Challenger says incumbent not conservative enough
Education, jobs and shrinking government are the three planks in Jayson Peters’ Senate District 3 campaign platform. He also thinks it’s important for someone to defeat incumbent Sen. Bruce Tutvedt, R-Kalispell.
A Flathead native, Peters’ parents ran a gas station on U.S. 2 in Batavia, west of Kalispell. He graduated from Flathead High School in 1990 and went on to Arizona State University, where he graduated with degrees in psychology and business in 1995.
After working in the Midwest and South Dakota, Peters returned to the Flathead in 1996 and got involved with the Hampton Inn project in Kalispell, serving as a construction and sales manager. After that, he worked for Semitool for 10 years and then Applied Materials after Ray Thompson sold Semitool.
“Applied Materials was a good job, but then Ray offered me a job with Sykes,” Peters said. “It was a choice between corporate or down-home.”
Thompson, who’s been a major donor in local and state politics, bought the Sykes grocery store and cafe in Kalispell after selling Semitool and restored the building. Peters has been the store’s general manager for three years. He’s also involved with the Montana Firearms Institute, along with Sen. Ryan Zinke, R-Whitefish, and Whitefish city councilor Chris Hyatt, in promoting local manufacturing.
Peters is no stranger to Flathead politics. At 28 years old, he was the youngest person to serve on the Kalispell City Council, completing a four-year term from 2001-2004. He’s also served as campaign advisers for various city council, commissioner and sheriff races.
“Senate District 3 is one of the largest senate districts in the state,” he said. “It will be like a commissioner race.”
The district includes rural areas south of Columbia Falls, rural areas surrounding Whitefish, and a swath of land extending from Olney to Marion. Peters said he and a third Republican challenger, Rollan Roberts II, entered the race to defeat Tutvedt, a West Valley farmer and rancher who is the Montana Senate’s current President Pro Tempore.
“I’ve known Bruce and his family a long time, but he’s not conservative enough,” Peters said.
According to Peters, Tutvedt carried a bill in the last legislative session that raised property taxes.
“They’re projecting a $300 million surplus,” he said. “I don’t know if I believe that — they play a shell game down there.”
Peters also said Tutvedt voted against a bill that would have required schools to notify parents about plans to teach sex education. Peters said he’s not against providing sex education in public schools, but he wanted parents to have the option of saying no and teaching it themselves at home.
A product of public schools himself, Peters said he’s not totally against public education, but he’d like to see more choices offered. Public K-12 schools are an “OK cookie-cutter program for about 70 percent of kids,” he said, but parents who want to send their children to private schools shouldn’t have to pay both tuition and taxes.
“They need some type of tax credit,” he said.
Peters said Democratic control of the State Land Board is one reason Montana’s natural resources are not being used to create jobs.
“It’s too skewed for Democrats — the land board has been controlled by Democrats for eight years, we had a Democratic governor, and we have two Democratic U.S. Senators,” he said.
Montana regulations and taxes are keeping oil drilling in North Dakota, he said, and not in Montana.
“We’re not a pro-business state,” he said.
Peters also said he wants to reduce the size of state government, noting that 900 additional state government jobs were created under Schweitzer.
“They forget that they work for us and the natural resources belong to the citizens,” he said. “I want to take private enterprise ideas to Helena and bring state government into check.”