Oct 31, 2018 6 min read

A local real estate attorney is challenging incumbent Republican state Sen. Camera Bartolotta in Tuesday’s election for the 46th Senatorial District seat.

It’s the first time Democrat James Craig, 29, of North Strabane Township, has ever run for office. He decided to run for state Senate after losing his mother and brother to opioid overdoses.

“I started looking at the problem of the opioid epidemic,” he said. “I decided to do something about it, and I started watching what elected officials were doing about it. There were a lot of town halls and conference calls, but nothing was actually getting done.”

That’s why the opioid crisis is one of the main issues Craig is running on, calling it “the most critical thing” that the Legislature needs to address. He said he’d like to focus efforts on providing more resources for families dealing with addiction, like making sure Medicaid and private insurances are providing for extended inpatient rehabilitation and family therapy options.

“We need to make sure we’re putting the dealers behind bars, but we also need to make sure there are guidelines in place for providers,” Craig said. “The problem is, people are still handing out prescription opioids like candy.”

Craig said the legalization of recreational marijuana, another issue he’s running on, could lead to a drop in opioid use. He said that if marijuana would be legalized and taxed, the state would collect about $1.1 billion in revenue, according to numbers he received from Pittsburgh’s chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and comparisons to tax revenue in Colorado.

That hypothetical $1.1 billion, Craig said, could be used to fund public schools. He said that though that wouldn’t be enough to completely fund schools, it could reduce residential property taxes, especially for senior citizens on fixed incomes.

“We fund our schools on the backs of property owners,” Craig said. “What we have right now is basically a form of economic segregation. We’re perpetuating poverty by basing it off the property taxes. If we broaden our tax base, it could dramatically reduce the property taxes.”

One issue Craig would like to see resolved “very early in this Legislature,” is lifting the time limit on victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests to take legal action.

“I think it’s despicable that the Legislature walked away without solving this issue,” Craig said. “I think if it was any other institution, the institution would be held responsible.”

Bartolotta, 54, who is running for her second four-year term, said that while she voted in favor of the legislation when it was in the Senate, she was changed her view after it was passed by the House because the language had changed. She said it didn’t address all of the recommendations the state grand jury made and created “two classes of victims.” She also said she wasn’t in favor of legislation that would allow the victims to sue the Catholic church in addition to the offending priests.

“There are millions of people that rely on the services of the church,” she said. “They help countless individuals and families. I don’t think those survivors would condone harming the people who rely on the good works provided to them by the church.”

Bartolotta said the biggest issue she’d like to address in the next four years is criminal justice reform.

“We need to rethink how we treat our nonviolent offenders and the moral concept of overincarceration,” she said. “If it’s a nonviolent offender, we can do better for society and those individuals than locking them up behind razor wire for years.”

She said she is working with other lawmakers to create a criminal justice reform caucus that will address both opioid-related offenses and juvenile offenders.

“It’s just costing Pennsylvania hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to lock them up, and then causing them to be dependent on the state after they’re released,” she said. “We create the barriers.”

School tax reform was another issue Bartolotta touched on, saying there could be other ways to come up with the $14.1 billion that funds the schools. She said that while she was campaigning, she met with multiple elderly women who “lost their family homes, which were paid for, because they couldn’t afford the property tax.”

Bartolotta said she’d consider looking for ways to maintain the property tax on commercial property and eliminating it for residents based on income level or for residents more than 65 years old. She called Craig’s idea to legalize marijuana as a means to reduce property taxes a “horrible idea.”

“The use of marijuana really affects the brain in negative ways,” she said. “It just leads to a lot of bad issues. We can’t get enough people to pass a drug test now.”

Bartolotta said the greatest accomplishment she celebrated in her first term was a 16-month process of getting Tierne’s Law passed, providing further protection for victims of domestic violence. The bill was named after Tierne Ewing of Washington County, who was murdered in 2016 by her estranged husband, who had a protection from abuse order placed against him and had been released from jail on bail after assault charges had been filed.

“That was a challenge to even get it out of the Judiciary Committee,” she said.

Earlier this month, Bartolotta was one of five senators to vote against a bill that would require those convicted of a misdemeanor domestic violence charge to surrender their weapons to law enforcement within 24 hours. She said that while she voted in favor of the bill while it was in the state Senate, she voted against the House version because the language had been changed and “has more loose ends than a bowl of spaghetti.”

“They put in other language and phrases in there that have no definitions, like ‘acceptable law enforcement,'” she said.

DEMOCRAT

Name: James Craig 

Age: 29

Residence: North Strabane Township

Education: Bachelor of arts, University of Pittsburgh; University of Pittsburgh School of Law

Occupation: Real estate attorney, owner of Close to Home Settlement Services, LLC

REPUBLICAN

Name: Camera Bartolotta

Age: 54

Residence: Carroll Township

Education: Bachelor ofsScience, St. Mary’s College of California

Occupation: Incumbent state senator, owner of Bartolotta Investments Inc.