Southern Nevada has grown into a world class community over the past 25 years. The excitement, energy and imagination flowing from the area represent the best of American values of pioneering entrepreneurs staking a claim and achieving the previously unimagined. Yet today, we live in troubled times where the failures of Washington, DC threaten the success of Nevadans. The quality of life and economic vitality of our community is impacted by many issues addressed by Congress, like education, energy, infrastructure and financial policies.
Improving the quality of life in Clark County is going to require investing in our children by rejuvenating our schools. Clark County is one of the fastest growing areas in the nation, but has not been able to keep up with school funding needs and teacher recruitment. High growth areas in America like Clark County are the future of our country, but are at a political and funding disadvantage as population grows faster than representation in Washington. This is the wrong approach for our children. We need to change how the federal government funds education to create equal opportunity for all children to obtain a quality education.
Imagine Southern Nevada becoming a world class innovator in renewable energy and high energy efficiency technologies. We can reinvent Southern Nevada's economy into the Silicon Valley of energy independence, creating high quality jobs and revitalizing our infrastructure by incorporating these new technologies into our buildings, transportation networks and power grids. To make this happen, we need leadership in Congress for a national energy strategy that acknowledges the important role Nevada can play in energy independence with its abundance of largely untapped solar, wind and geothermal energy.
The Las Vegas metropolitan area is becoming an increasing congested city and we need a national strategy for infrastructure investment to address the underinvestment in our community and many others throughout the country. But we also need innovative approaches to linking or communications, transportation and power generating infrastructure into a coordinated economic development program. A handful of cities have revitalized their infrastructure is this way by having localities using their lower cost of capital than private companies to install fiber optic cable to every home, allowing them to run high bandwidth applications for on-line collaborative tools like video conferencing and file sharing and joint editing in a secure, encrypted environment. Cities that have done this, like Banglore, India and Brisol, Virginia, have attracted engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs, igniting their economies, improving real estate values, and increasing tax bases, all by modernizing infrastructure by thinking about transportation and communications infrastructure in a new blended way that advances economic development.
If Bangalore, India, Bristol, Virginia and several other cities can accomplish this, surely we can as well.
None of these sorely needed investments will be possible if the Washington establishment continues to plunder our national treasury. Interest on the national debt consumes a substantial and rising portion of our hard earned tax dollars and experts have said will not grow our way out of this. The he federal government has never passed an audit, which means and it cannot account for the true cost of programs that are supposed to serve the people. This dereliction of duty threatens our economy and quality of life. I will set priorities and hold people accountable.