Kent McNaughton and his wife, Phyllis, have been married for 13 years. He is the father of four and grandfather of two, a veteran of four years in the Navy, and a software engineer by profession. Kent has been active in politics, having served as precinct committeeman on Colorado Springs’ Westside from 1988 to 1999.

He’s earned a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration (BSBA) from the University of Phoenix and a Masters degree in Computer Science (MSCS) from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

Mr. McNaughton is a software developer for Vitesse Semiconductor, previously working in the same capacity at Atmel Corporation. Prior to his change of careers, Kent spent nearly twenty years in various management roles with Digital Equipment Corporation. His last position at Digital was Senior Manager of Manufacturing Engineering.

Along with his engineering and management background, he also has experience as an educator as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Phoenix in the field of Information Technology.

Kent enjoys reading historical topics and biographies, hiking, woodworking, eating out, and working on and driving his English sports car.

His political ideals stem from the Golden Rule, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution. He believes that the American system is intended to maintain government in its place as the servant—not master—of the people. He believes—as Thomas Jefferson offered in the Declaration of Independence—that every person, as a child of God, has natural rights which are not subject to government—or majority—denial. He believes—as Martin Luther King gave voice to in his "I have a Dream" speech—that all people are fundamentally equal and must be treated that way under the law, to be given neither advantage nor handicap.

If elected to the Colorado House of Representatives, Mr. McNaughton would, as a guiding principle, work to restore people’s freedoms—personal as well as economic—that have been restricted by laws and regulations.

"The first test a proposed law must meet is whether it advances or restricts freedom. In general, if a law would attempt to create order by denying or diminishing a liberty, I would oppose it." –Mr. McNaughton

He favors reducing the size of state government and limiting its role to providing only those essential services appropriately provided at the state level. Among these essential services is the defense of personal and property rights.

"The only way to force the government to become smaller is to change its feeding habits. Tax reduction has the effect of government power reduction." The rewards gained by a person through his or her labor and ingenuity belong solely to that person. To the extent we must have taxes to pay for the functions only government can reasonably provide, they should be assessed as user fees where possible, and as taxes on consumption (sales taxes) where user fees are impractical. Labor (income), food, and medicine should not be taxed.

The ownership of business equipment is taxed at a high rate in Colorado. Investors in the Colorado economy such as Intel, Atmel, H-P, Vitesse, Oracle and Compaq must pay taxes on equipment they own on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. This is a poorly designed tax that acts as a dis-incentive to businesses with a high capital equipment intensity to move to or stay in Colorado. Yet these are exactly the kind of businesses Colorado needs to provide well-paying jobs with upward mobility for Coloradans.

If elected, He would work to scrap the business equipment tax and personal property taxes in their entirety. He would not support replacing them with other taxes.

He would also work to scale back, with a goal of eliminating, the Colorado State income tax and with it all functions of the state government that are more appropriately managed at the county or municipal level.

He would attempt to guide the operating philosophy of state agencies from one of rigidly seeking compliance with state directives to one of providing a clearinghouse and mediation service in order to better provide co-operation between the state, counties and municipalities. Where the heavy hand of state government is not needed to produce results and where results could be better served through free market competition, he would promote privatization alternatives. "It is not the state employee we should be curtsying to. It is the state citizen."

Yet, with all the effort and with all our yielding of freedoms we once took for granted, the authorities intercept between only 5-10% of drug contraband. This is a bad bargain!!

Fighting a marketplace is like fighting the weather. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into the fight. These dollars—your dollars—may as well have been poured into a sewer. The only thing this has accomplished is to strengthen the power of government at the expense of your rights.

"Sometimes the best strategy is to just declare victory and walk away." --Anon

If elected he would work to make civil asset forfeiture illegal in the state of Colorado. He would work to ban the use of no-knock warrants in police work. He would ban police policies and practice that use stereotypes to stop people going about their business. He would also work to decriminalize the possession, sale and distribution of recreational drugs, to free non-violent drug inmates convicted of possession or convicted of recreational drug sale to non-minors and restore their full rights as citizens. He believes that sales to minors should remain illegal and is best prevented by regulating the sale as is done with sales of liquor. Will there be abuses? "Yes." Will the tradeoff be worth it? "Absolutely! People don’t need government to tell them what to put into their bodies."

He believes that if Harris and Kleybold were unsure as to whether teachers, administrators and security staff at Columbine were armed, they might not have dared go through with their plans. And if these people in positions of trust and protection were in fact armed, the tragedy would have ended much quicker and with fewer lives lost.

He also believes that the use of guns without proper training can have disastrous consequences: yet it is the citizen’s responsibility to avail himself of this training. He supports those organizations and activities that provide training in the safe handling and use of firearms. He would encourage extra-curricular and co-curricular training activities in the schools, with student’s participation subject to parental approval.

Because of the varying firearms "carry" laws between localities in Colorado, if elected, he would work toward the establishment of a single statewide "carry" policy that would guarantee to adults the right to have and bear arms anywhere in Colorado without fear of being uncompliant in some jurisdiction.

Because the registration of guns is reasonably feared to lead to confiscation, he opposes registration and would make the maintenance of gun registration lists by any government office illegal in the state of Colorado, with the punishment of stiff fines and/or prison sentences for officials and/or government employees who break the law.

Kent recognizes that schools are just one aspect of education, that the role of parents is vital to a good education and would encourage parents to become involved in the schools their child attends, reviewing the content of coursework, encouraging reading and other intellectual pursuits, such as research via the Internet. In state-run schools, Kent feels parents should have access to all the books and lesson plans from which their children are taught.

Educational metrics:

Core: All children entering high school must be able to read at a functional level, do simple arithmetic in their head including fractions and times-table multiplication, be able to count change, and be capable of composing simple, yet coherent, written communications.

Science and Technology: Students must be given strong underpinnings in not just math and the traditional sciences, but also how they are used to produce the technologies that are affecting our present and our future. As an idea, businesses and/or the volunteers themselves might be given tax credits for the time engineers, scientists and other professionals spend volunteering in the classroom.

Civics: No child should be allowed to graduate a government-run high school without having a solid understanding of the U.S. Constitution and each of the Bill of Rights and their practical application in today’s world. The graduate should be able to describe the tension between the ideals of personal liberty, equality, and order in a meaningful way.

Abortion is undeniably tragic; with long lasting psychological effects on the woman. On the one hand are the rights of the mother to determine the use of her body, on the other the rights of a child to life. Mr. McNaughton believes that life begins at the point the child is able to live outside the womb.

Until there is a viable child, it should remain the choice of the woman whether to have an abortion. Government intervention in this most intimate choice is unwise and counter-productive. He further believes that precisely because government’s only real tool is coersion, all personal decisions that do not have a victim other than the person making the choice should remain outside government purview.

"Sprawl is what you have when people get to put a little space between themselves and their neighbor." If the issue is really roads, we should build and maintain the roads that are needed with users fees (gas and sales taxes). So-called "Smart Growth" plans usually consist of limits to our neighbor’s property rights.

If elected, he would request seats on the Business Affairs & Labor, Crimes and Prisons, Finance, and Education Committees.