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September 5, 2013
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Shirley Gillham was overcome with emotion Thursday as she read aloud the name of five-year-old murder victim Max Walters to a group gathered at Courthouse Square in Santa Rosa.

Max and his mother, Kathryn, were shot to death in January in Las Vegas by the boy's father, Hans Walters, who then killed himself.

Though she never met Max, and she has no children of her own, Gillham said that hearing about innocent lives lost to gun violence impassions her.
Issues:Gun Violence Prevention

September 5, 2013
U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson (CA-5) today announced $125,000 in new Drug-Free Communities Support Program (DFC) grants to Catalyst Coalition, a program at the Napa County Office of Education. The DFC grant funds will be used to involve and engage the local community to prevent substance use among youth.

“The best way to reduce drug use is to stop it before it starts,” said Thompson. “These grants provide Napa County with the resources we need to help prevent substance abuse, and organize our community around the goal of having healthy kids and drug-free communities,”

August 30, 2013
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Scientists say the San Francisco Bay Area needs 100,000 acres of wetlands to supply a healthy bay.

A project to restore the Napa Sonoma Salt Marsh, which sits on the edge of San Pablo Bay, will provide 10,000 acres toward meeting that need, and a newly completed recycled water pipeline to the area is a linchpin in reducing salinity in 640 acres, said Nadine Peterson, deputy executive officer of the California Coastal Conservancy.
Issues:Energy & Environment

August 29, 2013
U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, Chairman of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, released the following statement on the swearing in of Todd Jones as the Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and the Obama Administration's releasing of new executive actions to reduce gun violence.

August 28, 2013
U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson (CA-5) today announced grants from the Department of Transportation (DOT) totaling $39.7 million for Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport. The funds will be used to lengthen and improve the safety of the airport's runways. The runway project will help the airport accommodate regional jets flying longer distances to and from an increased number of air travel destinations.

August 28, 2013
News Articles
Business leaders and builders joined city, county and federal officials Wednesday to celebrate the imminent start of a $53.8 million project to lengthen the runways at Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport.

“Is this a great day, huh?” County Supervisor Mike McGuire told a crowd gathered inside a cavernous hangar for the runway project's ceremonial groundbreaking.

Scheduled for completion in October 2014, the project will fulfill a plan hatched 15 years ago to make the county's only commercial airport safer â€" and potentially attract more air traffic.
Issues:Jobs & Economy

August 16, 2013
News Articles

Just because his wife, former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was nearly killed in a mass shooting, doesn't mean Mark Kelly hates guns.

On the contrary.

The retired astronaut and Navy captain owns a small arsenal of pistols and rifles.

Kelly demonstrated his fondness for firearms at a gun range in Napa on Friday. He slipped two red shells into a double-barrel shotgun, raised it to his shoulder and yelled, “Pull!”

He fired once, shattering a bright orange disc as it sailed through the air.


August 16, 2013
News Articles

U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, had no trouble dispatching clay targets with a shotgun in a shooting range east of Napa Friday afternoon as he engaged a local gun dealer in a friendly skeet shooting competition.

But Thompson acknowledged that getting a bill through Congress to expand background checks for firearm purchases nationwide has been more troublesome.


August 16, 2013
U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson (CA-5), a senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, released the following statement today after the Washington Post reported that National Security Administration (NSA) violated privacy rules thousands of times according to an internal audit and other documents.

August 13, 2013
News Articles

Milton Tepeyac, who served eight years as a U.S. Marine, scrapes by on $3 an hour in this northern Mexican city, where he has lived since the U.S. government deported him in April.

His rented room floods when it rains. Scorpions skitter in. To kill them, he had to pay an exterminator $40 â€" a third of his weekly paycheck.

Once he served in Kuwaiti in a recon battalion, a highly trained grunt monitoring the movements of Saddam Hussein's military across the border in Iraq.

Issues:Veterans