Laura Wells

Laura Wells
Governor of California
Former Candidate
Party	Green Party
Education
Bachelor's	Wayne State University (1969)
Master's	Antioch University
Personal
Profession	Financial Analyst
Websites
Campaign website

Laura Wells (born January 2, 1948) was a Green Party candidate for the 2010 Governor’s race in the State of California. Wells is a former financial and business analyst, and political activist in Oakland California. She supports making significant changes to Proposition 13 and to the current super-majority voting rule in the Sacramento legislature. In 2002 she garnered nearly a half million votes in her run for California State Controller.

Biography

Wells was born and raised in Traverse City, Michigan. She earned her BA from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1969, where she was a scholarship student, majored in foreign languages, and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa society. Wells earned a Masters of Education at Antioch University, and later worked in finance, business analysis and computer programming.

Wells has resided in California for more than 30 years. She has one daughter, Natalia, born in Oakland, now a 23-year-old musician and graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Political career

Wells has served in numerous county and state-level leadership positions in the Green Party of California since she registered with the Green Party in 1992. She was a founding member of the Green Party County Council in Alameda County (1992-94; 2002-04), a co-founder and managing editor of the Green Party newspaper, Green Focus (2002-2004), and a campaign steering committee member for Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) in Oakland, an effort that achieved 69% voter approval (2006).

In 2002 and 2006, Wells ran campaigns for State Controller, receiving 419,873 votes in 2002, the most ever for a Green Party candidate in a statewide partisan race in California. In 2009, Wells appeared on the Fox News program “Your World” several times to discuss tax fairness in California.

Wells has also participated in five international delegations to Canada and South America to study innovations in participatory democracy and new constitutions, and has broadly worked in a range of volunteer and professional capacities for community and labor organizations, including Pesticide Action Network (North America), Women’s Economic Agenda Project, and SEIU United Healthcare Workers (West).

Elections

2014

See also: State executive official elections, 2014

Wells has filed a "Statement of Intention" to run for California Controller in the 2014 elections.

2010

See also: California gubernatorial election, 2010

In January of 2010, Laura Wells announced her candidacy for governor of California in the 2010 election. If elected, Wells would have become both the first female and the first Green party governor of California.

Wells’ campaign emphasized the California budget and tax issues, particularly Proposition 13, which she said must be changed, in part because it primarily benefits corporations over individuals. In a position paper on Proposition 13, Wells wrote:

”Proposition 13, in 1978, was promoted to California voters as a way to reduce taxes and to stop fixed-income seniors and others from losing their homes due to escalating property taxes. Since then, the bulk of the "tax relief" goes places the voters never intended--giant corporations. Corporate properties are rarely re-assessed since corporations don't die and seldom sell.”

Wells also favored lowering the margin needed to pass a budget and raise taxes in the state from two-thirds to a simple majority. She supported increasing funding for education, and the use of a ‘split-roll tax’ to keep cap residential property taxes while allowing higher property taxes for businesses. In a January 2010 interview with The Sacramento Bee discussing her views on taxes and the budget in California, Wells stated:

"The two parties, the Democrat and Republican parties, do not address the root causes of the problem," Wells said. "That's off the table for them. ... To get what we want and to have the revenue that pays for it we need to have a budget that makes sense."

Wells also addressed the difficulty that third parties have in running candidates for state elections:

”. . . she says [the difficulty for third parties] is a result of the "locked-down" system the Democrats and Republicans have put in place. As a case in point, she said she had to pay $6,000 for a 300-word ballot statement when she ran for state controller in 2006, a fee she said blocks minor-party candidates from running.”

Wells supports a Single Payer Universal Health Care solution for California, and if given the opportunity, said that she would gladly sign SB 840 (the Single Payer bill introduced by State Senator Sheila Kuehl) into law. Wells also supports the use of clean, sustainable, local energy, including publicly-owned utilities, Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) and localized (distributed) electricity generation, instead of nuclear power or carbon sequestration. Wells also opposed government bailouts of large corporations and banks.

External links

Suggest a link

• Laura Wells' Gubernatorial Campaign Website
• Project Vote Smart biography
• Laura Wells on Facebook
• Laura Wells on Twitter