Voter Guide: Mary Shea (D)
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Interview transcript:
Q: Tell us about your background, including your education, career experiences, public service, and any other previous political involvement, and what experiences have prepared you to serve in the legislature?
Okay, well, I've been in Pocatello for 27 years. I'm the mother of three, now adults in their 20s. Two of them are at ISU, all raised here in Pocatello. And I'm a former educator in Pocatello, and I am an attorney. I've been an attorney for a long time. I practiced in Virginia for about a decade.
Before moving to Idaho in 1999. In Virginia, I worked for the Virginia Attorney General's Office for a Republican administration, and I was a civil litigation attorney. My primary job was to defend the state of Idaho when they got, or the state of Virginia when they got sued. I also provided them with a lot of agency advice. And now in Idaho, I'm primarily a family law attorney and I'm a child welfare law specialist, which means I spend most of my time in the juvenile courthouse helping families try and solve their problems so that they can stay together. And that work has been a very meaningful experience for me. I decided to specialize in that area about a decade ago.
And I had to take a specialty bar exam to get that specialty certification to do it. But I really, I'm sort of in the sunset of my legal career and I wanted to feel like I was doing something meaningful with my time. And I will say that it has done that for me. I have really felt that experience has grounded me in humility and in gratitude and in not judging other people before you walk a mile in their shoes. And those are values that I would take with me to the State House. Beyond that, I've been very involved in the community for the entire time I've been here. I have been the past president of the Portneuf Healthcare Foundation. I've been board president for Idaho Legal Aid. I've served in leadership roles in the state bar, in the local bar, in the family law bar. And I am currently helping with Festival of Trees. And I did that before when I worked for the Portneuf Healthcare Foundation. In fact, I was on the original committee that started that way back in the day.
And so that involvement in the community is really what brought me to politics. I was invited by the Bannock County Democrats to consider running for office. And it was a good fit with the feeling that I had at the time that I wanted to, sort of in the sunset of my legal career, feel like I'm giving back to the community and making a meaningful difference in people's lives.
Q: If elected, what would be your highest legislative priority this year and what specific policies or actions would you pursue to address it?
A lot of priorities under this umbrella, but affordability is the issue that we are hearing on the campaign trail. Just, you know, nationally, I know that that's a big issue, but we're definitely hearing it in Pocatello, Idaho. One statistic I like to share with people that they may not know is that Pocatello, Idaho is in the top 10 cities in the nation for housing affordability that has not matched wage increases, meaning that we've got a huge gap between our wages and housing affordability. That is a pressing problem. It is contributing to our unhoused population. It's making starter homes just completely out of reach for people like my children.
And we want kids to be able to get into their starter home sooner so they can start building wealth and equity. And that's becoming harder and harder for kids to attain in Idaho. The average age now in Idaho is 40 years before they're able to afford their first home. And to me, that's just unacceptable. Very concerned about health care affordability under that umbrella. Very concerned about education and education affordability and attainability. Both supporting our public school systems as well as our higher education systems, our career and technical education, and all of it. Very concerned about tax burden on lower income people and concerned about continued tax breaks that go to things like data centers that pay no sales tax or not a lot of property tax.
Compared to, you know, regular Idahoans who are paying the highest grocery tax rate in the nation. We're tied with Mississippi at 6% on our groceries, on our diapers, on our food. And so, those are things that I would immediately start to address along with the other, my running mates, Senator James Rutte and Nate Roberts.
Q: What do you think the government should do to address those issues- inflation, economic situations? What specific steps would you take to help improve that?
Well, we would propose cutting the grocery tax. My running mates and I have entered into a contract with Pocatello, and that's available on our websites and online and on our social media. But cutting the grocery tax would be a focus. Working with organizations like Gem State Housing and other organizations to really tackle the affordable housing and remove barriers to creating starter homes and other affordable housing for people. Working possibly for relief on the gasoline tax, even if it's temporary. I would do things like restore the child tax credit because that really helps lower-income people. Also, I would be focused on making sure that we can keep more Idahoans on health care insurance.
And that's a real challenge right now because of some federal policies that the state of Idaho has adopted aggressively. I would try and reverse as much of that as we can because the less people who can afford health insurance, that spreads the cost. It's not like they stop getting sick or stop needing the health care. It just means that we're spreading the cost among the rest of us.
All of our health insurance premiums are already getting more expensive because of it. I worry a lot about the burden on rural health care right now. We've got 10 hospitals on the brink of closing and $1 trillion of cuts in Medicaid spending is really going to hurt Idaho. We did get a small rural health care grant to try and make up some of those losses. I don't think it's going to be enough. And I'm not convinced that we're spending it in the right way to shore up the rural health care system. I worry a lot about people not being able to access doctors, especially labor and delivery units when they need it. So those are some of the issues I would be focused on. A lot more that's on my mind, but those would be some priorities.
Q: Immigration is a major issue, both in the state and federally. What's your position on immigration policy and what role, if any, should the state government play in addressing immigration-related concerns?
Yeah. So it is a big issue in Idaho. You know, we rely a lot on immigrants and people not from Idaho, not from America coming to work in agriculture as well as in construction. I support border security and I agree with, I think, most of America that we sort of fell down on the job for a few years. And we need to make sure that our borders are secure. We need to make sure that we are deporting criminals. We need to make sure that our communities stay safe. At the same time, I support a path to citizenship.
I support year-round temporary visas for our employees who need to come and work here that our employers need to come and work here in Idaho. And I support the dairy industry in those efforts here in Idaho. Also really, really concerned is a civil rights attorney. And I've worked for a state government. Like I said, I work for the state of Virginia.
I know how hard it is, and I support cooperation with the federal government, you know, to make sure that our communities stay safe. At the same time, what happened in Wilder, Idaho, I saw a lot of violations of people's civil rights, both citizens and non-citizens alike. I don't think it's necessary to zip tie children in order to ask immigration questions and those kinds of things. So I personally believe that we can enforce our immigration laws and still respect the United States and Idaho constitutions. And that would be my expectation for state government as well as federal government.
Q: As lawmakers consider state budget priorities, what level of funding do you believe public schools should receive? And what factors should shape your position and what outcomes would you hope to achieve by doing that?
Yeah, well, this is a hot issue for me and my running mates. We all three strongly support our public schools. It's a pillar of our community as well as a path to economic security and economic growth in Idaho. And so we support things like the Launch Program, support fully funding our public education system.
Right now, we've got about $100 million gap in special education funding. And when I talk to educators, as well as families all across Pocatello, that's a primary concern of that funding gap and what that means and how that burdens our public school system in really every single way.
We also have a backlog maintenance deficit still of almost $2 billion, and the legislature has taken some chips at that. But I don't think they're doing nearly enough to make up that funding gap. And that funding gap didn't happen overnight. That's happened over, you know, a couple of decades now of grossly underfunding our public school system.
So I support full funding of our education system, making sure that we are meeting our obligations to our special needs students. I support changing the funding formula. I support Superintendent Critchfield as well as her challenger on that issue. I would do it faster rather than slower. I would support repealing the tax credit voucher system where we are diverting $50 million of general funds in Idaho a year to private schools that have no transparency and no accountability to the taxpayers of Idaho. And where we have every reason to believe, based on the experience in other states, that most of that money is going to families who are already able to afford to send their children to private school. I have nothing at all against school choice. Idaho offers a lot of school choice. And we would be having a different conversation about that if we were fully funding our public school system, but we are not.
And I think we need to make public dollars work for public systems first before we start giving them away to private enterprise.
Q: What's one issue that has not received enough attention during your campaign and why do you think voters should care about it, I guess is what it is?
I would say, I would just reiterate that the healthcare access is about to become a crisis in places like Idaho. And I don't, I see some candidates talking about it a lot, but I'm not sure that we're raising the alarm bells in the media enough. I did see a story today about it out of Idaho Press. And I appreciate that because those are the concerns I have is that as we kick tens of thousands of Idahoans off of Medicaid, that's we're expected to do over the next couple of years with the loss of the ACA subsidies, a lot of Idahoans are going to go off the ACA insurance and we'll lose tens of thousands of more off of the insurance rolls. We just did an affordability town hall as candidates a couple of weeks ago, and we heard from a lot of Medicare recipients their concerns that their Medicare Advantage insurers are leaving the area. And it's because they can't afford to compete in a market like this anymore. And so they're retreating to the Boise area where they're able to actually stay in the black. And that's unacceptable when our seniors, when our vulnerable, cannot get access to health care in an affordable way. Healthcare bills remain the number one cause of bankruptcy in America. And it makes a hard and unaffordable economy even less affordable when something catastrophic happens. My heart breaks for families who are uninsured and find themselves in a very horrible, traumatic event. It's happened to a family that I know and that I care about very much recently. And my heart breaks for them because I know what that kind of economic situation is going to look like for them in the long term. So I think that's a crisis that's brewing in Idaho. Like I said, 10 rural health care systems are on the brink in Idaho right now. We are 50th in the nation for per capita providers in Idaho right now. You know, when women have to drive a couple of hours to get to their nearest labor and delivery unit, we get bad outcomes. When people have to drive long distance to get to the nearest emergency room to get trauma treatment, we're in big trouble. When people can't take care of their chronic health needs, we're in big trouble. It's going to be impactful to our labor force in the future. We're fourth in the nation for uninsured children. Meaning that we've got a lot of children who are not getting their well-child visits, who are not taking care of their dental needs. Again, that's long-term impact on our economy, on our labor force going forward. So I think it's a crisis. I think it's something that needs immediate legislative attention and a lot more focused attention on the real core of the problems.
that have been created by the state and federal government.
Q: Anything else you want to bring up or any other comments?
Well, it's been a real honor and a privilege to run for office in Pocatello, Idaho, and to meet all the people that I've gotten to meet and to talk about all the things that we've gotten to talk about. And I just encourage everybody to get out and vote and participate. Make sure you're paying attention and protecting your own rights.
Make sure you're paying attention and protecting your rights to democracy and pay attention to the candidates and the issues and vote for the people who align with your values and who are going to fight for you in the statehouse.
Editor's note: This interview was transcribed using Subscript software. All content was reviewed and verified for accuracy by the Local News 8 editorial team.
