Senate District 1 Primary Conversations:​Dan Cruce & Adriana Bohm

The first one is economic security. I know lots of folks are calling it affordability. It’s the same idea. It’s that folks are struggling, and we’ve been taking action on it.

The second focus area for us, I call “defending our freedoms,” and I hate that we have to even have that as an area or a topic, but it’s where I’ve been able to lead legislation, particularly this last session, to make certain that we are holding and protecting – most of the time in advance of – attacks that are coming at us.

The third area, and I hate that we have to focus on this one too, but I say it loudly everywhere I go, it’s human dignity. Just that simple phrase: human dignity. We still live in a time, it’s worse than ever, where some of these things all go hand in hand.

That’s incredibly important because anybody can put out a laundry list of the 15 to 20 things they say they’re going to do.

I worked to make certain that I’m not just talking, we’ve actually got work done. When we talk about economic security, I never planned to become one of the poster children for property tax reassessment.

What happened with the previous administration, and particularly in New Castle County, was a complete mess. I made certain that I got myself appointed to the Property Tax Reassessment Committee so we could dig into the details and ask the tough questions.

This turned into legislation that I ran in January, and we have results now. When we think about Mr. Holodick’s corner barbershop in Bellefonte and the tenfold increase to his commercial taxes, and then we compare that next to – I’m not trying to pick on Amazon or big business, but it just sticks out like a sore thumb when they have a million-dollar decrease – that just doesn’t sit right. I need to at least see the work behind those calculations.

I ran fast in January to make certain that I passed Senate Bill 228, which enabled, empowered and charged New Castle County with going back in and looking at exactly [those valuations]. The Amazon Boxwood plant was originally valued around $100 million or so, and it’s now valued at closer to $400 million.

That’s a very obvious change, and that results in direct additional taxes, not from mom-and-pop businesses and my neighbors, but from corporate interests, who should pay their fair share.

We also, as a caucus this year, moved legislation forward around hospital system reform. Incredibly important. I also know that the cost of childcare for some of our families, it can be more than the cost of college. It’s ridiculous.

I helped move multiple pieces of legislation around purchase of care and childcare this session. We’ve got a long way to go to get to where we need to be, but we continue to climb up that mountain.

That’s a very big question and there’s a lot of phraseology in there that I don’t necessarily agree with – but to get to the heart of the question, I will tell you any organization or PAC that might have given to my campaign, not a single one of them own me.

And almost to a T, there are examples where whatever interest they may represent, I’ve been on the other side of them. And so there’s chatter out there about organizations like Working Families Party (WFP) that don’t accept corporate PAC money or don’t accept corporate money. I would challenge your smart team to research where the WFP money actually comes from, and is it actually traceable in this state.

But to your question, example after example where folks are welcome to invest in our campaign. I know that they invest in our campaign not just because of what we do, but actually how we do it. It’s not just since I’ve been elected, some of these folks that are investing in our campaign have been friends and colleagues.

We have built things together; literally built things together in the education space and in the nonprofit space. I think that’s incredibly important to have a track record to show how you’ve led, before you’ve ever been elected.

And that track record of mine shows building bridges.

I think the one-on-one conversations are incredibly important. Folks may conceptually think that that’s a bad thing, and that’s a narrative that’s been fed by lots of different folks.

There is nary a bill, particularly with some of my colleagues in WFP who are on the progressive flank, where I’ve been on the opposite page as them. I think there’s also a little bit of a misconception that I’m not progressive, that I’m too centrist or that my position on issues are ones that are disaligned with some folks in the progressive flank of our party.

And I would just really like folks to point to an issue or a bill.

I’m the only Senate Democrat that has actually signed on to the open primary bill. I think I’m one of maybe two or three Senate Democrats who are on the Homeless Bill of Rights.

And so, the issues and the specifics are important rather than the headlines.

I would absolutely support changes and reform or whatever makes a smarter process to bring more people to the table for a special election process. That’s an easy answer.

As it relates to my special election and the two other special elections this past session, we followed the rules, and everybody played by the rules. For some folks that criticized the outcome, I wonder if they would criticize the outcome if they were the victor in that process?

I’m in full support of any evolution that makes it more open for folks to be a part of the process for a special election. What I know is that we had rules and we followed the rules, and anybody that’s actually on the inside actually knows that I was not the “inside” candidate.

I’m not gonna give it any air. I’ve lived in Wilmington my full-time. I know that my neighbors are sick of hearing it, particularly my neighbors who live in my building and see me every morning that I live here.

I made a public statement, where I had to prove that I flushed the toilet every day here, where I live, because there was a complaint that was filed during the special election.

I want to talk about the issues, and where I live is not an issue because it’s a result of folks not being able to find any issues, with my issues.

I like to say that I’m an introvert, so running for political office was never in my wheelhouse of things I wanted to do or accomplish. And so when we were organizing in Wilmington, we were organizing with other people across the city around issues having to do with racism, poverty and education.

And out of that work, people asked me to run for the school board, and I didn’t want to because I’m an introvert, and I would let myself be persuaded. I served on the board for 10 years, never missed a meeting, never missed a vote. And then I believe in term limits, so when people asked me to run a third time, I said, “No.” I thought we should be working on building that bench.

And then after I came off the board, I was thinking very deeply about educational issues more and more, and I was also thinking more about the fact that the challenges we experience in the classroom don’t emanate from the classroom. They really stem from failed state policies to let people have affordable, livable lives that they enjoy.

And so if we want to begin to address the issues in the classroom and in school, I really was saying, “Well, we need to work on some of these state-level issues that we can address. That’s going to begin to get at education.”

And I grew up in Wilmington. I raised my children in inner-city Wilmington.

A number of the children that my children grew up with – who spent time in our house, went on vacations with us; I fed them, they hung out – a number of those children were killed.

They were children that I loved. I knew their families. And so that was an element as well because, trying to change the climate of Delaware and the culture of Wilmington was deeply personal on one hand.

We’re a blue state. We have a blue trifecta, and I think we could be doing a lot more. I’m very excited about all the people we’ve been talking to on the doors, and the ideas we’ve been reading about, hearing about, learning about, and that people are sharing with us.

And so I think we need progressives in the Delaware state legislature, and I think that we have a lot of great ideas about movement we can make, and I think we need to do that.

It was highly frustrating two years ago to listen to Delaware lawmakers fight about whether students should get free lunch. We know as educators, we know as people who look at the research and read the data and the reports, that children cannot focus on learning if they are hungry.

We don’t know what’s going on, so just give everyone free lunch. We did it with free breakfast. Let’s do it with free lunch. That should be a no-brainer.

I’m really interested in strengthening public education. I definitely want to address the weighted funding formula, which Jea Street’s been talking about for decades now. We need universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.

And what I love about universal pre-K is that not only does it help children with literacy skills, but if you read the reports coming out of law enforcement, they’re unified in saying that universal pre-K is the No. 1 thing we can do to reduce crime over the life of a child.

We also need to think about what we’re feeding our students. What they’re eating is unacceptable and that needs to be addressed.

I’m also really interested in, looking at economic stability. We know that corporate profits are at a record high, but people’s everyday lives are very compromised.

So working with the business community to address livable wages and how we can get people up to a standard of living where they can afford things.

So looking at livable wages, but also I think we need to have a conversation about ending sub-minimum wages. So tipped workers, workers who have disabilities, youth incarcerated workers, they’re not getting even a minimum wage.

I’m very into safe and accessible housing that’s stable. I was reading Dr. Matthew Desmond’s book about evictions. He has a great quote that just stayed with me and he says, “Children are hungry because the rent eats first.” And that’s so true for so many of our families in SD 1.

I’m also very into publicly owned grocery stores.

Kansas is doing it, North Dakota is doing it, Atlanta’s starting to look at it, and I think that would be a wonderful way to keep grocery prices down, but also employ people and give them very good wages because they would be unionized.

Delmarva Power bills are the No. 1 thing that people have talked to us about on the doors from every single neighborhood we’ve walked in. So I think we could do work there.

I would say we are the richest nation in the history of world civilization. There is money in this country to do all the things we need to do to make everyone have a standard of living that is more than acceptable, but that we are giving them lives that they enjoy living.

I’m not going to fall into this false narrative that we don’t have the revenue or the finances in this country to take care of people, because that’s simply a non-truth, and it’s an unacceptable non-truth.

We have the money. We do not have the will. Corporate money and revenue has been increasing. We know that more and more money is being generated, but the people who are being harmed are the people who are working.

What I think is we need to look at maybe some new ways to tax.

Arkansas took their medical marijuana sales, and they took the tax from that, and they’re using that to provide food for the people in their communities. In New Jersey, just a little ways away from us, they have a corporate transit fee or a corporate transit tax.

New Mexico has taxes that they’re using for corporations that are working on extracting natural resources. You can also have taxes on super luxury items.

So if people buy a super yacht or their 18th house, there may be a special tax on that. So there are ways that we can bring revenue in, and I think we need to be doing that.

Universal pre-K is the hill I’ll decided to die on.

I think we have to pay for our people, and we’re gonna either pay in the beginning or we’re gonna pay in the end. We are gonna pay. We just need to decide where we’re gonna do it. And I think preemptively paying and investing in our peoples and in our communities is something that we have to do.

We know that when poverty proliferates, democracy disintegrates. That is absolutely true.

And more and more people are beginning to think that our institutions are failing. And that’s why when we’re knocking on the doors, people are very upset with the Trump administration, but I cannot tell you how many people have told me that they are done with the Democratic Party as well.

So I think the Democratic Party is at a crossroads. How hard are we willing to fight for our people and for our democracy?

I grew up on 21st Street, and the one thing I learned how to do there was fight. I learned how to use my voice, and I learned how to fight for the everyday people, and that’s the energy and passion and coalition-building that I’m gonna bring.

I’m gonna bring that energy to Dover, and I’m gonna bring the people from our communities to Dover with us.