At Thursday night's candidate forum, Ed Lockwood, the Democratic candidate running for House District 43 State Representative - said the key issue right now is the economy and jobs.
"We have people graduating college who need to find employment," Lockwood said at the forum. "(And) we all know the 50-plus neighbor down the street who lost their job during the recession."
Lockwood said getting employment for those people should be a focus moving forward.
"The observation I've made is there really is no one person to pull the whole economic district together," Lockwood said at Thursday night's forum. "Gary (Jungermann, presiding commissioner) goes down and talks to the legislatures, but do they really hear? We need somebody from here who is willing to pull it together and get the ball moving in the same direction and I would like to be that person."
When asked about his stance on Amendment 3 Lockwood described it as a "hot-button issue" in his home because his wife is a teacher. He said he is against the amendment because it shifts power away from the local education systems.
"It takes away local control," Lockwood said. "That's what we are all about. We want local control of our education system. Amendment 3 will take that away."
Amendment 3 will appear on November's ballot. The ballot language in part reads, "require teachers to be dismissed, retained, demoted, promoted and paid primarily using quantifiable student performance data as part of the evaluation system." According to he ballot language, it will also "prohibit teachers from organizing or collectively bargaining regarding the design and implementation of the teacher evaluation system."
Lockwood said Amendment 3 involves great cost.
"All of these tests that are mandated, somebody has to pay for them," Lockwood said. "And it's going to come out of tax dollars, out of state budget."