Candidates speak out in Assembly Republican primary races
Area voters will have choices to make when it comes to who will represent the area in Madison next January.
As part of the recent redistricting, Taylor County was moved from what was once the 87th district and the county has been split between the redrawn 69th and 68th Districts.
The 69th District includes the city and town of Medford, Stetsonville and the towns of Browning, Goodrich, Deer Creek and Little Black. The district extends to include the Athens area of Marathon County, all of Clark County and portions of Chippewa County. Lori Voss of Abbotsford and Karen Hurd who moved to northern Clark County are running for the seat in the August 13 Republican Primary. The winner of the primary will go on to face Democrat Roger Halls of Stanley in the November general election.
The remainder of Taylor County as well as Price County, Rusk County and the rural portions of Chippewa County are in the 68th Assembly District. Rob Summerfield of Bloomer and Rusk County resident Cliff Taylor are facing off in the August 13 Republican Primary.
The winner of the primary will go on to face Democrat Richard Pulcher in the November general election.
The Star News interviewed each of the four assembly candidates asking them a series of questions about their goals if elected to the legislature, below are the questions and responses. The responses have been edited for clarity and space.
69th Assembly District Candidates Lori Voss
Lori Voss cites a long history of service to the community as a business owner, EMT and in local government.
Voss has owned the Hawkeye Dairy Store the past 28 years and is a lifelong resident of the area growing up on a dairy farm in the Colby area.
She has served more than 14 years as an EMT with the Central Fire and EMS.
In local government she served as Abbotsford Mayor for four years and served on the city council for a total of 14 years. She was a member of the Colby/Abbotsford Police Commission, the Clark County Mayor’s Association, Central Fire and EMS Board. She was also a 4-H Leader and served in the Wisconsin Army National Guard.
She has 2 grown children. Her daughter lives in the Curtiss area and her son lives in Superior.
What do you see as the most pressing issue impacting Wisconsin and how as a legislator would you address it?
What I see my window to the world is being in small business and being on ambulance for fire EMS and police is the drugs we see in the area. I was the EMT on scene for the latest stabbings, and that's really affected our community. We've seen other horrific stuff, drugs, assaults you name it and I just think we need to do more. We need to be more vigilant on vetting people coming into this country and closing that border. I have nothing against somebody that wants to move here for a better lifestyle, but it needs to be done legally. They need to be vetted.
What is your level of independence within your party caucus? Would you be willing to go against your caucus and leadership if you felt it was in the best interest of your district?
Absolutely. I have never been a yes man, since I was in the military, and I'm not going to start now. One thing I'd also like to add is these wind turbines and solar fields, people don't want to live next to them and we've done a survey.
I've been involved with Farmland First since they started off, and I don't understand all the government thinks you can keep an open window and flood everybody in here and then use our precious farmland. What are you supposed to grow crops and raise animals on?And I'm for our constitutional freedoms in smaller government, when I was mayor we had to spend over a $100,000 on a turtle fence. What a waste of money.
What should the state’s role be in promoting residential and economic growth particularly in rural communities?
I think the state needs to be less involved in rural areas. Landowners, they know more about their situation in land than what somebody looking out of a Madison window knows. I'm for less government and let farmers farm.
We are seeing medical services being scaled back and centralized across the state. How do you think the state should address the resulting coverage gaps?
From what my understanding is when they put in the Obamacare act it limited private doctors from owning hospitals. . . . I think that's silly. Oakleaf would have purchased the hospitals over in the Eau Claire area, for instance. And I don't know why that should be that way.
I mean, if you don't want doctors to own hospitals and a dentist shouldn’t own dentist's office and attorneys shouldn't own law offices, that's just silly thinking. They know their practice better than anybody else knows their practice. They know how to do patient care they know what the needs are just like an attorney knows the needs of his building and a dentist knows the needs of his building. I have no issues with doctors owning hospitals.
Why should someone choose you as the candidate?
Well, I'm a local native to this area. I didn't just move here, my opponent moved here. I have a business here. I'm solid, I've always been “Here she is.”
She's announced she's now had two businesses, and now she opened a third one in Fall Creek. If she's committed to this area, why didn't she open the third in Clark County, Taylor County, or Marathon?
I'm a native girl and a hard worker. I've always held 2 and 3 jobs my entire life and work hard for my children. Through college they paid for their own college education. And I don't believe in the handouts from the federal government right now for that college stuff. I don't like the indoctrination of children in school.
Life is hard enough for kids. You teach them, he and she and now you're gonna teach all this other stuff. Life is hard enough. It's just hard enough without putting more on our children. Our children are our future.
Karen Hurd
Karen Hurd was born in Houston, Texas in 1957. She is married with 5 children, and 5 grandchildren. She graduated Kirkwood High School (Kirkwood, Missouri), 1976; B.A. in Spanish, Truman State University, 1980; Diploma in Comprehensive Nutrition, Huntington College of Health Sciences, 1994; M.S. in Biochemistry, University of Saint Joseph, 2017.
She is the owner of Karen R. Hurd Nutritional Practice and has worked as a K–12 substitute teacher with the Fall Creek School System.
She served as U.S. Army Captain, Military Intelligence from 1980–84. Where she received the Army Commendation Medal, Air Assault Badge and Expert Marksmanship Badge.
She has been a member of a number of civic organizations and boards including: Fall Creek Valley Housing/Fall Creek Retirement Housing (board member, former president); American Legion Post 376 (color guard commander, chaplain); Fall Creek Public Library Trustee; Fall Creek Lions Club; Fall Creek Historical Society.
She was elected as a Fall Creek Village Trustee in 2021 and was elected to the elected to Assembly in 2022.
What do you see as the most pressing issue impacting Wisconsin and how as a legislator would you address it?
The worst issue is inflation and a lot of this comes from a federal level. So there's only so much we can do at the state level, the first thing is lower taxes.
If that's something we can do at the state level, we can lower the amount of taxes that the state charges. What it does is it puts more money in the individual's pocket so that they can better deal with the inflation, because things do cost more and then also when you lower the taxes, then, companies can survive better because you saw through COVID how many companies close. You'll have companies closing and our economy is very dependent upon having money available for people to buy products.
If you have more money in your pocket then you can go buy the product if the company is selling and then the company can stay alive and the company stays alive and they can hire employees. It is all connected. So the main piece is lowering taxes helps the whole thing.
What is your level of independence within your party caucus? Would you be willing to go against your caucus and leadership if you felt it was in the best interest of your district?
Absolutely. I already have, look at last session. I was a chair of a task force on childhood obesity. If you are not a Republican, any bill you introduce will not go anywhere. If you're a Democrat, it's dead on arrival and I had in my task force, a Democrat whose name is Alex Joel, this representative Alex, he came up with an outstanding idea and he said “Karen would you introduce this idea?” I said, “Alex, this is excellent. We need to pass this into law” and he said it won't go anywhere, you know that because you'd have to have a Republican sponsor, and I said no, you came up with the idea, this is your work, you're the one who's done all the research to find out all this information.
The bill was to encourage food stamps recipients to access fresh produce at farmers markets by giving them double stamp dollars for those purchases.
What I did is I went to speaker Vos and I said, I have a Democrat colleague in my committee and he's come up with this idea and explained to him. And I said, I would like for him to be there. I can be a co-author you know that's what we call a second, I'll be the second and support it, but it would be a Democrat bill and democrats will vote on it. He agreed, he said, go with it, I agree. And so then I had to convince the rest of my caucus who had a vote for it, and then I had to go find a senator that took a lot of work, I went to several senators, because you have to have a senate lead on it too. That had to be a Republican, you know, and so I found a senator.
I went against my caucus, and we work in a bipartisan way, and it passed both houses and was signed into law by a governor but that's the way it's supposed to work. It was awesome.
What should the state’s role be in promoting residential and economic growth particularly in rural communities?
We have to be involved. We have to promote agriculture, we are big agriculture industry and forest industry. … What I've done is I was the one who put forth a budget motion to increase the Wisconsin exports.
We have agricultural exports. And we are exporting to 142 different countries. There’s different products that we send and in Australia, their favorite cheese is mozzarella made not from Italy, but from Wisconsin, they love our products.
See 69th DISTRICT on page 14 What I did is I put in a budget motion, because we needed more money because we have to advertise in these foreign countries, so we only had a certain amount of money. It was only $800,000 in the budget to be able to increase Wisconsin agricultural exports. I asked for a million dollars for the first year in the biennial budget, so the first year of this last budget and then a million for the second so $2 million increases, and it passed, it did get approved.
When we increased it to $800,000 we increased by 7%, our agricultural exports, which makes money for Wisconsin. It makes money for our farmers. It makes for the people here.
We are seeing medical services being scaled back and centralized across the state. How do you think the state should address the resulting coverage gaps?
We lost St. Joseph’s Hospital (Eau Claire), we lost Sacred Heart.
We got a whole hour notice that they were closing because I'm actually the 68th district representative right now and then I represent a little bit more than half of Clark County. I represent where this happened and Hospital Sisters Health system, they called us the legislators one hour before they made it public. That’s all the time we had Rep. Summerfield. He and I and Sen. James Clint Moses, we got together and we came up with a bill and we got that through in 11 days and I will tell you we were up to midnight and 2 a.m. in the morning talking to our fellow legislators to pass this, you know, because they're like, are you kidding? We're going to bail out Chippewa Valley.
[Hurd explained that without emergency rooms, people would have to drive to Bloomer for care which would overwhelm that hospital. The bills secured funds to maintain emergency medical services in the region.] We got the bill passed in 11 days, and it was an incredible work, but because we had to convince all of our Republican colleagues who would sit in each office to listen to me. We’re only using the $15 million that was going to Sacred Heart anyway to increase mental health services, it's not any new money.
I have spent a lot of time at the Wisconsin Hospital Association working on how are we going to address this problem.
[Hurd spoke of the need for rural healthcare access rather than having people needing to drive long distances for care. She gave the example of a child with a broken arm having to travel a long way to get care and said they are working on grant programs to get doctors, nurses and other medical professionals to come to rural areas.] We will help you with your education, if you will sign a contract that you will serve in rural Wisconsin for a certain number of years after you graduate. We’re trying to do incentives like that to keep things in the area and hospitals themselves and trying to keep those open.
I've actually got meetings set up with the Wisconsin Hospital Association on strategy and about what bills do I need to introduce to be able to fix this? So we're going through that now.
Why should someone choose you as the candidate?
Okay, that is a very good question. First of all, it's because I have 2 years of experience and somebody said to me yesterday, well, yeah, but we need new blood. You've got one term.
I said I understand about term limits, I'm not against term limits at all, I said, but one term, you don't terminate somebody after 1 term, because it takes a term to learn.
There's a learning curve, so I have experience and as far as new blood sure, after I've been, you know, after I've done several terms, because if you get rid of somebody every 2 years, then nothing gets done.
I've been considered a leader in the legislator because there's no other freshman [legislator] that did as much in fact, the Dairy Business Association gave me a legislative excellence award in June because I did so much for the Dairy Business Association. I helped with the meat processing grants and with the dairy grants.
Also WISCAP, which is Wisconsin Community Action Programs, they awarded me the William Steiger award as the Republican legislator who did the most for community action and low-income families. I also got a call from the Wisconsin Towns Association, because I've done a huge amount of work for the towns. [Hurd received a legislative award from the Wisconsin Towns Association.] [Hurd also spoke of her service in the military and the leadership this taught her and as an author who has published three books and writes an historical fiction column for six local newspapers.] I'm endorsed by the Wisconsin Rights to Life, the National Rifle Association, the Dairy Business Association,
