KIFI/KIDK Voter Guide: Dave Roth

• Party:
  • Democratic Party
• Website: rothforgrowth.nationbuilder.com
• Facebook: David Roth
• Background:
  • Roth has spent most of his life in Idaho Falls and started his first business in high school. He's spent time working with challenged youth in Salt Lake City. He says he's spent most of his career in education.

Why are you running for Idaho House of Representatives District 33B?

I'm running because I believe that the values of Idaho falls are not being represented in Boise. I feel that, you know, when you look at the number of votes that are going against funding education, we have the lowest funding in the entire country, but yet education is a priority for the citizens of Idaho falls. So when I saw what happened with the education standards, when I saw what happened with the teacher certification guidelines, I really saw no option other than to try to make a difference in the best way that I could.

What issues would you focus on if you’re elected?

Some of the other major issues I helped to address are property taxes. My mother has lived in her house for 37 years and is in danger of being priced out of it because of her rising property tax. So, we need to address that issue. And part of that can be fixed with increasing the homeowner's exemption and tying it back to an index. Part of that can be fixed by having the state honor its constitutional mandate to fund public education, instead of pushing that burden back to the taxpayers of Idaho falls, the property taxpayers.

Any other issues?

Other issues I'm concerned about, of course, healthcare is a big issue. District 33 overwhelmingly approved Medicaid expansion in the state of Idaho. And our legislature has failed to enact that as it was requested by the voters. They enacted a watered down version with lots of bureaucracy and different requirements that really moved away from the spirit of what the Idaho voters asked them for.

Do you have any specifics on how you would manage community growth in the long term?

Our community growth is a huge issue. Especially when you look at our schools, we have overcrowding. And if you look to how the pandemic has sort of laid bare the flaws in our system, our schools were overcrowded to begin with. So I think it's great that we are going to continue to draw business to the area. I think it's great that we're going to bring more people here through development at the INL and other businesses as we bring them to our area of Idaho, the challenges is to make sure that we have adequate funding in place for the infrastructure that's necessary to manage that. That includes adequate funding for our schools, adequate funding for our police forces and adequate funding for just our general city infrastructure, parks and recreation centers, to make sure that we maintain Idaho falls to be the same Idaho falls it is now just bigger.