CLEARLAKE – Rep. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena) and his entire staff team met with members of the Lake County community on Wednesday. The meeting came as part of a listening tour by Congressman Thompson and his team from both the district and his Washington D.C. office.
In addition to members of the Lake County Board of Supervisors, Clearlake and Lakeport Council, members from various county department and agencies attended the meet and greet and joined in a discussion of local issues including, but not limited to, expansion of services for veterans, fuel reduction projects in the aftermath of fire disasters and the need for additional healthcare resources for residents.
“After redistricting changed the boundaries of our district to include all of Lake County, I brought my staff team to Lake County to hear directly from our community,” said Thompson. “Our district is my top priority, and hearing directly from the people is the best way that me and my staff will be able to serve our district. It was great to meet with elected leaders, business leaders, community leaders, and others from Lake County and talk about how we can best work together to support our community and deliver on our shared priorities.”
“Over the next two years, I am focused on ensuring that my office is a resource for all of our district, and meetings like this will provide my staff with the hands-on experience needed to understand the local issues and connect with those we represent,” he added.
Clearlake council member Joyce Overton, who is also the director of the Highlands Senior Center, said she was concerned about veterans who are homeless. “We tend to have a hard time working with the V.A. Clinic here. I just don’t think they have enough people, or they don’t know what to do with them. Lake County is really bad with anything to do with homeless but when you see these veterans and seniors that are homeless, it breaks my heart, and I am not having very good resources here.”
Thompson acknowledged that the V.A. clinic in Lake County is far under the level where it needs to be. “They tell us it needs to be widely expanded.” He added that V.A. has been talking about relocating the facility to Lakeport in the foreseeable future. “Homelessness is an issue all over, I believe the veterans within that unhoused population need to get specific attention from the veterans’ community, from the bureaucracy to continue to support programs and provide funding for that and we’ll continue to do so, but we got a long way to go.”
“What we do right now is we address symptoms of mental health and we put Band Aids on those symptoms,” added Thompson in regards to mental health issues, “There is not enough money in anybody’s treasury to pay for the Band Aids. We need to figure out how to get ahead of the curve.” He said to that end he has been working on legislation to invest on brain research in order to better understand mental health issues.
Discussion of the proposal to take out the dam at Lake Pillsbury led to questions about water resources. “The problem is somebody else owns it, (PG&E) that’s the rub here, we are trying to work through that.” Thompson said his staff is working towards setting up a pretty aggressive tour of the area in March, bringing all the stakeholders together for a round table discussion trying to find a solution. “We are in kind of a bind, we need to figure out a way to maintain that and still deal with the private property issue.”
Thompson also briefly addressed the need constituents have expressed in regards to getting more doctors to come to the county. “We have a shortage of medical professionals at all levels,” said Thompson, adding that there is an ongoing effort to increase the minimum wage for lower wage health care providers to try and encourage people to come in. “The pharmaceutical costs associated with health care is a big player in this, there’s an ongoing battle, and there always will be, to drive those down. We’ve had some really good success with Medicare drugs specially the cost of insulin.”
Thompson said when he was a representative in Humboldt County, doctors were told they could sell their city homes and move to the more beautiful rural areas while buying the same house for a third of what they sold them, but that argument is no longer viable due to the rising cost of housing prices in the state. He also took credit for doing the first bill in the U.S. at the state level to open up telemedicine, which he said will be extended for two more years after the end of the COVID emergency.
Brock Falkenberg, superintendent of schools said there is no doubt students were impacted by COVID and asked about cybersecurity in the schools. “It has become a nationally covered issue. It’s important that every single school district have in place their own element for cyber security,” he said adding that e-rate funding is very limited in how it can be utilized. “That forces school districts as the only entity that’s focused on cyber security, utilizing their general fund moneys, money that could be utilized in the classroom or to catch up on COVID.”
Rep. Thompson is a senior member of the House Committee on Ways and Means and serves as the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Tax.
Following the 2020 Census, Rep. Thompson’s district now includes all of Lake County.
