Richard Holober’s top priority is to get County budget costs under control.

Click here to read Richard Holober's 6 Point Plan to get San Mateo County's budget back on track.

Tough times call for seasoned leadership. Richard has an unmatched 17 year track record in elected office balancing complex budgets while maintaining essential services with fewer funds.

As President and Trustee of the San Mateo County Community College District, he carefully examined spending, reduced expenses and eliminated waste. Holober protected classroom education and avoided faculty layoffs at College of San Mateo, Cañada College and Skyline College. Today, with 20% less state funding, student enrollments are booming, and our Peninsula colleges deliver quality education and job training to 42,000 local residents each year.

Richard spearheaded the College District’s “green building” practices which protect our environment and reduce energy consumption, saving taxpayers $1 million annually in energy costs. Richard will put his 17 years of budget experience to work for San Mateo County, preserving vital public safety, health and senior services, while eliminating wasteful spending and reducing top-heavy overstaffing.

As an elected Board President of a college district that is the Peninsula’s premier career training agency, and as a labor advocate for two decades, Richard Holober has improved the standard of living for working Californians.

Last year, State Treasurer Bill Lockyer appointed Richard to a Blue Ribbon Commission to save jobs at the Toyota NUMMI plant in Fremont. Richard met with Toyota leaders in Japan, and urged them to retool the plant for green transportation manufacturing. Soon after the delegation returned, Toyota announced that it was teaming with Tesla Motors to build new electric vehicles at the NUMMI plant. Nearly 100 auto workers have been rehired, and prospects are good for thousands more green tech jobs.

Richard supported the creation of the biotech careers initiative at Skyline College which has retrained hundreds of laid-off airport workers who found new careers at local biotech firms. With Richard’s leadership, Skyline College, College of San Mateo, and Cañada College provide career training in over eighty fields, including nursing, construction trades, computer sciences and health care.

When the minimum wage fell to a 40 year low, Richard founded the Livable Wage Coalition, and led the successful Proposition 210 campaign that raised the minimum wage and lifted two million hard working Californians up from poverty.

As a parent, Richard was active in his children's public schools. He won election to the Millbrae School Board in 1993, where he supported efforts to reduce class size and served on a State Board of Education curriculum committee. In 1997 Richard won a countywide election to the San Mateo County Community College Board. He was re-elected in 2001, 2005 and 2009. Richard is serving his third term as President of the College Board.

Richard has made sure that College of San Mateo, Caňada College and Skyline College rank among the very top in rates of certificate completion and transfer to four year institutions.

Education is under attack as never before. Since the start of 2009, Sacramento politicians have cut public schools, colleges and universities by over sixteen billion dollars. That means overcrowded classrooms, tens of thousands of teachers fired, and hundreds of thousands of fewer admissions to our state’s community colleges. UC has reduced freshman admissions by ten percent, and Cal State University enrolled 35,000 fewer students in 2010.

While others watch from the sidelines, Richard Holober is fighting back to restore school funding. As Executive Director of the Consumer Federation of California, Richard works for budget and tax justice. He signed the Prop 25 ballot statement, which voters approved in November, and which will allow adoption of a state budget by a simple majority.

Locally, Richard is ensuring that our three community colleges offer affordable, accessible educational opportunity during the current hard times. Working collaboratively with faculty and staff, the college district has minimized the impact of Sacramento-imposed cuts on our core academic and vocational programs. Our community colleges' enrollments have soared. Richard is keeping the doors open for students shut out of other institutions of higher education.

As Executive Director of the Consumer Federation of California, Richard Holober played a pivotal role in winning the nation’s strongest financial privacy law and regulations preventing identity theft. For years, privacy protection bills were crushed in the Assembly under the weight of campaign contributions from giant banks and credit card companies. Richard took on the crusade and founded Californians for Privacy Now. He built a coalition, engaged thousands of consumers, and forced the banking industry to agree to the nation’s best financial privacy law.

Richard has led efforts to crack down on corporate fraud, to ban toxics from children's products, and to strengthen food and drug safety laws. He signed the No on Prop 16 ballot statement, and helped defeat PG&E's $45 million campaign to preserve a monopoly that keeps electric bills sky high.

Last year, Richard helped to lead the campaign that stopped auto insurance company efforts to raise rates on motorists with perfect driving records. He has helped lead political reform efforts to reduce the corrosive influence of corporate campaign dollars in Sacramento.

Richard campaigned to hold polluters responsible for toxic clean up and took the fight to the State Capitol. He’s worked to strengthen pesticide regulation and to promote development of alternative fuel vehicles. With his leadership, the San Mateo Community College District is recognized as a statewide leader in energy conserving “green building” construction.

Richard worked closely with environmental groups to stop Maxxam Corporation from cutting down old growth redwood forests on the North Coast. He sponsored legislation to stop polluters from hushing up vital life-saving information about environmental contamination. He managed the successful No on Proposition 10 campaign, defeating a $23 million advertising blitz by a Texas oil tycoon designed to keep California dependent on fossil fuels.

Richard's vision is of a Bay Area that combines the creation of green tech jobs with environmental preservation.

As a leading voice for consumers and as an advocate for the California Nurses Association, Richard has been at the forefront in the fight for universal health care coverage. Richard helped to double the number of registered nurses trained at San Mateo Community Colleges. He supported laws that increased inspections of nursing homes and that cracked down on elder abuse. He has crusaded for prescription drug price controls, and for HMO patient rights.

America spends 17% of our economy on health care, more than any other industrial democracy, yet we have 51 million uninsured. Tens of millions more are underinsured, with big insurance co-payments and out of pocket costs for care. Richard believes that health care is a human right, not a privilege. He wants to build on recently enacted national health care reform, and supports creating a health insurance plan available to all, modeled on Medicare, with patient choice of doctor and hospital.