Photo courtesy of Elaine Hurd.

Lucy Flores, candidate for Lieutenant Governor, was in Mesquite Tuesday visiting with residents at the Mesquite Senior center.

When asked what she can do for Mesquite if elected, she stated in her email:

Nevada was hard hit by the recession. Our urban centers have bounced back but the recovery in our rural areas has been much slower. As in other parts of rural Nevada, Mesquite has been overlooked from an economic development perspective.

The lack of a diversified skilled labor force and the lack of a high quality educational system in Nevada act as a barrier to attracting new industries and good-paying jobs.

Better education means better jobs, and our families know it. This is why increasing education funding is the central tenet of my campaign. We need to expand, not contract, the availability of higher education in Nevada, and the lack of variety in the programs available at the CSN campus in Mesquite is a case in point.  

Furthermore, we need to do a better job of identifying opportunities for entering into public-private partnerships – these have successfully been utilized in other states as an economic development tool: private industry partnering with community college networks to create training programs so that local workers can revamp or hone their skills and make themselves more valuable to the new industries that we are working to attract to Nevada. Mesquite is ripe for economic development and would be an ideal site – halfway between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, with a new industrial park which will soon be accessible off of I-15. All we need are partners.

As Lieutenant Governor, I will continue to fight for increased education funding, and be a tireless advocate for Nevada and everything our state has to offer.”