Thank you to the League of Women Voters for helping voters make informed decisions! Commissioners must serve constituents by listening, staying accessible, and meeting the needs of both rural and suburban residents in District 4. We must spend tax dollars transparently and protect residents from unnecessary tax burdens while maintaining public safety, schools, and roads. As budget chairman, I've helped Rutherford County achieve a AAA bond rating from all three major agencies — placing us in the top 1.7% of counties nationwide. By restructuring and paying off debt early, we've saved taxpayers $26.4 million since 2010. I also support raising the $67,000 income threshold for the senior property tax freeze.

One goal I have is to ensure our land and water are clean. We need to increase recycling to reduce our dependence on landfills. We need to have better alternatives than burying trash or paying to ship it to another landfill. We are advised to not eat the fish that are swimming in our community’s water source. I want to locate the source of this problem and take corrective action.

Additionally, I have a goal to help preserve our rural farmland. We are losing over 9 acres every hour to development in Tennessee. This equates to over two hundred acres daily. This negatively affects us all, as we all eat food grown from farms.

Rutherford needs a recycling center or waste-to-energy facility near the Nashville interchange in LaVergne. We currently accept out-of-county trash, increasing road maintenance costs and traffic. I want to stop outside waste to avoid added strain. TDEC grants and other funding can help finance recycling infrastructure and address brownfield (contaminated) sites. I attended three statewide environmental conferences last year to identify opportunities for our county.

Passing Plan Rutherford would protect our rural heritage, prevent overdevelopment, and allow denser growth only where soil conditions support it. Responsible growth is the goal.

The Commission holds the power of the purse and is beholden to the people regarding how tax dollars are allocated. Commissioners are responsible for seeing that every branch of county government is properly funded and has access to every resource needed to operate in an efficient manner.

I also believe that the commissioner should be an organizer in their district. A commissioner should also be on the lookout for ways to bring about changes and institutions that will make their district a better place to live.

It is, in my opinion, a commissioner's responsibility to keep the public informed about upcoming decisions, both local and state, and how they could affect the people's day-to-day life.

Universal free breakfast and lunch for every student in Rutherford County Schools and ensuring that county infrastructure is prioritized in such a manner that it can keep pace with growth.

I have a detailed proposal regarding universal breakfast and lunch on my website, but the Cliff's Notes version is that we simply have to prioritize feeding kids. Paying for breakfast and lunch would cost about 1% of the county's annual budget. We have hundreds of millions of dollars just sitting in reserves not being used. The money is there; we just have to spend it. The USDA has a program that would cover a large portion of the county's cost. If we tied into that program, it would literally cost us about 0.3% of the annual budget.

Infrastructure is a multifaceted issue, but again... the root to fixing it is a shift in priorities. Plan Rutherford is a solid start, but we need to ensure we put people over builders.