FAIRFIELD – Democratic State Assemblymember Lori Wilson is facing a reelection challenge from three candidates this March as she seeks to be reelected following her first full term.
Two Republicans – former business executive David Ennis and real estate agent Wanda Wallis – are both challenging Wilson, as well as data and policy analyst Jeffrey Flack.
Each faces a potentially insurmountable challenge taking on Wilson, who has amassed considerable political and financial support and has risen to key leadership positions in the Assembly.
Scott Morris
The 11th District covers all of Solano County and small sections of Sacramento and Contra Costa counties. State Assembly members are elected for two-year terms. The top two candidates will advance to the general election in November, regardless of party affiliation.
The Vallejo Sun requested interviews with each of the candidates to better understand their experience, policies and positions. Flack did not respond to interview requests.
David Ennis
David Ennis is a civil engineer and former business executive who is running on a platform of fiscal discipline and infrastructure improvements. He spent years working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and says that experience will help him bring federal infrastructure funds into the region. He is running as a Republican and describes himself as "a fiscal conservative and a moderate on social issues."
Ennis said that he first moved to California in 1979 and lived here most of the time since then, including when he worked as vice president of sales and contracts for Zodiac Aerospace. Ennis returned to the East Coast after leaving that position, joined FEMA in 2017, then returned to the area to respond to wildfires in 2020.
Ennis said that his experience in business helped prepare him to hold elected office by giving him experience in managing a budget. He said that there are often big revenue swings in the state budget from year to year, and blamed this in part because wealthy people like Tesla CEO Elon Musk seek to move out of the region and take their businesses with them.
“That’s a pretty strong statement from someone with that much wealth and power,” Ennis said. "If we're going to take care of our population, we should be sure to take care of our population who pays the bills, and we're not doing that."
Instead, he says that California brings in people who are undocumented immigrants, don’t have a job, are homeless, or have mental health issues, and is “putting money into them.”
Ennis said that his experience with FEMA made him intrigued with municipal government. He responded to Hurricane Harvey in Texas and later spent two years in Puerto Rico with a private company. During that time, he said he applied for $1.8 billion in grants for infrastructure and disaster prevention measures.
But despite that he thinks that Solano County needs to invest in growth, he said he was ambivalent about the proposed California Forever project to build a new city between Travis Air Force Base and Rio Vista because the county is not well prepared for it and California Forever has not done a good job engaging residents.
"I don't know how it's going to work out. I know it's going to be contentious,” he said. "At some point [California Forever CEO Jan Sramek] might want to modify his stance and relax a little bit and let residents have more of a say in what's going on."
Ennis also said that he wants to roll back Proposition 47, a ballot initiative passed by voters in 2014 that reduced some nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors in an effort to reduce unconstitutional crowding in the state’s prisons. The reduction in penalties, he said, has made prosecutors less likely to file charges for thefts.
While the effort allows the state to save money on prisons, Ennis said that “it's just shifted the expense to the private businessperson.”
"The idea of letting them out free so we don't crowd up the prisons, it's a total duck,” he said.
But as the state faces looming budget deficits, Ennis argues that he can bring federal assistance to help with California's most intractable problems. "There is federal money available for well thought out long-term plans addressing homelessness, addressing housing, and addressing resilient infrastructure,” he said. “That's where I can excel."
Ennis has reported no campaign contributions so far this year. He is endorsed by the California Congress of Republicans.
Wanda Wallis
Wanda Walls is a real estate agent in Suisun City who says she never had aspirations to run for political office, but was dissatisfied with taxes and regulations and felt that legislators were infringing on the rights of people in the state. She is running as a Republican.
"I saw the climate was not for the people, but more the legislators put their will on us,” she said. “It's time for someone to step up and then maybe others will follow."
While she may not have political experience, Wallis argues that anyone who runs for office the first time didn’t have political experience then. She pointed to U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, who she said “was a bartender” before she was elected to office in 2018. (Ocasio-Cortez studied international relations and economics at Boston University and was a political activist before her election.)
She also says that she does not have aspirations for higher office, but said that she believes others in the government are interested in wealth and power.
"I saw a need, and I prayed about it, and I thought that God acknowledged that in me, because I started seeing things that pointed me in that direction," she said. "If four years from now, then I feel I have a call to do something else, and the door is open that way, I don't know. I could just do this job and retire. As far as I feel right now, that's fine with me."
Wallis emphasizes “parental rights” and said that she thinks that schools and the legislature have infringed on the rights of parents in various ways, such as by not notifying parents if a child is presenting as a different gender while at school.
She also referenced a 2022 bill by Sen. Scott Wiener which would have allowed children over 12 to receive the COVID-19 vaccine without their parents’ consent, but was withdrawn for lack of support, as well as legislation that allows minors to consent to their own mental health treatment if their provider determines that involving their parents would be inappropriate.
“Families come first and parents should be in charge of their own children, not the government,” she said.
She also said that she thought Proposition 47 should be rolled back and that criminals should face stiffer penalties for theft. She said district attorney’s offices should be given more resources to prosecute crimes.
“Crime has caused so much harm in our cities and no one seems to be legislating to do anything about crime,” she said. “Someone wants to put legislation in to give them voting rights? That's wrong.”
She also said that she thinks that there is not enough diversity of perspectives in the California Assembly, where Democrats have a 62-18 supermajority. She said that means that the perspectives of the people of California are not represented, despite that Democrats won elections against Republicans to be elected to power. She attributed that to Democrats being better funded and organized than Republicans in the state.
“Like minded people flock together, so you don't get to hear too much from the other side,” she said. “But there are clearly citizens on the other side.”
Wallis’s campaign has received $1,351 in contributions from 21 donors this year, as of her most recent campaign finance disclosures. She is endorsed by the California Republican Party, the Solano County Republican Central Committee, and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.
Lori Wilson
Assemblymember Lori Wilson overwhelmingly won a special election in 2022 to succeed Assemblymember Jim Frazier after he resigned. She was elected to a full two-year term later that year and is seeking a second full term in office.
Wilson has a background in accounting and was elected to the Suisun City Council in 2012. She was then elected mayor in 2018.
Wilson said that in the brief time that she’s been in the Assembly, she has had numerous significant accomplishments. For example, one of her first bills signed into law addressed racial disparities in access to resources for people with developmental disabilities, which followed recommendations of a state audit.
She said that as a Black woman in government, she wanted to make sure that "every single year we're going to carry a bill for the marginalized, the underrepresented, or the underserved."
She has also taken on leadership roles in the Assembly, becoming the assistant majority whip, then the majority whip and then being named the chair of the Transportation Committee.
"Each one of those are pretty big leadership roles in the assembly," Wilson said. “I’m proud to have demonstrated my leadership so quickly.”
And she did all of that while undergoing treatment for breast cancer. Wilson was diagnosed with cancer in early 2023. “It slowed me down a little bit,” she said. Her doctor had recommended she take 6 months off for treatment, but instead, she said that she agreed to only work as much as she could. "For my mental health I need to be as active and engaged as possible,” she said.
She missed committee meetings several times, but only missed four days of session, and didn’t miss any voting dates. She was in chemotherapy from May to July, started radiation treatment in August, then had surgery in September. By October, the doctors found she was cancer free.
“My staff couldn't keep up while I had cancer and they can't keep up with me now,” she said.
Wilson has also been an advocate for transgender rights in the Assembly, stemming in part from her personal experience, as her son is transgender.
"My child came out as trans in his teens, we had a healthy view of it,” she said. “We welcomed him as we did the day before he told us with open arms."
But she said that in supporting her son through his transition, she came to realize that others did not have the same experience of acceptance. “And that was really sad to me and I couldn't understand how parents could reject their children,” she said. “When your own mother or father or family member can't love and accept you, it's very traumatic."
One bill that Wilson introduced, AB 957, would have instructed courts to consider affirmation of a child’s gender identity for the purposes of custody and visitation, but was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, drawing ire from LGBTQ advocacy groups.
In a statement on the veto, Newsom argued that the same reasoning could be used against marginalized groups depending on who was in power.
"I understood his intent but I didn't agree with it,” Wilson said. “I wanted to make sure as these kids are being tossed to and fro, that the judge when thinking about their well-being would take that into consideration."
Wilson said that transportation is particularly important to her, and said that as numerous public transit agencies are facing a fiscal cliff in the face of declining ridership after the COVID-19 pandemic, the legislature needs to address that, particularly because public transit agencies are crucial during natural disasters and other emergencies.
Wilson has amassed a considerable campaign warchest, with $603,774 raised for her reelection campaign so far. Her largest contributors include California State Council of Laborers PAC, Centene Management Company LLC and Its Affiliate Health Net, the Pechanga Band of Indians, the California Teachers Association, Nike, and the California Nurses Association.
THE VALLEJO SUN NEWSLETTER
Investigative reporting, regular updates, events and more
