Campaign phone
9734522213
Campaign Address
PO Box 76, Madison, NJ 07940
Facebook Page
https://www.facebook.com/ld23democrats
Website
www.ld23dems.com
In New Jersey, in 2025, we face pressing challenges to both our rights, and our local economies. To the former issue, we are seeing an uptick in anti-government hate groups, and science deniers, taking over school boards and library commissions. To combat that we need to get more Democrats who stand up for American & human rights elected, everywhere. To the latter concern, we are seeing small-town economies ruined by misuse and abuse of the land by speculators and developers. For example, in New Jersey, but particularly in my District, we need to help boost local businesses and create jobs with heritage tourism, agritourism, support for main street, and renewal of empty buildings; not paving over all the open, wild, and green spaces with mega-warehouses. We can and should masterplan for paradise, not industrial parks.
There are several. As a candidate for endorsement by the Forward Party I believe they are leading the charge on this. As per their approach I believe we can restore democracy with electoral reforms like term limits, open primaries, and rank-choice voting. These measures will help ensure that new voices in both parties who represent common grounds will rise and become representatives.
I covered this in my initial response. But to add more to it, we need to boost local, hyper-local, everything. We often forget, for example, that our most tremendous human resources are in our own backyards, our own neighbors. For example, we need more project labor agreements to make sure that local building tradesfolk who live in our communities get prevailing wage jobs on huge projects in our backyards. These agreements support prevailing wages, safety protocols, and local hiring practices (often with union labor) and would be a sea-change for our small-town communities in terms of prosperity, and opportunity.
We need to fix the S2 Funding Formula. While it has helped the inner cities tremendously, it has come at the cost of our more rural communities. For example, I remember vividly attending a school board meeting not too long ago in Greenwich Twp, outside of Phillipsburg, Warren County. They were openly lamenting at how they were missing 100,000's of dollars from the yearly budget due to S2, and were no longer going to be able to offer art and music programs. This will only be more of a problem if we lose great programs like Title 1 if the current federal administration ends the Department of Education. We have to address better budgeting and plugging essential gaps from the State level. We have to make the billionaires pay their fair share to help. If they are truly patriotic they will understand.
Everyone has the right to become an American through the legal processes. I also believe that those systems need to become streamlined and simplified. For example, it is not right at all that someone has to wait years for their green card if they have been working, paying taxes, and contributing to their local community. I know of many such people stuck in the process. We should start something like an interim "Work to Stay" program in NJ, until the feds can get their act together, that allows documentation of such folks. In the meantime, we are hearing of people being taken, unconstitutionally, by ICE. Misidentifying all undocumented people as dangerous criminals is terrifying and wrong.
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Campaign Address
PO Box 76 Madison, NJ 07940
Website
https://ld23dems.com/
This is not answerable in a thousand words or less, simply because there are so few challenges now that aren’t pressing, and we are challenged on all fronts. What I will say is that no challenge can be undertaken without resources to strive with; whether the challenge is climate change, loss of fertile farmland to overdevelopment, inadequate energy policy, poor infrastructure, poor public transport, or the brutality of simple economics in our new Trumpian era, we must carefully steward NJ’s resources to combat it.
We cannot afford half measures, and we cannot afford to be complacent. Likewise, we cannot afford to rush to judgement or overcorrect. We need to listen, and we need to have a head for nuance. I will listen to all of my constituents, and we will navigate towards a better future together.
I believe in pushing low lifts that make big progress. Ranked Choice Voting, and a statewide election holiday are easier cases to make. Open primaries would be very difficult in New Jersey, but not impossible to get passed. I would support them, if reasonable efforts could be made.
I also think we should explore a ban on outside employment of the legislature, and make the assembly and senate full time public servants with a salary that is 3-4x the current salary, to act as a countermeasure to corruption and personal interest.
First, we need to enable better cottage industry. In our region, starting a home business is almost impossible- it is far easier in many other states that do not require a commercial facility for making jam.
We need to enable people to have small scale micro businesses, to localize our economies more. Good examples of bad regulation are the $10,000 license requirement to open a barber shop, or the inability of breweries to serve food.
We need to modernize and defriction our economy in New Jersey.
I will defer to education experts and the recommendations of the NJEA as far as possible, in this.
Having grown up on the border, I support a partially closed border with a stringent immigration process that is far better funded and allows people to come here the right way, instead of forcing them to come without documents or illegally.
We should strengthen our programs like H1B visas and provide high value employees an avenue to citizenship, and reinstate migratory programs like the Bracero program.
