Matt Mahan

But my sense is that there is a fear of simply returning to the era of mass incarceration and whether or not

I don't want to ascribe motives to that, but look, the truth is we need our government to be willing to do hard things.

And the hard thing here is to prioritize the spending in the budget to build treatment, operate treatment, and when necessary, require that people at a minimum come indoors into a safe environment.

That's really hard.

That means budget trade-offs.

That which means upsetting certain highly organized interests in Sacramento who like the budget priorities the way that they are currently aligned.

That means actually getting people into drug courts and making those drug courts work.

That means a modest and I think appropriate

suspension of certain liberties to sell someone.

You can't just use drugs in public endlessly.

You've got to go into treatment.

There's a whole set of things that have to change, and change is hard.

And we all in our elected offices, I guess the most charitable view is we all pick our battles.

We all choose

which fights to take on.

I don't know deep down where the governor's core beliefs are on that set of issues I just outlined, but it's certainly not an easy thing to do.

I give him credit though for bringing forward ideas like care court and Prop 1 and supporting conservatorship reform.

My bigger issue, particularly as a former CEO, is really around execution.

I think my job

coming in as our next governor would really be to build on and follow through on these ideas.