There’s no doubt that Tracy City Councilman Bob Elliott has a resume that qualifies him as a suitable candidate for the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors.
A retired United States Army Colonel and Special Forces soldier with 30 years of military experience, Elliott – who was deployed on diplomatic assignments during his Army tenure to United States embassies in Tokyo and Seoul – got his education at West Point and has had a successful career in nuclear energy with both General Electric and his current employer, Westinghouse.
He’s hoping to parlay his experience into the Fifth District seat that will be vacated by Supervisor Leroy Ornellas who terms out in November and is seeking a position in the California State Senate.
The Fifth District includes parts of Manteca, Tracy, and Ripon.
“It’ll be a natural extension of my lifetime service,” Elliott said of the seat that he’s seeking at the candidates night meeting held by the South San Joaquin Republicans last week. “I’ve built upon and served my country and now I want to build upon and serve my community.”
Elliott laid out three main focal points of his campaign – public safety, economic development, and the preservation of agricultural land and rights for farmers, ranchers and growers in San Joaquin County – and hit on several ways that he plans on instituting each of those if elected.
First and foremost on his list is public safety.
“As County Supervisor, my primary concern will be ensuring adequate funding for public safety,” Elliott said is a campaign statement. “Our Sherriff’s Department and District Attorney’s office are on the front line in addressing crime and gang problems in our County. We need to do everything we can to ensure our communities are safe – potential employers won’t bring new jobs to communities they view as unsafe.”
The addition of government regulation and spending is also something that he railed against while laying out his campaign platform. Letting local economies take care of their own problems, he said, is something that should be standard operating procedure.
“We can grow our way out of a recession,” Elliott said. “We don’t need to the government to bail us out and put us even deeper into debt.”
His comments received a round of applause from those in attendance.
Also on list was describing his agricultural platform which, he said, centers around providing adequate, quality water to those who need it to produce the crops and products in San Joaquin County’s biggest economic category. He opposes the peripheral canal that he said could devastate farmers.
Elliott and his wife Debbie have three daughters: Judy, Kathie and Erika; two sons-in-law: Glyn and Scott; and seven grandchildren: Huw, Kyle, Anna, Evan, Kara, Kallie and Ryan.
