ELLY GRIMM

   • Leader & Times

Election time is just around the corner, and one of the offices up for election is Kansas Treasurer.

Juan Luengo is among the candidates for that office, and as he tells it, he is rather new to the political scene.

“My work in politics began about four years ago. I’d gone to a meeting, and then I came out being the Hispanic caucus chair, and I've been doing that for the past four years,” Luengo said. “I've been involved in other advocacy work for mental illness. I've been involved in family court reform. I've partnered up with unions in the private sector to do some advocacy and changing of certain laws that will better help the business community too, so I would say a lot of that experience also stems from my 20 years of risk management experience in insurance.”

Like other candidates for this year’s elections, Luengo said recent events inspired him to run for office this time around.

“It was just looking at what's happening throughout the state, and I decided I wanted to help make some changes,” Luengo said. “I'm a single parent of a 9-year-old, and his generation is going to have it a lot tougher than what we've had. I’ve also been looking at the tough business environment as well. Small business doesn't have a seat at the table, it's always a big player, but the largest employer in the U.S. is small business. We're also forgetting about our senior citizens when it comes to property taxes – I’ve got elderly parents, they've contributed to the U.S. economy, and just because they're retired, that doesn't mean we get to forget about them, so part of what we're building through our campaign is forward thinking leadership, because Kansas has to move forward. I think we're stagnant, and there are a lot of opportunity right now for Kansas to grow. If you look at the next 10 to 12 years, there’s going to be about $85 trillion worth of projects, we don't have the labor to tackle all of them. If we look at the students we have coming out of college, there are opportunities in the trades, there are opportunities in other industries, and if we don't start working on this now, it’ll be very difficult for Kansas to even compete later on. I'm a business guy, and when you have an opportunity sitting in front of you of this nature, you look at the pros and cons, and then you eventually pull the trigger. This time, I pulled the trigger, because if we don't do it now, we might not have this opportunity later, or it might be a lot messier later if the opportunity comes around again.”

Luengo said he has multiple goals should he ultimately be elected to the office.

“We have five pillars we're running on. One is education, because there do need to be some changes made there,” Luengo said. “We're also looking at bringing capital to Main Street to help farmers, to help small business service providers, manufacturers. We're also looking at establishing an economic council that would help guide us through policy. We're also looking at property tax relief – unclaimed property is one of the many things the treasurer's office does, but we also want to be able to advocate to have a deferral program for property taxes for seniors. Unless that formula is redone again, you're pricing out homeowners in the senior category from the home they’ve been in for 30 or 40 years. At the end of the day, I feel after everything that they've done, especially that Baby Boomer generation, that's sour. And if you look at what happened in Jackson County two years ago, where the increments went anywhere between 50 percent to 110 percent in property taxes, there were a lot of people who were close to losing their homes, and a lot of people did. So why would we want to repeat the same mistake?”

Luengo also offered encouragement for constituents to get in touch with him with questions and concerns.

“This campaign has been all about connecting with people, because having their input is going to help us improve public policy. If we have bad public policy, everybody's affected. If we had great public policy, we wouldn't have a lot of the issues that we have right now,” Luengo said. “We can't just ram legislation through and then hope for the best. Our current legislators have to sit and look hard at their policies, because their policies are part of the reason we're in our current situation in the first place, and it's frustrating. Anyone wanting to get in touch with me can also visit our social media pages or visit our Web site, jcfortreasurer..com, which has a contact page there. We’ll also be doing online live town hall meetings, so if anyone wants to watch any of those, they can, and those will also be on our YouTube channel later on. I want to connect with everyone possible, so if anyone has any questions or concerns, I am happy to talk.”

Overall, Luengo said, he is ready to get to work.

“Hispanics are also a large part of this campaign and the overall big picture – if you look at the Hispanic community, it's a $4 trillion economy. If Latinos were an economy by itself, we surpass Germany,” Luengo said. “I encourage Latinos to come out to every town hall meeting to communicate what their pains are. People also need to understand the treasurer's office is limited in certain areas of what we can and can't do, but if people don't come out and come to our town hall meetings or events and express their thoughts or concerns, we can't affect change or be that advocate for you. If you want us to be an advocate, come out, so search us on our Web site, go to our social media, and get in contact with us.”