Experience and Qualifications
I am currently the State Assemblymember for this district, having been elected in 2020. I currently hold the position of Assistant Majority Leader and sit on six committees including Health, Insurance, Judiciary, Environmental Conservation, Children & Families and Libraries. Prior to taking office I was an attorney in Rochester for 12 years focusing on personal injury, workers' compensation and social security disability.
Community Involvement
Prior to taking office I held numerous leadership positions in the Monroe County Bar Association, including Chair of the Young Lawyers Committee. I was a Board Member on the Anthony Poselovich Memorial Foundation, a charity devoted to helping families of children with cancer. I was a state co-chair of the New York Chapter of Lawyers for Good Government and volunteered my time with the Center for Youth Crisis Nursery. I donated my pro bono legal time to various Telesca Center Partners.
Education
J.D, Boston University School of Law; B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy, Hartwick College
Campaign Endorsements
NYSUT, NY AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood, PEF, CWA, NYS Nurses Association , New York League of Conservation Voters, Caring Majority Rising, Council 66, NYS Young Democrats, Eleanor's Legacy, Monroe County Democratic Party, Working Families Party
Campaign Instagram
@votejenlunsford
My three top priorities center heavily on healthcare and the cost of living crisis. First, with the full implementation of the changes in HR.1 (the so called "big beautiful bill") New Yorkers are going to fall off SNAP and Medicaid due to the added administrative burden the federal government has placed on those programs, so we need to provide funding to the safety net programs that will catch those people as they fall, like food pantries, schools, and community health programs.
Second, we need to focus on the high cost of utilities, gas prices, and consumer goods as a result of the war in Iran and tariffs on every-day goods. We will continue to find ways to put money back in New Yorkers pockets like expanding access to the HEAP program and holding greedy corporations accountable for price gouging.
Third, we have to laser-focus on building up our grid capacity and modernizing our electrical transmission lines to keep up with growing demand from residential and commercial expansion.
Obviously our energy policy is a critical component of our fight against climate change, and the data center moratorium we put in place this year is a good first step towards ensuring that we are making smart, deliberate decisions about how much power we onboard onto our grid and why. Beyond just capacity and ensuring that we continue diversifying our power generation with more clean and renewable infrastructure, we must also invest in modernizing our transmission lines, which are amongst the oldest in the country, to create more efficient power delivery.
But waste management is an often overlooked area that we must do more to address, seeing as a significant contributor of greenhouse gas emissions, most notably methane, come from landfills, incinerators and wastewater treatment. With several mega-landfills slated to close in the next decade, we must get a handle on how much waste we generate and what we do with it. Investing in municipal composting and recycling is essential.
The wealth inequality plaguing our entire country right now is a weight around the neck of so many of our racial and social justice policies. We have to create more guardrails around the out-of-control corporate greed that is contributing to the high prices on consumer goods, insurance hikes, and housing costs. We need a tax policy that more fairly assesses the profits being earned by large corporations and the ultra-rich on the backs of working class New Yorkers so we can use those funds to advance the policies we've already put in place to better address social and racial inequality in our state.
To begin, I fundamentally disagree with the Court's decision in this case, but I respect that it has the power of law. New York's constitution precludes gerrymandering of any kind, but expressly precludes gerrymandering for the purpose of diluting a racial or language minority's voting rights. We also have laws that expressly require that districts be drawn with the historic core of the prior district maintained, and to combine, to the extent practicable, like-communities. It is likely that the Supreme Court would interpret this, in certain circumstances, to result in what they are calling "Racial gerrymandering." So we have taken steps at the state level to remove that language from our constitution, which requires a bill to be passed through two consecutive legislatures and then to go to the voters for approval. The first step in that process has been approved by the legislature.
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