My name is Tracy Mitrano and I am running for Congress because I believe that I can bring economic opportunity and jobs back to the 23rd district.
There are generally five things that you need in order to have economic opportunity take off. You need healthy people; educated and trained people; natural resources; infrastructure and capital. Let’s take a look at the criteria and where we are today.
We have people who are desperate for jobs. They definitely want that opportunity to come back to this community.
Are they healthy? Not with the medical care that we have and that with the medical care that our current representative keeps trying to persuade us as the right way to go when we know we need universal healthcare. We need especially to address the addiction problem that has corrupted so many of our children, so many of our families. We need to go after the pharmaceutical companies to get the money back into a place like Cattaraugus so that we can correct that addiction problem and we can get healthy people back to the next step, which would be education and training.
We have a lot of work to do there. We have gutted our K through 12 schools and we also need to be thinking about how to educate and train them for the twenty first century. I just came from a house party today in Corning. There were many people from Corning were there and they said, “well what are you going to do? How are we going to train people to know what they need to understand about fake news and walled gardens online?” Information literacy. Absolutely. As someone who’s been working in information technology for fifteen years, I’ve been advocating a long before I became a candidate for Congress, but we can’t get that on this until we start to take our K through 12 education seriously again.
Natural resources. We have a plenty and I guarantee you that the rapacious industrial interests that feed into Mr. Reed’s coffers know what a blessed community we have here with water, good soil, good climate. You know the opportunity that lies with all the natural resources here.
Let me move now to the area where there’s absolute want: infrastructure, the roads. We need to be able to get people to school, get people to jobs. We need to be able to have commodities move from out west in this area here to the eastern portions, and up and down the sea. We then need to get an intranet that is going to connect to every farm and every home and every school and every library. And then that’s when all of this starts to make sense because if you build it, that’s how they will come.
So what’s really lacking? Yes, I’ve mentioned many of those things, but what’s really lacking is the leadership and the belief that this is a community that we want to grow, that we want to live in abundance, that we want to see thrive. We don’t have it a now because Tom Reed is being paid not to lead, but I guarantee you I will. Thank you.
