This situation can be improved by amending Washington’s Growth Management Act and balancing our State’s regulatory system to permit smart residential development and nurture a thriving business environment while protecting our natural resources and environment. Washington State has enjoyed a revenue surplus in recent years yet has adopted new tax regimens that should be scaled back or eliminated so that working families are not so strapped. Revenue expenditure should be focused on education, as required by our constitution, and key government functions such as infrastructure and public safety. Our K-12 public school system must emphasize academic achievement in math, reading, civics, and vocational-technical skills, and both support and demand accountability from administrators and educators. Washington’s superb higher education system of universities and community colleges should prioritize enabling local residents to fill our State’s growing need for workers in the skilled trades, engineering and technology, medicine, law enforcement, and public safety. This will not only help the Olympic Peninsula’s younger generations prosper, but also retirees that find it difficult to locate the service providers needed to take care of themselves and their properties. Law enforcement must be enabled to not only provide public safety but also steer drug users into treatment.  And we should embrace a broad variety of clean energy generation and distribution technologies rather than fixating on solely one.

Marcia’s background in engineering, law, and business will enable her to move effectively in the Senate for these changes in our State’s government. This includes her experience as a senior executive and the top lawyer at a biotechnology company, growing that business over 19 years from a start-up to being a publicly traded, revenue-generating company, creating approximately 250 new jobs in the process. Earlier on in Marcia’s career, she earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Chemical Engineering and worked for the U.S. Navy as a civilian engineer. Then, after earning her law degree from the University of Washington, Marcia practiced as a patent attorney protecting the inventions of entrepreneurs and established companies. All of this provided invaluable experience, which would serve the Olympic Peninsula and State well, in prioritizing limited resources, budgeting, policymaking, accountability, operating in regulated environments, grants administration, job creation, hiring, and supervision, contracting, team building, dispute resolution, and technology.

Marcia is an independent thinker and moderate in view, and seeks to bridge divides that have festered for too long. Two of her adult children and a dear granddaughter live on the Peninsula and Marcia is committed to ensuring that Washington State can be safe and prosperous for all generations.