has “stayed true” to her campaign promises, since being elected in 2016, with a focus on key issues such as improving fiscal responsibility and accountability, transportation and public safety and student education, and reducing taxes and regulations.
Kraft had a bill she primarily sponsored signed into law during the 2017 session. The legislation, House Bill 2138, provided a sales tax credit on adaptive houses for disabled veterans.
“I’m honored to have the opportunity to support our veterans with this legislation,” Kraft stated in the release. “After all they’ve done to serve us and protect our freedoms, we need to make sure we’re doing our part to serve them.”
Kraft’s professional background includes account executive work for several companies as well as her own business, providing grant writing services and working with nonprofit organizations, the release stated. A focus on small business owners, nonprofits and community leaders outside of her duties in Olympia were also highlighted.
“I believe it’s vital to the wellbeing of our community to listen and understand the real challenges and issues our citizens are facing. That makes me better equipped to work toward positive results for them in Olympia,” Kraft stated.
While Kraft made the announcement last week, Tolson said he has been campaigning and fundraising for about seven weeks. As of a Dec. 1 interview, he said the campaign had broken a milestone of 100 individual contributions, something that pointed to his desire to meet and discuss the issues with a wide variety of constituents.
Tolson, a veteran of both the U.S. Army and Marines, moved to Vancouver in 2014 to be closer to his son, James Jr. Originally from the Washington D.C. metro, Tolson is co-founder and board president of Concerned Humans Against Poverty (CHAP), an advocacy group.
Although the nonprofit started late last year, Tolson said that the idea of CHAP as a movement was much greater. He said that changing the narrative on how poverty and homelessness is discussed is a major point of that movement, explaining how misconceptions and ignorant assumptions can lead to the dismissal of the needs of those suffering what were often symptoms of other problems, personal and societal, that needed to be dealt with.
“We’ve become desensitized to the plight of others,” Tolson said. The perception that the homeless were such due to laziness or some personal failing such as drug addiction ran counter to CHAP’s mission to look at what causes poverty.
After living in the area, he said he saw an “immediate need” for relief from poverty and homelessness, a solution he wanted to be a part of. He mentioned a point in time count of the homeless population in the area going up 18 percent in the space of a year as evidence of the problem.
“And it’s not just the same people, either,” Tolson added. “It’s families, our elderly. The face of homelessness is rapidly changing. We have more mothers, more children.”
His passion for combating poverty does not mean he’s a single-issue candidate, Tolson said. A major issue he’s weighed on is tax breaks to big businesses, mentioning the $8.7 billion break for Boeing in 2013 while the aerospace company went around and cut thousands of jobs.
“Do you know what a tenth of that $8.7 billion could do for non-franchise small business owners?” Tolson asked. He dismissed trickle-down economics except when it came to putting money in the pockets of owners on the small scale, not multinational corporations.
“If the middle class spends about 120 percent of what they make back into the economy, let’s help them out,” Tolson said. “We have a system. Let’s get the system working for the people.”
Tolson also looked to repeal a decades-old prohibition on rent control. He said he isn’t in favor of a statewide rent control law; rather, he wants cities and counties to be able to decide whether or not such a scheme would work for them.
Though running on what might be considered a progressive platform, Tolson is no stranger to the more conservative parts of the district, which currently only have Republican legislators in office. He has hosted coffee and conversation meetings in the more northern Salmon Creek reaches of his district in order to tap into the more Republican-leaning parts of the constituency.
Partisanism was something Tolson wanted to get as far away from as possible, stressing that a lot of the issues he would focus on affected everyone regardless of party lines. He touched on the last legislative session and the failure to fully fund education as per the McCleary decision, likening it to hiring plumbers who attempt a fix a leak by undertaking vastly different approaches at opposite ends of the pipe.
“They continue to do these things until they meet in the middle and they see each other’s handiwork and say, ‘You’re completely wrong,’” Tolson explained. “Imagine as a homeowner you come back to the house, you’ve seen what they’ve done and each of them hand you a bill.”
“Are you going to pay the invoice?” Tolson asked, likening the Legislature’s inability to work together and get things done while still getting paid to the tale of the two plumbers.
Tolson’s focus on bringing people together has some evidence. In August he, along with Vancouver-based right-wing activist Joey Gibson, signed a pledge of nonviolence, cooperation with law enforcement and denouncement of hate groups for two different rallies happening at the same time, Tolson’s CHAP-led Unity March in Vancouver and Gibson’s own activist wing, Patriot Prayer’s freedom march in Portland.
From Tolson’s perspective, the people who could use the help the most are so burdened by the pressures of poverty that voting is the last thing on their mind.
