About Barbara Sprenger

Barbara Sprenger is a businesswoman, a mother, a grandmother of three, a former school board member and a community leader who is helping take on an international corporation to protect our most precious natural resource – clean, locally-controlled water.

Now Barbara is a candidate for California Assembly, District 27. She’s working to put her real-life skills – and the common-sense perspective that comes from community experience – to work in Sacramento for all of us.

We need to make our environment our very highest priority – and that’s just what Barbara did when she helped organize Friends of Locally Owned Water (FLOW) in Felton to take on a multinational corporation and win the fight to protect our local water supply.

Drawing on real life experiences of hundreds of neighbors, FLOW created a workable solution to protect our environment and our economy. This successful effort is exactly the kind of positive action we need in Sacramento as we work together to restore our fragile environment and create secure futures for our children.

We need long-overdue health care reform that will bring financial relief to California families and help California business compete. That’s why Barbara will work to make sure that all Californians are covered – lowering overall health care costs and making health care affordable and secure for everyone. No one should live in fear of changing jobs, losing jobs, having inadequate coverage or not being able to afford a hospital visit when they, or a family member, is sick.

We need high-wage jobs of the future – the kind of jobs Barbara helped create as a co-founder of a successful small business. Her company, Mountaingate Engineering, developed and patented a novel and energy-efficient technology that allowed metal can manufacturers to meet stringent Clean Air Act requirements using less energy and space than was possible with any other available equipment. Barbara grew the business to compete internationally, expanding sales to Asia, Europe and Latin America.

Barbara’s experience at Mountaingate is just one of the reasons she understands that our future success rests with growing our economy in sustainable ways. From building a company that developed innovative equipment for meeting the Clean Air Act to building family-friendly homes using state-of-the-art energy-efficiency and affordable, sustainable green techniques, Barbara Sprenger has demonstrated that California can lead the nation in developing green technology industries – and do so while providing secure lives for workers and a reduced footprint on the planet .

We need the world’s best public schools so our kids can thrive in the economy of the future – and that’s exactly what Barbara worked to accomplish for eight years as an elected trustee of the San Lorenzo Valley School Board.

At the end of Barbara’s term in 2006, the budget was stable, test scores were among the highest in the county, staff and board relationships were strong and almost all of the district's schools had been honored by the state as “Distinguished Schools.” Enrollment decline is decreasing, a new middle school has opened and major construction and renovations are nearing completion – on time and on budget.

Barbara ran for the school board to help create an environment where children feel valued, in school and in society. It’s why she worked hard with others to grow the San Lorenzo Valley Equity Committee to fight prejudice and racism and to build a Teen Center as a meeting place for kids who might otherwise fall through the cracks.

Barbara has been an active community servant for many years. In addition to her work outlined above, Barbara served on the board of the Valley Resource Center, focusing on budgets and systems, mechanisms for empowering clients in program development, and building. She was a founding member of Youth First, a non-profit that developed a Teen Center and Skate Park for the San Lorenzo Valley. She served as a Santa Cruz County First Five Commissioner, overseeing the expenditure of Prop 10 tobacco tax funds. These funds were used to provide education and health programs for kids aged 0-5.

Barbara was honored as a United Way Community Hero for her work on The San Lorenzo Valley Equity Committee and Youth First.

Barbara was raised in Los Angeles as one of six children. Her father was a salesman; her mother, a bookkeeper for A&M Records. Barbara settled in Santa Cruz County in 1983.

At 20 she moved to London for several years, beginning to raise her young family. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s she lived on a small homestead in West Virginia, before returning to California in the mid-1980s. Her husband of 21 years died of lung cancer in 1993.

Barbara earned a BA degree in Economics from UC Santa Cruz, graduating with highest honors. In 2006, she completed a Master of Public Policy degree from the Panetta Institute for Public Policy and California State University at Monterey Bay with dual concentrations in Health and Social Policy and Government, Policy and Politics.

Barbara is happily married to Ken Meshke. Between them they have five children and three grandchildren.

Barbara Sprenger – a Leader Who Shares Our Dreams and Gets Things Done

Elected leaders who are genuinely involved in their communities, who have run successful businesses and who care about the environment and the day-to-day struggles in families’ lives, tend to work for common-sense solutions because they share our concerns and our values. That’s why Barbara is running for state Assembly.

Barbara Sprenger will bring her lifetime of experiences – from a young mother with four kids struggling to make ends meet to a (not-so-old!) grandmother and all that she’s helped accomplish in between – to Sacramento and put these experiences to work for all of us.