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For the week of May 1 - 7, 2002

  News

Brady highlights education, environment and rural Idaho


By GREG STAHL
Express Staff Writer

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brady highlighted a three-sided, triangular platform last week that includes Idaho’s children, jobs and fairness.

Jerry Brady

In a Friday interview in Ketchum, he explained that each of those three attributes, each a side of an equilateral triangle, helps support the others. Take one away, and the geometry collapses, he said.

With that foundation laid, he said the Legislature’s education cuts last year were unacceptable.

"It was over the top," he said. "They really doomed us last year with the (tax) cut. They didn’t plan for the future. They acted like the recession would never come.

"We’ve got ourselves in a hole, and it’s a deep hole, because the tax cut is permanent."

Brady, from Idaho Falls, is slated to run against fellow Democratic Idaho Falls candidate Rue Stears in the May 28 primary election. He has taken a leave of absence as publisher of the Post Register in Idaho Falls. In his earlier career he has also practiced law and worked as a legislative assistant to the late Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho.

He spent Friday meeting local public officials, touring Bellevue, Hailey and Ketchum and building support for his gubernatorial bid.

On a potential run for the governor’s office against incumbent Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, who also said education is among his most important platform issues, Brady said he is the real education candidate.

"It’s not a slogan I invented three years ago to make people feel good," he said, alluding to Kempthorne’s 1998 campaign promises.

"Education is the first responsibility of any society. We’ve got to step up to in regard to education. We’ve got to take seriously George Bush’s words: ‘Leave no child behind,’ and we’re doing a very poor job of it."

Brady said this is a new era when children can’t leave high school and get jobs in mines.

"This is a time we’ve got to have brain power," he said. "Educate someone. It turns into a job. The better the education, the better the job."

As Brady’s newspaper, the Post Register, is considered "green," so too is Brady.

"Certainly I’m a conservationist," he said. "And certainly I stand for protecting open spaces, protecting wildlife, clean waster, clean air, good soil. I make no bones about that. I’m proud about that."

However, he said extreme measures like "throwing ranchers off the land" and "locking up the forest" can not occur.

"If we don’t show ourselves to be responsible, if we can’t demonstrate that here in Idaho, in our little communities, we can protect the land and still have jobs, then somebody will eventually take that away from us."

The key to making it work, he said, is collaboration.

And working against large, conglomerate farmers and ranchers like J.R. Simplot.

"We’re on a slippery slope to the loss of the family farmer and family rancher," he said. "I think there is a crisis, and I get excited about it. I get angry about it."

Unfortunately, there is no one solution, he said.

"I know enough to be a good governor," he said. "I didn’t grow up on the back 40. I wasn’t a farmer. I wasn’t a rancher. But I know about it. I care about it. I studied it.

"I also know it’s so complex that you can not have one solution. Every place is totally unique. Work with what you have and the people that are there, not bring in something else new. Try to save the people who are here, doing what they want to do."

 


The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.