Congressman Ami Bera, right, and his staff member Josh Gumacal, middle, talk with Tri-Communities Lunch Bunch attendees and organizers at Brookfields Restaurant on Madison Avenue in Sacramento on Aug. 7.

SACRAMENTO COUNTY, CA (MPG) - Congressman Ami Bera, M.D., spoke for about 30 minutes Aug. 7 about the state of the country and the county at the informal monthly Tri-Communities Lunch Bunch meeting in North Highlands and then answered questions for about 25 minutes.

Bera represents California’s Sixth Congressional District, which includes suburbs of Sacramento and incorporated suburban sections of the city. Major neighborhoods and cities include Arden Arcade, Carmichael, Citrus Heights, Fair Oaks, North Natomas, Rancho Cordova, Rio Linda and South Natomas.

Bera discussed an array of topics, including education, legislation, the economy, housing, the COVID-19 pandemic, artificial intelligence, homelessness and food scarcity.

“There was this promise of higher education,” Bera said, “that if you got the skills, the grades, desire; cost wasn’t going to be a factor.”  

While the California school system has served the state well, Bera said, his education was better than what today’s students receive. Bera, a life-long Californian, said that he lived a simpler life growing up than today’s youth. 

“I look at kids today and it seems like life is a lot more hectic and complicated,” Bera said. “And I don’t know that it has to be that way.”

Bera said that it’s possible that the State of California made a mistake by not opening the schools as soon as possible during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“No one’s going to disagree that our kids were impacted by having schools shut down,” Bera said. 

On another topic, Sacramento Area Creeks Council President Crystal Tobias spoke to the congressman about the efforts taken to clean the waterways and homeless encampments. Since January 2023, Tobias said, millions of pounds of trash and thousands of needles have been cleaned up from the waterways. 

“This population needs somewhere to go that’s not a $500,000 apartment,” Tobias said. 

Bera said that there seems to be a set of rules for the homeless and a different set of rules for the rest of the residents. Residents, such as a congressman’s aide, can hardly afford a one-bedroom apartment, so giving someone such an apartment is not common sense, Bera said. 

“Don’t expect the federal government to push money out any time soon, so we’re going to have to solve this ourselves,” Bera said. 

It’s not just housing, Bera said. People need to be met where they are and provided with wrap-around services, meaning extra care, monitoring, assistance and resources; otherwise, the alternative is jail.

He said that some rules (not laws) need to be broken to help people and “we need to be creative,” meaning that the hypothetical rule book governing homelessness does not permit the tough love that fosters creative solutions for such complex situations.

Sober model housing, providing work and trade skills are some of the suggestions Bera made, contrasting the “rules” he said are set by members of his party, the Democrats, such as safe injection sites and half-a-million-dollar housing units for the homeless.

Concerns about children’s education during school and after they graduate prompted Bera to cite a statistic saying the college graduate unemployment rate was around 20%, whereas the unemployment rate for individuals with a trade or vocational certificate was 2%. 

Bera said that not every student’s dream is to get into college and that science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) is used throughout different trades and industries. His junior high classmates weren’t fond of STEM, Bera said, but used math and science to create works of art in the different shop classes.

Some community members were concerned about the fate of teachers in the State of California as well as the state of special education, with one member anecdotally citing an increase in demand for paraeducators and a lack in fair compensation. 

“Let the teachers teach,” Bera said. 

Teachers are often disrespected and/or punished, Bera said, for attempting to discipline the small percentage of students who disrupt class and take away from the learning experience. It’s a small fraction of parents who don’t do their due diligence raising and disciplining their children, he said, and teachers pay the price. 

Bera said that the Trump administration’s Big Beautiful Bill is expected to cut funding for education in areas such as school lunches.

“It’s about to get really bad,” Bera said, citing inefficient processes that create waste, such as discarding unused food and creating legislation against the redistribution of that food to people or families that need it. He said that we need to “break some rules” because “the next decade is going to be hard” if policies don’t reflect the desired outcomes. These processes don’t help teachers lead, Bera said, and they don’t address hunger. 

On another topic, Bera said that 70% of state workers are telecommuting and not working in state-owned buildings. The workers “most likely won’t be coming back, leaving a void in tax revenue with those buildings sitting empty or close to it,” Bera said.

While the quality of life might be better telecommuting, there are still issues to address, Bera said. 

Community members addressed the plethora of vacant or abandoned lots becoming an eyesore throughout the Sacramento region. The vacant lot owners are usually from the Bay Area, Bera said, and community members should rally together to address local agencies about regular code enforcement, cracked concrete, dilapidated structures, overgrown vegetation, fire hazards and any other issues.

“The point is to force the owner to sell, build or do something with the property,” Bera said.

Fixing this gap in revenue requires more community involvement, more festivals and bringing the area to life, making it an irresistible plot of land for developers, Bera said.

Addressing national politics, Bera said that Congress “isn’t quite fun at the moment.” He pointed out that much of what goes on today is “small, petty politics, when the country is at a point where it really needs to move forward.”

What keeps him going, Bera said, is the legislative work that is done locally in Sacramento, such as the housing developments and highway projects along Highway 50. 

“Looking at the big picture, President Donald Trump is not your conventional president,” Bera said as a compliment to the president’s apparent rebranding of the political landscape with his comments and actions. Conventionally, presidents lean into their brand, not uproot it.

Topics such as pronouns are not for Congress to legislate, Bera said, and there are more important issues to legislate, such as studying the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and artificial intelligence. 

“We have bigger things to be talking about and debating,” Bera said. “The world is changing rapidly and we should be talking about how we avoid World War III with China.”

Discussing concerns related to the importance, utility, severity and dangers of artificial intelligence, Bera said it’s “here to stay and we need to learn how to use it.” He pointed out that children will grow up with the technology in their homes and schools. 

“Because AI is going to make AI exponentially better, quicker,” Bera said. “We have about a six-to-eight-month advantage over China, so that’s a lot of what we’re focused on in the intelligence committee.”

Bera was previously Sacramento County’s chief medical officer and a University of California, Davis associate dean for admissions.