Incumbent Tana Senn (D-Mercer Island) is vying for 41st District’s state representative Position 1 against Republican John Pass in the Aug. 2 primary.

When Senn looked at the Mercer Island City Council in 2011 and saw seven men, she decided to change that.

“That wasn’t really representative of our community,” she said.

While serving the city, she was appointed to the Legislature in 2013 and elected in 2014, hoping to work on issues like transportation and education at the state level.

She said that she feels that she has been working on issues that “really resonate,” including equal pay for women, for which she was a sponsor, along with children’s mental health, funding schools and gun safety.

Education is “without a doubt, the first and foremost issue” the Legislature must address this fall, she said, and new revenue will be needed to protect the state’s safety net and investments in higher education.

“As a mom with two kids, bringing the voice to challenges that families in our area face is important,” Senn said.

Senn is a part of the Legislature’s work group on children’s mental health, working on “upstream” approaches, including early prevention and accessibility to services.

Senn is a strong proponent for transportation infrastructure, transit services and improving freight mobility.

Her challenger,

Pass , has spent enough time on the roads of the Eastside to know that changes have to be made.

The 50-year-old candidate, who has called Bellevue home for 14 years, said he wasn’t a born politician. But when his elected officials put up the Interstate 405 express toll lanes, he was forced from the background to the forefront to try and make changes on a statewide level.

“We need to be more flexible when it comes to transportation,” Pass said. “We can’t all take the bus, and we can’t all take light rail. We need more general purpose lanes.”

Pass, who drives anywhere between 300 and 500 miles every week as part of his job as a wholesale manager at Flower World, said the gridlock on I-405 causes surface streets to swell with excess traffic, and he’d like to stop it.

He’d also like to stop another type of gridlock — in the state House. Pass said his Army and sales experience make him a steady negotiator who is willing to work to make Olympia move again, improve Washington’s schools and lower the tax burden on Washingtonians.

Katie Metzger contributed to this report.