On The Record With April Arndt, GOP Candidate for Assembly District 21

April Arndt’s GOP candidacy for Assembly District 21 and her campaign slogan “Safer Streets, More Jobs, Better Schools” reflects her life-long passion of serving her community. As the mother of three children, she has had to navigate the challenging “one-size-fits-all” public education system and is an advocate for school choice. She has earned the endorsement of Governor Joe Lombardo and is facing democratic incumbent Elaine Marzola, who is currently under an ethics investigation by the Nevada Bar Association.

Having served nearly 20 years in both Boulder City and Henderson police departments, Arndt’s retirement from the Henderson police department came after she and her husband, a captain with the Henderson Fire department, survived the October 1, 2017 Las Vegas shooting. We begin with that harrowing experience before we dig into her professional and personal experiences that led her to run in a swing district located southeast of the Las Vegas Strip.

This interview has been shortened for publishing,

Would you like to touch on your experience at the Route 91 festival?

Well, I do want to clarify that my husband and I were not working. We were celebrating our anniversary. It was a life changing moment for the both of us. I thank God we had the training we had.

I didn’t talk about this for a very long time. At one point my husband and I had been separated. My husband has medical training and I have first responder training, but I had never seen him work in that capacity. Everywhere you looked, people were shot and injured.

Being a responder to something like that, and then actually being in it, is totally different. It was just pure chaos. Of course, everybody’s cell phones were dying, so many had no communication. I was able to talk to a dispatcher at my department a few times, my sister who was with my kids, and then my phone died. So, I was separated for a long period from anyone I knew. I didn’t know if I was going to see my kids again.

There were a lot of young people who were trying to get out, so I would just tell them to get in this car or that car. At one point I think we had 12 people in a taxi. All of these young people were trying to call their parents, and all I could think of was my own kids, and then me telling them to get off the phone because they needed to get out of there. But, people were paralyzed. Even the tax cab driver was shaking so badly that I had to yell at her to drive and move. I was literally telling her to turn the wheel of the car to drive out of there. When I say it was chaos, it was chaos.

You could feel the bullets passing your head. At one minute, you’re running away from them and the next minute you’re running into them. We were under fire from multiple positions.

I think it was about 5:30 in the morning when my husband and I got home. My husband, being a paramedic, said he smelled iron. I looked down at the both of us and we were both covered in blood, but we hadn’t been shot. We didn’t even realize we were covered in blood up until that moment.

It was an event that changed our lives. Until that time, I don’t think I would have ever left the department. I have always struggled with that decision, as most working moms do. But, it forced me to look at the world a bit differently and reprioritize where and how I was going to spend my time. At the time, my kids were middle school age so I decided to stay home. It was a coming to Jesus moment. I loved my career, but it was a turning point for me.

Why run for office at a time when you are retired?

I’ve always had that need to serve and always asked “what can I do to make things better?”  When the opportunity to run for state assembly surfaced, it was just an extension of what I had already been doing for most of my life–trying to make a difference. I can continue this work in public service and try to improve the things that so many people are complaining about. I thought that I can complain about things, or I can try to do something to make things better.

The “defund the police” era and anti-police legislation impacted me personally and professionally. I also have kids in school that have struggled, so finding a good education for each of my kids who learn differently and have different skills, was also a challenge.

This opportunity allows me to serve my community in a different capacity, I can make improvements, no matter how big or small. When I was in my 20’s, I wanted to change the world. Well, the reality is that you get to make small differences every day. Every one of those small improvements adds up to the greater good.

What are the complaints or the main concerns of your constituents?

During the primary, I knocked on over 8,000 doors because I wanted to get feedback. It is very important to me to meet the people I will represent and know what is important to them. I thought the main issue would be the economy, but overwhelmingly, it was the border– but for different reasons for each person I talked to. The economy is always a top issue because we are in very trying times right now.

As I started knocking on doors, it was when we saw the increase in utilities that became a huge, topic of discussion. Housing is also an issue, as is the economy, and housing and the economy go hand in hand.  

Many people I talk to have adult children living with them because they can’t afford an apartment or home. Or, elderly parents are moving in with their children because they can no longer live on their retirement income. I have also met retirees who have had to go back to work because they can’t afford the basics due to inflation.

What can you do from a legislative standpoint to ease some of their economic burdens?

Obviously, we’re guided by a lot of things that happen nationally. But, I do think there is room to start with the basics of supply and demand. If we can get some of this land from our federal government and start increasing our supply of housing, then demand goes down. That has a ripple effect on our economy. We can also give some consumers just a little bit of breathing room in some areas. I’m the mom who puts back the chicken breast now and buys chicken thighs because they’re three cents cheaper. We’re all making those concessions. So as legislators, we have to ensure that we aren’t passing laws that ultimately increase costs or fees to Nevadans.

Wherever we can find room to lower costs, we should be doing that…because the longer people are struggling, the harder it is to rebound. I read a study where people’s savings accounts are being depleted. So at some point, this economy is going to hurt more and hurt longer

There are also some tax incentives or tax breaks that we can give seniors that don’t have a huge impact on the overall, general fund. Building relationships with private entities to get more attainable homes for entry level families is another avenue. There are many ways we can work with private industry to provide whatever breaks we can.

As a mom of three, let’s talk about education. Were your kids enrolled in the public school system? How do you fix the failing education system?

We’ve been in the public school system. We’ve been in the charter system, and now I have one doing online school, which is a charter. I also had one at a private school. My oldest son went to a public school and had learning issues. At Liberty High School, we found our saving grace. We found something different for all of them because they’re all very different and they learn differently.

I worked in the classrooms. I was always the volunteer mom. My son found that he loves flight and wants to be a pilot.  It was something that was paired to him through the school. I would love to see more of that for our entire community–where we could pair different trades with different schools and give kids a different path, other than just one straight path to college. I appreciated the different structure that private school introduced. I like charter school in that it gave them a different freedom of learning and pair what works best for your kid instead of a “one-size-fits-all approach.”

Having three kids, I found that, over time, education was becoming more politically driven and motivated, rather than teaching the basics. I wanted my kids to have all the information and make good decisions for themselves, and have all the facts to make good decisions. There were more social issues that were being brought into the school that I just felt were more burdensome and distracting. Let’s just learn. Let’s get the education you need to be successful in life.

I really feel like the teachers are restricted. I met so many great teachers, and the consistent complaint I would hear were from teachers were they were getting more and more programs, but no resources to implement them. They were being stretched thin. They were doing more and more on their own time and they didn’t have the freedom to teach. They had to use one curriculum all the time for every student, but teachers have so many different students with different personalities.

I went to school with my kids a couple times to see what was going on and found that teachers deal a lot with behavioral issues. It’s hard to have a one-size-fits-all curriculum or approach, and it doesn’t seem to work well.

We need to expand the options for parents and students through school choice, especially for the families who have the financial need for it. We also need the accountability measures that Governor Lombardo has introduced for transparency. With that transparency, we can then focus on where and what needs to be fixed or improved.

As a retired police officer, do you hear from your former colleagues about the consequences or benefits of the criminal justice reform bill that Democrats passed under former Governor Steve Sisolak? 

We do talk about it, and it is one of their biggest frustrations. Everybody wants justice and we want to support victims. We need to ensure that we are making people feel safe. When a law isn’t working towards those goals or working in the favor of victims and police officers, then there needs to be changes. Police officers sign up to “protect and serve.” I was reading that legislation and part of it was to monitor the success of it, but from what I understand it is hard to do that. In fact, the only thing I could find was that as our prison population went down, property crime went up. The monetary savings of reducing the prison population doesn’t seem to be justified. The ultimate goal of crime legislation should be to prevent crime. This piece of legislation doesn’t seem to be doing that.

I used to work in a retail theft task force, and these retail crime rings are very organized. They know exactly how much they can take before they are held accountable and facing a felony. The former thresholds mattered because they were a deterrent. Now those thresholds have been raised. I’m not a fan, and I think I think it’s hard for the officers on the front line to do their job when the laws aren’t supporting them or the community.

Crime evolves with time and technology, so sometimes we are working with an archaic law that doesn’t fit in with a new trend. We need to ensure that our laws are looking forward, and when drafting legislation, it is important to work with the people on the front lines who have the first hand experience. Ultimately, the goal of the law is that we are protecting citizens and victims. At the precinct level, we can come up with programs that are meant to be deterrents. So battling crime is a multi-pronged approach and an approach that can actually be measured.

Currently, your competitor is under a Nevada Bar Association investigation. Do you have any comment about that?

I don’t know about all of the ins and outs of her case. But as an officer, you’re trained that you have a duty to remove yourself if there is a personal or professional conflict of interest. As a sworn officer you take an oath, and I think you owe it to the people that have elected you to hold yourself accountable and conduct yourself with the highest integrity. As an elected official, you owe it to the people that elected you to do the right thing.

A lack of ethics causes disenchantment. I have talked to voters who no longer want to participate because they don’t trust the system.

In general, and for far too long, we’ve had too many politicians that are muddied in these ethical issues. I think the only way to regain the trust of the people and have them actively participate in a process that was meant for them is to to make sure that we’re holding ourselves accountable and that there is absolute transparency.

I come from a place where it’s  imperative that you have trust with your community. I see the government as an extension of that. Let’s clean it up so that we can restore trust.