Randy Ross for Kansas House District 48
Q: What career background did you have prior to this?
A: "For the last 25-ish years, my business partner and I had a strategic marketing consulting company, and we would work with healthcare companies to help them do a better job of reaching out to their customers. So they would come to us and say, ‘You know, we're just not having success with our messaging, and we're trying to reach people,’ and so what was really fun was you kind of start to diagnose where their problems are, and many more times than not the problem was not that they couldn't communicate with the customer. They couldn't communicate with each other in the company. Nobody. Everybody was stubborn about their opinion. Nobody really wanted to compromise and so there were just a lot of turf battles. And so, you know, we did that, and we learned how to get people to kind of break down, and start to see other sides within their own company before they could even focus on the customer. And so I was done, you know, I was thinking about (how I have) always had that interest in state government, and it's kind of like, wait a minute, people that can't get along, they can't see the other side, they struggle to find solutions. I said, ‘That's state government.’ I've been kind of working with this problem, you know, for 20-some years, and that's exactly what goes on there sometimes when they can't get things, yeah, or get them done efficiently. So it was kind of a nice segue into a second career, no, but an opportunity to serve for a few years maybe, and you don't see what I can do over there and let somebody else do it [well]."
Q: What policies and values are you trying to bring up if you get elected?
A: "Education is really the cornerstone. If we didn't have the Blue Valley system performing at the level that it is. I mean, you guys set the bar, and you set the bar for private schools in the area as well, because they you know, if they're inferior, who's going to go there, right? So you guys set the bar pretty high, and so I want to keep it set that high. And so we have to fully fund (education.) Number two is fiscal responsibility, and that kind of goes back to the affordability of areas, but on a state level, we just put some tax cuts in place. But you know, we [have] some tax cuts through the legislature this year. I think we need to do more because, you know, I only want to take from people what is absolutely necessary to make things run. But in order to lower taxes and take less money out of people's pockets we gotta pay our bills. Remember, no deficit spending. So that means you have to focus on the budget. And the budget is what creates the invoices, the taxes are meant to pay for the state, and we're, we're just starting to get the legislature more involved in the budgetary process. The third thing is cybersecurity. And I'm sure you guys talk about that in different classes, the state's been rated twice within about the last four years. During COVID-19, we were paying out a lot of unemployment compensation because a lot of people were out of work, foreign bad actors figured out how to game our unemployment system and walked off with almost half a billion dollars. Where I come from, that's a lot of money, but you know, that's not money. We're not going to get back, and the taxpayers are the ones that paid it. And you know, when you start to look at that, you're going, ‘How'd that happen?’ So they've got back into investigating and quite frankly, we really weren't doing a good job of paying attention to our cyber security. Well, you would think that we would learn from that and say, ‘Okay, you know, we're going to fix this problem,’ and then let's check and make sure all the other doors are locked. I think the state has a responsibility not only to secure itself but also to make sure that other targets around the state are aware because if we harden all the targets, the bad actors will go somewhere else. They'll try to find targets that are easier to infiltrate. Yeah, those are the three things, okay, that I would like to get accomplished over the next few years."
For more information about Randy Ross visit his website Randy Ross for House District 48.
