Core Values
Throughout my career, I’ve spent years learning which programs actually move outcomes and which ones just move money around. My policy positions are grounded in evidence with a focus on responsible investment over irresponsible outcomes.
Prevention beats intervention every time the math is done.
Education
Protecting Public Education in Indiana
When families research where to relocate, the first thing they check is school quality. It tells them what they need to know about the community. Right now, Indiana's public schools are being hit from three directions at once: voucher dollars leaving the public system, state property tax caps stripping local funding authority, and curriculum battles driven by politics rather than evidence.
90% of Indiana children are educated in public schools, and we are on track to spend $600 million next year on private and charter schools, while cutting funding to the public schools that the overwhelming majority of our kids attend.
We can:
Reverse the state's decision to make school board elections partisan. Noblesville voters already made their preference clear and our representative ignored us.
Keep public school funding in public school classrooms. Any funding for alternatives should come from a separate appropriation, not the same pool that funds the 90%.
Require any school receiving public per-pupil funding to contribute to the shared costs public schools are legally required to carry: special education services, transportation, and English language learner support. Taxpayers should not be paying twice for the same obligations.
Require an independent, third-party audit of Indiana's Special Education funding formula. I spent years learning exactly how federal law is supposed to protect students with disabilities, and what it looks like when states find ways around it. Indiana's formula has not received the scrutiny it deserves.
Base curriculum and assessment decisions on educator expertise and peer-reviewed evidence, not political pressure.
Affordability
Real Affordability
Affordability is not one issue. It is what happens when housing costs, utility bills, childcare, healthcare, and wages all move in the wrong direction at the same time, and your paycheck doesn't.
Indiana's affordability crisis was built by policy. That means it can be dismantled by policy. Several bills passed in the 2025 and 2026 legislative sessions that will make our affordability crisis worse haven't even taken effect yet. The window to reverse course is now, before the next round of damage is locked in.
Every section below follows the same logic as the introduction to this page: the cost of prevention is a fraction of the cost of the problem it prevents. Indiana is currently choosing the expensive option on almost every one of these issues. That is a choice, not an inevitability.
Utility Bills
Indiana passed laws that let utility companies raise your rates without ever lowering them. Electric bills in Indiana went up 25 percent in one year because of choices made in Indianapolis.
We can:
Reform the rate-tracker laws that lock in utility increases regardless of actual costs
Stop charging residential customers for the infrastructure being built to serve corporate data centers. Homeowners should not be subsidizing that expansion.
Restore Indiana's state energy efficiency program, which helped families make permanent reductions to their bills before the legislature eliminated it.
Ensure utility costs cannot consume an unsustainable share of a household's income, with targeted relief for fixed-income seniors and low-wage workers.
Housing
Hamilton County's median home price is $461,000. Teachers, nurses, and the people who keep this community running cannot afford to live here.
We can:
Stop out-of-state corporate investors from buying up single-family homes and converting them to rentals. Thirty percent of Hamilton County home purchases are currently made by out-of-state investors. That is an extraction economy, not a housing market.
Protect seniors and fixed-income homeowners from property tax spikes driven by rising home values, with targeted relief that doesn't require gutting school and fire budgets to deliver it.
Create a clear path to ownership for first-time buyers and workforce families through down payment assistance and financing structures that don't require two professional incomes to qualify.
Restore local governments' authority to make their own zoning decisions, including what to permit and what to reject, rather than having state law override community preferences in either direction.
Childcare
In 2024, Indiana froze childcare assistance for working families and cut payments to childcare providers by up to 35%. More than 300 providers have closed. Thousands of children are on waiting lists. And Indiana is forfeiting an estimated $4 billion in economic output because childcare costs are pricing families out of the workforce entirely.
We can:
Fully restore the childcare assistance funding that was cut in 2024.
Expand tax credits so working families can afford quality care without choosing between a paycheck and a provider.
Move toward a shared-cost model where employers, families, and the state each carry part of the load, and make sure Indiana is drawing down every federal matching dollar it currently leaves on the table.
Treat childcare as the workforce infrastructure it is, not an optional social program.
Healthcare Costs
Hospitals have technically lowered their prices in Indiana, but families aren't feeling it. The gap between what hospitals charge and what patients pay is being filled by insurance companies and pharmacy middlemen who are collecting more in premiums, denying more claims, and shifting more costs onto patients every year.
We can:
Enforce Indiana's healthcare pricing transparency law with real penalties for violations, not voluntary compliance.
Hold insurance companies accountable for systematic claim denials. When a denial is overturned on appeal more than 80% of the time, it’s not a medical decision. It’s a delay tactic. Indiana should treat it like one.
Remove the administrative barriers blocking eligible Hoosiers from Medicaid coverage they already qualify for. Protect HIP from the enrollment caps and benefit cuts that would strip coverage from Hoosiers who depend on it.
Expand access to telehealth and primary care so that a routine health question doesn't become an emergency room visit. Prevention is cheaper. We should invest accordingly.
Food Security
Hamilton County has a reputation for affluence, but that reputation is hiding something: an estimated 33,000 residents or more, including over 7,000 children, don't know where their next meal is coming from. Local food pantries have seen demand jump 30% in a single year. Meals on Wheels reports a 52% increase in clients requesting financial assistance since 2022. The people walking into these pantries are not who most Hamilton County residents picture. Many of them are working. They're choosing between a utility bill and groceries, between medication and food. That is happening here.
We can:
Streamline enrollment so families who qualify for both food assistance and Medicaid can apply at the same time, in one place. The bureaucratic separation between these programs serves no one except the people who prefer low enrollment.
Connect food access to primary care so patients are not choosing between groceries and medication. That tradeoff is showing up in Hamilton County emergency rooms. It doesn't have to.
Expand Indiana's SNAP incentive programs so food assistance stretches further at local farmers markets, keeping dollars in Indiana's agricultural economy while improving access to fresh food.
Protect beginning farmer programs that keep Indiana's food supply regional and its farmland out of corporate consolidation. What happens to Indiana agriculture directly affects what Hamilton County families pay at the grocery store.
Elder Care
The average nursing home in Indiana now costs nearly $10,000 a month. Most families have no plan for that and no warning before they need one.
We can:
Create real, structured support for family members providing care. Indiana now caps reimbursement for Legally Responsible Individuals providing Attendant Care at 40 hours per week per waiver participant, regardless of what the person in their care actually needs. Dementia does not work a 40-hour week. Neither does recovery from a stroke.
Repeal or reform HEA 1120, which caps Indiana's PathWays for Aging program at the cost of nursing facility services. On its face that sounds reasonable. In practice, it removes the financial incentive for the state to invest in home-based care, the option that costs less, produces better outcomes, and is what families actually want.
Cut the waitlists for Indiana's home and community-based care programs, which are leaving seniors in a queue for services they already qualify for while their families scramble.
Make sure every Hamilton County senior is enrolled in the federal benefits they already qualify for. There are programs that can save families thousands of dollars per year in healthcare and prescription costs. Most seniors don't know they exist.
Wages and Tax Fairness
Indiana has not raised its minimum wage since 2009. Over the same period, the state's tax structure has charged the lowest-income families more than twice the effective rate of the highest earners. That is not an accident. It is a policy choice, and it is one we can reverse.
We can:
Raise Indiana's minimum wage. It has lost nearly half its purchasing power since it was last updated. That is not a raise that never came. It is a cut that happened slowly enough that nobody had to vote for it.
Reduce or eliminate the sales tax on groceries. Every household pays the same flat percentage regardless of income, which means the family with the least pays the most in proportion. This is one of the most straightforward fixes available to the legislature.
Create an Indiana Earned Income Tax Credit. Thirty-one other states have one. It reduces the tax burden on working families and returns money to people who spend it locally. Indiana's refusal to adopt it costs working Hoosiers real dollars every single year.
Require that corporate tax incentives come with verified job creation. Indiana has invested billions in business development with accountability measures that are rarely enforced. I will push for transparent, third-party verification tying every tax break to jobs that were actually delivered, so Indiana's investment in business growth reaches the workers it was supposed to benefit.
Opportunity
Opportunity You Can Count On.
The floor keeps getting further away and the ceiling is not moving. Real opportunity means more than a credential pathway that leads to a job that still cannot cover rent, childcare, or a mortgage. It means more than asking families to do more with less.
What Comes After High School
Indiana changed its high school diploma requirements and called it workforce development. It did not fund the pathways it mandated, and it did not ask whether those pathways lead to wages that support a family in Hamilton County.
We can:
Fund the workforce and trade pathways Indiana is now requiring on a diploma, including the school counselors students need to navigate them. Mandating a path without paying for it is not a policy. It is an unfunded promise handed to schools that are already operating without the resources to deliver it.
Expand apprenticeship programs and community college pipelines so a four-year degree is a choice, not the only viable option. Noblesville has been building these pathways for years. The state mandate means every district in the region is now competing for the same employer partnerships. Indiana needs to grow that pool, not just redistribute it, by creating real incentives for local businesses to take on students.
Ensure credential pathways lead to wages that actually support a family here, not just credentials that fill employer vacancies while workers still cannot afford rent or childcare.
Measure the success of workforce development by whether workers can build a stable life, not by whether employers have filled their open positions.
Building Something of Your Own
Employment is not the same as opportunity. For the next generation, a real economic path forward has to include the possibility of ownership: of a business, a home, a stake in the community they live in.
We can:
Remove the regulatory and financial barriers that make starting a small business harder than it needs to be. I paused my own business when tariffs made the market too unpredictable to absorb. Policy instability is a real cost, and it lands hardest on small operators who don't have the cushion that large corporations do.
Support Community Land Trusts for commercial real estate, which prevent landlords from pricing out the local businesses that give a neighborhood its character when rents rise faster than a small operator can absorb.
Fight for stable, predictable trade and tariff policy. Small businesses and family farms cannot build around rules that change without warning. Large corporations can. That asymmetry is a policy choice Indiana's delegation should be pushing back on.
Reform the corporate subsidy and incentive structures that consistently favor institutional investors and large corporations over local owners. The data center subsidies being passed onto residential utility bills are one example. The tax treatment of institutional homebuyers is another.
Protecting Opportunity
Opportunity requires safe neighborhoods, funded schools, and communities with the tools to invest in themselves. SEA 1 strips local communities of exactly those tools. The programs that lose funding first are the ones that create the conditions for people to get ahead.
We can:
Oppose state legislation that strips local communities of the authority to fund their own priorities, including schools, public safety, and the infrastructure that makes Hamilton County a place people choose to live and build a business.
Protect community safety programs like NobleACT, Noblesville's evidence-based intervention model that connects people in crisis to services before a situation becomes a criminal justice matter. That is prevention over intervention in the most direct sense.
Invest in local infrastructure as economic development. Roads, transit, broadband, and public spaces are not amenities. They are the foundation that private investment builds on.
Ensure that property tax relief is targeted to the people who genuinely need it, not structured as a blanket rollback that pulls funding from the schools and services the entire community depends on.
Agriculture and Local Food Systems
Hamilton County is surrounded by some of the most productive farmland in Indiana. It is also some of the most vulnerable. Land on the edge of a fast-growing suburb gets converted to development faster than anywhere else in the state, and once it goes, it does not come back. The distance between what Indiana grows and what Indiana families can actually access and afford keeps increasing. That is not inevitable. It is the result of policy decisions that consistently treat farmland as a waiting room for development.
We can:
Support beginning farmer land access legislation that keeps agricultural land in the hands of working farmers rather than investment portfolios. A farm owned by someone who works it produces food. A farm owned by someone who is waiting for the right moment to sell it does not.
Protect Hamilton County farmland from speculative development through conservation tools that give farmers real options beyond selling to a developer. Teter Organic Farm is a model for what that can look like when a community decides its agricultural land is worth preserving.
Invest in the local infrastructure that connects Indiana farms to Indiana families: farmers markets, regional distribution, and direct purchasing programs that shorten the distance between what is grown here and what ends up on a plate here.
Champion locally rooted agricultural programs as economic development, not just rural policy. What happens to the farms surrounding Hamilton County directly affects what families here pay for food and what kind of community this remains.
How do we pay for this?
The question is not whether Indiana can afford these investments. It is whether Indiana can afford not to make them. The state is currently paying the back end of poverty through emergency rooms, nursing homes, missed work, and stunted economic development, without investing in the front end that prevents those costs from accumulating.
Indiana receives $23 billion a year in federal funding. Money Hoosiers already paid in taxes. Right now, the state is paying $147 million in penalties for administrative failures in food assistance alone. It cut childcare subsidies and forfeited the federal matching dollars that go with them. It barely uses a federal program that permanently lowers utility bills for eligible households. It turned down funding that keeps kids fed over summer. And it has made it systematically harder for Hoosiers to access healthcare coverage that costs the state general fund almost nothing to use.
The approach is straightforward: fix the state-created problems that are costing us money, collect the federal dollars Hoosiers have already earned, and redirect what we are currently spending on bad outcomes into the investments that prevent them. This approach doesn't require new money. Indiana has the resources. What it has lacked is the will to use them for the people who paid for them.
Indiana has one of the most regressive tax structures in the country, and it shows in the gap between what Hoosiers pay and what they get back. That gap does not close without legislators who are accountable to the people they represent rather than the party leadership that put them there. That is what this campaign is about.
That is why I am asking for your vote on May 5th.