Sandy Swint is focused on slowing the housing growth in rural San Benito County that she called haphazard.
The marketing professional who also has a background in bookkeeping and accounting also believes her career experience will help bring business to Hollister.
“And businesses will bring jobs to Hollister because if I can market San Benito County as a place that is desirable for them to work at and to build business at, then that will bring us more businesses and more jobs.”
But she doesn’t believe building more houses is the way to attract jobs.
“I have been watching all of the building that’s been going on, and to me it has seemed very haphazard,” she said. “And the real reason I think I wanted to run is because I think that San Benito County really needs to take a step back and I think we need to slow down our rural growth and get a hold of our roads and our infrastructure before we keep building in our rural areas.”
Swint is running for the District 4 county supervisor seat in San Benito County against incumbent Jerry Muenzer, Chief Financial Officer Robert Bernosky, Hollister Councilman Jim Gillio and Community Relations Director Elia Salinas.
Swint said she particularly wants to slow growth south of Union Road and east of Highway 25.
“We’re building hundreds and thousands of homes before fixing our roads first and without really looking at infrastructure at all,” she said.
As for her top issues, she had one subject to address.
“I think the biggest issue would be slowing down this growth that is just on this crazy train right now,” she said. “I think we need to concentrate our growth from the city first and kind of slow down our growth in the rural (areas). The reason that people live here is because of the beautiful rural setting that we live in. That’s why people live here. That’s why people visit here. We don’t want to become another suburb of San Jose.”
Even in the city, she wants the growth to happen at a slower pace.
“We need to maybe bring back the rule of one-acre plots in the city so we’re not just throwing track homes and becoming another suburb of Santa Clara and San Jose,” she said.
In addressing goals, she reiterated her stance on housing.
“Well, my biggest goal would be to slow down our growth,” she said. “It would be to slow down our growth and to focus on fixing our roads. There’s so many roads in our county that are not even being maintenanced.”
Swint mentioned housing approved along Fairview Road as a particular problem.
“That’s just going to bring more traffic to 25,” she said.
Candidate Profile
Name: Sandy Swint
Age: 40
Occupation: Marketing
Political Experience: None
To see video interviews with four candidates running for District 4 supervisor, see below. Incumbent Jerry Muenzer has not committed to an interview.
http://sanbenitolive.wpengine.com/election-2018-video-interviews-in-district-4-supervisor-race/
