Ethnicity will be the one obvious difference when California tax board member Judy Chu arrives in Washington shortly to succeed fellow Democrat Hilda L. Solis . Chu, the easy winner of Tuesday’s House special election in the state’s 32nd District, will fill the seat Solis vacated in February after she was confirmed as President Obama’s secretary of Labor.

Solis is Hispanic, as are more than three-fifths of the residents in the district that takes in East Los Angeles and working-class suburbs such as El Monte and West Covina. Chu, who is Chinese-American, will be representing a district in which residents of Asian heritage make up about one-fifth of the population.

But in terms of their personal backgrounds and mainly liberal philosophies, Chu and Solis have much in common. Both were born in Los Angeles and raised in labor union households. Both built careers in human services, Chu as a psychologist and an educator, Solis as director of a state college preparation program.

Both entered public service in the mid-1980s and took rather winding routes to Congress. Solis, who is 51, was a community college trustee, county insurance commissioner and member of both state legislative chambers. Chu, who turned 56 exactly one week before Tuesday’s special election, was a local school board member and state assemblywoman prior to her 2006 election to the California Board of Equalization, which oversees the tax system in the nation’s most populous state.

Chu, who has known Solis for more than a decade, refers to the former congresswoman as a mentor and role model. Like Solis, Chu will likely be a reliable vote for the House Democratic Party leadership on most issues, while continuing to focus on her predecessor’s local priorities.

“I actually want to carry on her legacy,” Chu said. “And I want to continue fighting for the San Gabriel River Valley.” Solis had worked to protect and restore areas of the valley and pushed for a study to determine whether the area can be included under the national park system.

Chu noted there currently are vacant seats on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Education and Labor Committee. Transportation, Chu said, is vitally important to her district, where efforts are under way to extend the Gold Line route of the Los Angeles mass transit system. Chu said she hopes to gain additional funding for the extension project.

“We are a district that’s rather hard hit by the foreclosures and the high unemployment rate,” said Chu, who predicted a fully funded Gold Line extension “would bring in 30,000 new jobs as well as $43 billion stimulus to this area.” Chu also hopes to improve the district’s freeway infrastructure.

Chu, elected more than six months after the 111th Congress convened, also will immediately face an array of daunting national issues, as Democrats and Republicans grapple over how to fix the nation’s economy, overhaul the health care system, and deal with energy policy and its effect on climate change.

But Chu certainly is acquainted with the difficulties of governing in the midst of a deep recession, as her badly hit home state is dealing with a full-scale budget crisis. Chu said she is eager to apply her experience to financial and budget issues and said she looks forward to working with Obama as she seeks to obtain funds for the 32nd District from the economic stimulus program (PL 111-5) enacted in February.

She also said her background as a psychologist gives her a personal drive to work on to health and human services issues. She said she supports the president’s goal to provide affordable, accessible health care coverage to all Americans.

Chu said she enjoys delving into the minutiae of policy issues and noted her work on a tax amnesty bill in California. The measure that she authored in 2004 was initially projected to bring in $300 million in delinquent tax payments, but ended up producing more than $4.8 billion in revenue. “I was able to dig deep into that. Yet at the same time, we had to listen to all sides to be able to get down to the practical reality,” said Chu, who regards the tax amnesty bill as one of her major achievements in office.

Chu comes by her interest in numbers naturally. She received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from University of California Los Angeles (known familiarly as UCLA). She obtained a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology in Los Angeles and taught psychology at the community college level for 20 years.