Mike Greer looks to flip District 2's Assembly seat Republican

The renaissance man's life experiences range from preaching the Book of Mormon to working graveyard shifts at 7/11 to rebuilding Paradise after the Camp Fire.

Greer got 27.6 percent of the vote in March’s primary, while the rest of the vote was mostly split between Chris Rogers and the other Democratic candidates. (Photo via Mike Greer, Instagram)

Who is Mike Greer?

When I met up with District 2 Assembly candidate Mike Greer in Ragle Ranch Park a couple weeks ago, he was donning the San Francisco Giants cowboy hat he wears everyday, fresh off a three-day several-stops-a-day tour of the county in his truck.

Ever since March, when Greer, a Republican, came out on top in the District 2 primary with nearly 27.6 percent of the vote, he has been on the road in that truck, campaigning as far south as Sonoma County and as far north as the Oregon Border. Greer says he will have gone 30,000 miles on that truck by November’s election.

As I would learn early on in our conversation, Greer has a diverse life experience, one that he says prepares him well for the task of being a California Assemblymember.

For starters, his ancestors were among the first Mormons to make the trek from the banks of the Mississippi River to Utah with handcarts. Greer remains a follower of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints today and went on missions around the country as a young adult to spread word about the Book of Mormon’s teachings.

When Greer was a teenager, his mother married a serviceman who was later deployed to Okinawa in during the Vietnam War. Greer tagged along, living in what was then an American territory for two years before moving to an Air Force base in South Dakota.

After high school, Greer helped build a nuclear power plant with his biological father. Then he worked in the iron business. Next the plastic injection molding business.

After stints back in Utah, and also Iowa and Nevada, Greer settled down in Gridley, CA. That’s where he began to sell life insurance.

But he didn’t like that, so he went to school to become a teacher, and used money he made working at an auto shop to pay for it, all while he and his wife were parenting five kids. But that money wasn’t enough, so he started a landscaping business, helped his friend out with his pest control business and worked midnight shifts at 7/11. Somewhere in there he served on the Gridley city council for two years.

After graduating college at the ripe age of 50, Greer spent 20 years establishing a special education program for 18-22 year-olds transitioning into adulthood in Sutter County. Greer represented a handful of Northern California’s rural counties in the California Teachers Association and was for a long time on the Board of Trustees for the Paradise Union School district.

He was there during the Camp Fire, which remains the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history. That fire caused 85 fatalities and displaced more than 50,000 people.

“We lost it all,” he recalls. “My daughter was a teacher at the high school, and she actually had to put her special education students into her car and drive through the flames.”

Despite losing his home in the fire, Greer remained steadfast in his efforts to rebuild the community. That started with the schools. Thankfully, the school busses, which in many ways served as the nucleus of the rebuilding efforts, managed to survive the fire.

“All of our busses would have been gone, but because of those busses, we were able to go ahead and transport kids down to Chico,” Greer said. “That decision to have school that day probably saved between 350 and 400 kid’s lives. Otherwise, their parents would have had the older siblings watching their kids [when the fire came through] with no way out.”

Greer recalls that while it took the city council of Paradise a month to reconvene, the school board did so two days following the end of the fire. The whole experience connected him to many of the most powerful politicians in the state and country, making his run for Assemblymember a possibility.

“I’m probably the only person you’ll meet that has a picture of me and President Donald Trump, and me and Governor Newsom,” Greer said. “We needed money, and so I did a lot of that stuff. That gave me a lot of insight into a number of things.”

One of those things, Greer recalls, was urgency in decision-making.

“When we have a problem,” he said, “how are we going to solve it? Are you going to sit there and talk it to death? Or, are you going to do it?”

The issues

Education

Given what he’s done for the past quarter-century, it is no surprise that Greer’s chief issue he is running on is education.

Greer sees a lot of fixable problems in the state’s current education system, and sees charter schools as a big way to enhance school choice throughout the district. Greer proposes the elimination of additional training for out-of-state teachers and the advent of local mentorship programs for new teachers to combat teacher shortages. He also advocates for higher, more equitable, teacher wages and for giving teachers a larger voice in the decision-making of a district over administrators.

“I think the real big thing is work conditions,” he said, referring to the success and wellbeing of teachers in the 2nd District’s many school districts. “Our universities are not training teachers in classroom management. One of the main reason teachers are leaving the field is because they don’t feel safe, they don’t get supported. They don’t know how to handle the students today.”

Immigration

Greer supports immigration, albeit with “closed” borders, and is supportive of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S.

“I don’t want to have immigrants coming in that don’t have some type of skill or ability to be able to earn a living,” said Greer. “Right now, that’s not the way it is, and that’s what has to be included in immigration reform. It’s caused a larger problem because we don’t vet anybody coming across. That’s where a lot of human trafficking is coming from—it’s not just something the media is making up.”

Energy and the environment

Greer also sees a more friendly and precise attitude towards loggers and fisherman as being key to both the local economy and environmental protection/safety, noting that the closing of local fisheries as a result of environmental regulations has hurt tourism and the safety of the North Coast.

“One of the reasons that we have these massive wildfires is we have not managed the forest,” he added.

And, as far as energy is concerned, Greer is worried that the North Coast will get screwed by where they put alternative energy sources such as wind turbines, and by who that energy is ultimately given to.

“Do we need to have alternative sources of energy,” he said. “Absolutely. I’m not saying I’m against wind power—it’s where they want to put it.”

“Well, let’s put them in L.A. in the middle of the city,” Greer continued. “See if you want your windmills down there.”

Furthermore, Greer sees the energy problem as one that trickles down and is the biggest factor contributing to struggling businesses and high costs.

“California can produce their own energy,” he said. “We have the natural gas to do so. It doesn’t matter about our carbon footprint. We can do everything we want. It’ll never overcome what’s happening in China and India. That’s just the way it is. Now, do we need to protect our environment? Absolutely. I firmly believe that if we come down on the cost of energy and start producing our own, that you’re going to start seeing those prices drop. Everything is trucked in, okay? When the price of gas goes up, drivers aren’t eating that. Companies aren’t eating it. It’s the consumer that pays for it. Every time our energy prices go up, the consumer is paying for it.”

Homelessness and housing

As far as homelessness is concerned, Greer places it in a category he calls “community safety,” since he says one of the major issues is that certain areas have become unsafe for the general population to be in.

In general, he claims that much of the worsening homelessness problem can be solved by putting money in the hands of nonprofits that offer achievable and measurable outcomes.

“I looked at the books of one nonprofit, and they had seven trucks,” Greer said. “They paid their maintenance man $275,000 a year for seven trucks. Give me a break, you know.”

“The California economy is based on small business, Greer continued, “but they’re destroying it with all the taxes and regulations that they’re doing and the fact that they’re not holding themselves accountable for the money that they lose or the money that they spend. It’s just like a student with an individualized education plan. We have to measure the outcome.”

In addition, Greer believes that unnecessary local and state regulations have made it more difficult to develop housing, and for the average citizen to be able to afford it.

“That’s one of the things they want to do here is increase the building fees. You think the builders are going to eat that? No, it’ll go right on top what the customer has to pay,” Greer said. “And that’s what’s happened for housing with every regulation they have whether it’s that you can’t have gas stoves and have to have the expensive electric stuff instead of the gas. We have too many people now that are right on the verge that they can barely afford rent, let alone buy a house. They’re the ones that are going homeless right now because of the economy.”

Getting out the vote

Greer says he got a 20 percent crossover vote in March’s primary, but he believes he needs a 35 percent crossover vote in November. This means he needs a chunk of those who traditionally think of themselves as Democrats to cast their ballot for him.

“I do a lot of door to door,” Greer said. “My goal is about 87 percent of the doors within the district. I go to any type of event, including Democrat ones. I was at Latino festival in Windsor, handed out all my, you know, brochures in Spanish, and talked to them. I talk to anybody. So I do a lot of that. I hold fundraising events for the money. Money is the big thing. Chris Rogers had, you know, has a ton of money—over $700,000—and I haven’t even hit the $50,000 mark. Okay, I got the most votes when they spent that $3.5 million fighting amongst themselves during the primary. I spent $17,000 and got the most votes with 20% crossover, because I do the work.”

“If you want things to continue,” Greer went on, “if you want things to keep going up in price, stay with the same horse, because it’s not going to change. If you want someone to be loud, consistent and on your side and voice your opinion, yeah, then you better change horses. And that’s pretty much what I’m talking about.”

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Editor’s note: We published an interview with Greer’s opponent, Chris Rogers, last week. You can read that article here.