In the mid 1990s, Gabrielle Giffords worked as an urban planning consultant for a Big Six accounting firm in New York City. During her time there, she conducted a study for a client that sought to determine whether job training programs in the city were preparing people for jobs that actually existed. "Sure enough," she recalls, "we found that there was no match."

A few years later, Giffords was called back to Tucson, her hometown, to take over the reins of her family's tire and auto repair business. She had hardly settled into her new role as president and CEO when she learned firsthand about the woeful condition of workforce preparation in America: More than half of those seeking jobs with her company were so poorly educated that they could not fill out an application.

"Granted, we're talking mainly about people applying for lower-wage, low-skill jobs," she recalls. "Still, it seemed outrageous to me that our public schools were graduating people without the ability to read or write." When the state house seat for her central Tucson district became open in 2000, Giffords saw both an opportunity and a duty to act on her concerns about basic education, workforce readiness, and smart economic development. "I'm a third generation Tucsonan, a Fulbright Scholar, and I have a master's in urban planning from Cornell," she says. "With that background, I felt that if I didn't run, who would?" Giffords campaigned for the seat and won, and voters rewarded her in 2002 by electing her to the state Senate.

Now the owner of a property management firm following the sale of the family business, Giffords brings her experience in the private sector to bear in the legislature. While Arizona remains a leading economic performer, she remains deeply concerned about the state's declining per capita income relative to the rest of the country. "I fear there's a perfect economic storm brewing" in the state, Giffords explains. "Our population at the lower end of the economic and skills spectrum is growing, we're having a hard time attracting and retaining high-skill, high-wage jobs, and we're slashing education funding."

A big part of the solution, she says, is to improve the state's education system and to educate workers in skills that will allow them to enter higher income and technologically oriented career paths. She also says the state needs to attract venture capital investment to become a stronger competitor in the global economy.

In January, New Democrat Gov. Janet Napolitano appointed Giffords to her new Governor's Council on Innovation and Technology, which is charged with developing ideas for energizing the state's high-tech industry. In tandem with her participation on the panel, Giffords plans to introduce legislation this spring that would permit the state's universities to launch or take equity positions in commercial ventures. The idea, she says, is to "to allow our universities to become much more involved in incubating business in the state."

With Arizona facing one of the largest budget shortfalls in its history, Giffords also believes it is vital for the state to ensure that tax dollars are being spent effectively. Working with the Arizona Prevention Resource Center housed at Arizona State University, Giffords is working to secure state funding for a project to gather, analyze, and disseminate data on an array of preventive programs spanning such issues as dropouts, smoking, crime, and teen pregnancy.

"The first step is to conduct a program inventory and determine which populations they are serving and what they are doing with their money," Giffords explains. "Then we are developing a data system using more than 80 social indicators-- basic demographic data, teen arrests, health data, it runs the gamut-- and we're matching it with computer mapping. We want to find out if state dollars are going to those most in need. The third step is to get the state to fund the most effective programs. And the final part is community training."

"As a business owner and as a citizen, I believe in accountability, efficiency, and accessibility," Giffords says. "The state needs to be accountable to citizens, and for that to work, citizens need proper feedback from the state. As far as efficiency, we need to deliver products and services as well as possible and get rid of duplicative, outmoded programs, in some cases perhaps entire departments. And finally, those products and services need to be accessible."