What about you and your background makes you the best candidate for this office?

 

My background is in community advocacy and community organizing, not politics. The terms legislator and representative are often used interchangeably because our elected legislators are meant to represent the communities that they live in. There's no way that a person can accurately represent a community that they aren't familiar with and actively engaging with. 

 

I've watched my community struggle due to the careless decisions made by our elected officials. I've watched those same elected officials ignore the hardships that people in my community and across our entire state are facing due to their actions. More importantly, though, I've watched my community come together to support each other through each and every one of these hardships. Whether it be a natural disaster, another warehouse fire, or children in need of food and clothing, West Virginians never fail to show up for each other in troubling times. 

 

I don't believe that our current state government represents those West Virginian values, if it did, we wouldn't be forced to face these hardships at all. We deserve leaders who value their communities, take the time to understand them, and work tirelessly to stand up for their best interest. 
 

What are the top three statewide issues you see for West Virginians at this time?

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• Public Education: Our public education system has been neglected for far too long. Our public schools are closing at an alarming rate, our teachers and staff are underpaid, and unlimited amounts of funding that could be going into improvements for public education are instead being used to fund a private school voucher program. Public schools are the only schools that are accessible to every child in our state, regardless of their zip code or income status. We must prioritize them first in order to ensure that every student is able to receive a quality education.

• Data Centers: HB2014 took away our ability to have any local oversight on data center development in our communities. Generation after generation, West Virginia has been subjected to exploitation and destruction at the hands of outside industries who take all of the profit and leave our state in worse conditions each time. We don't have to sacrifice our land, water, and energy in order to create jobs in West Virginia. We need to slow down the development process of data centers in our state in order to come up with a legal framework that will protect our people and our natural environment. West Virginians should have a voice in the decision to build these projects and they should have enough time to learn about their potential impacts before any decisions are made. We deserve clean water, we deserve affordable utilities, and West Virginia's natural environment deserves protection.

• Water Crisis: The southern coalfield counties are facing a severe water crisis that has continuously been ignored and pushed aside by our state legislature for years. Every single person in our state should have access to reliable, clean drinking water. We need to increase our water protections across the entire state and prioritize both state and federal funding to immediately begin improving the water infrastructure in the most impacted counties.

What are the top three issues you see for constituents residing within the district you are seeking to represent?

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• Utility Costs: People within my district and across the state of West Virginia are struggling to afford their increasing utility bills. The WV Public Service Commission is currently reviewing a case submitted by MonPower and PotomacEdison that would apply a surcharge to residential customers in their service districts to pay for the construction costs of a $2.4 billion gas plant being built exclusively to supply power to anticipated data centers. This surcharge would begin immediately after the case is approved and would gradually increase over the next 5 years while the plant is being constructed. In addition to this, the Lubeck Public Service Commission is currently proposing a 30% rate increase for water and a 14% increase for sewer to the Wood County Commission. People are already struggling to afford their utility bills. It's crucial that we protect people from unnecessary rate increases due to data center development and it's equally as important that the state supports our public utility services so that they can continue to provide safe and affordable services to the residents that they serve. 

• Affordable & Accessible Childcare: West Virginia desperately needs to increase the amount of state funding that goes into childcare assistance for low-income and working-class families and increase the level of support and reimbursements that it provides to childcare providers, especially in areas that lack access to childcare. If families don’t have affordable and reliable childcare options, they can’t go to work. Investing in childcare is an investment in the local economy and also encourages young families to stay in West Virginia.

• Environmental/Public Safety Regulations: Wood County has dealt with our fair share of environmental disasters due to the carelessness of the corporations who own our local chemical plants. These corporations need to be held to strict regulations and accountability measures that will ensure that the residents in our communities are protected and compensated for the hardships that they’ve endured.

 

What is your position on data centers being built in our state?

 

Data Centers require large amounts of water, energy, and land in order to operate. West Virginia is a state that is already suffering from a severe water crisis, unaffordable utility bills, and permanent environmental scars from previous industrial development. Our state government is meant to protect us from being exploited by outside industries, which is unfortunately something that they have failed to do generation after generation.

 

West Virginians should have a voice in these decisions. They should have time to learn about how the development of these data centers might affect their lives and environment before any development begins. Data Center developers that are allowed to build in our state should be held to a very strict set of regulations regarding how they impact our water supply, how they impact our electric bills, and how they impact the communities that they're being built in. All of this would require repealing HB2014 and introducing new legislation that protects us from being exploited by this industry. Our elected officials should always put the best interest of West Virginians first, even if that means slowing down or pausing the development of data centers to make sure that we’ve had time to address our concerns and feel comfortable before moving forward.

 

How do you intend to better serve the education system for children in our state if elected? 

 

Our public school funding formula is in desperate need of being improved and updated. West Virginia's funding for public schools is largely based on enrollment numbers without taking into consideration the number of students living in poverty and the number of students with special needs at each of our schools, both of which have been proven to require more funding and resources. Our special education programs are underfunded, our teachers and school staff are underpaid, and our enrollment numbers are declining which is reducing the funding that our schools receive even further. To make matters worse, we are spending roughly $230 million on a private school voucher program with funds that could otherwise be used to better support our public education system. 

 

We need to improve our public school funding formula, provide better wages and benefits to our teachers and school staff, and apply guardrails to the Hope Scholarship program to reduce its increasing price each year. 

 

What is your vision to increase family incomes and opportunity, raise the quality of life, and to make Wood County an area that families want to call home?   

 

If we want young people to choose to stay in West Virginia and start their families here, we need to prioritize our public education system, invest in childcare resources, and increase our worker's wages and protections overall. West Virginia's minimum wage hasn't been increased in nearly a decade. We can't expect our local economy and small businesses to thrive while people can barely afford to survive. In addition to that, supporting and strengthening our unions by repealing our right-to-work legislation, restoring prevailing wage, and granting our public sector workers collective bargaining rights and civil service protections would greatly benefit every single worker in our state by increasing their wages, providing them with better benefits, and ensuring that they are working in a safe environment.