Campaign Phone Number
2062099093
Biography (max 750 char)
As a fourth-generation Washingtonian born and raised on Mercer Island, I've watched this state lose its way — Olympia keeps spending more and delivering less, treating your tax dollars as a blank check. State spending has more than doubled in two decades while accountability, affordability, public safety, and health outcomes have gotten worse, not better. I'm an attorney, investor, and Washington-licensed nutritionist. I think independently, follow evidence, and value outcomes over ideology. I will prioritize accountability, affordability, and improving health outcomes for Washington families. District 41 deserves a representative who brings expertise, demands fiscal discipline, and fights for solutions.
Government's first responsibility is to spend taxpayers' money as carefully as families spend their own. My priorities are the three things I'm running on. Accountability: I've spent my career reading budgets and pricing risk, and before Olympia takes another dollar, it should show where the last one went and whether it worked — performance audits with teeth, honest accounting on legacy PERS 1 and TRS 1 pension liabilities, and structurally balanced budgets without one-time fixes. Affordability: budgets that stop adding to families' cost of living. Health: real funding for behavioral health and addiction treatment, where today's approach is failing. If revenue were ever necessary, I'd close special-interest tax preferences that fail review — not raise broad-based taxes.
Washington's vote-by-mail system is a national model — accurate, audited, accessible. The confidence problem isn't how we vote; it's whether legislators answer to voters or to the money behind them. I support real-time disclosure of contributions, stronger PDC enforcement, and closing loopholes that let PAC money move through intermediaries. I hold myself to that standard: I accept no PAC money. To lift participation, I'd move local elections to even years, when most people vote. Today, school boards and councils are decided in odd years by a fraction of the electorate; consolidating roughly doubles turnout, and King County voters already approved it for county offices. I'll also tell my constituents how I voted and why, every session — government that shows its work earns trust.
Follow the evidence. Washington ranks last in the nation in police officers per capita — and has for fifteen years. Fund recruitment, retention, and training until agencies can answer calls. But hiring alone won't fix what everyone sees on our streets: open drug use and untreated mental illness. Public drug use is already illegal in Washington; enforce the law, and route those arrested into drug courts, where the consequence is treatment. Add co-responder teams for behavioral-health calls and treatment capacity, so courts have somewhere to send people. Clear crime-lab backlogs — swift, certain consequences deter crime better than severe-but-rare ones. Measure every dollar against response times, clearance rates, and recidivism, and move money from what fails to what works.
Local journalism is civic infrastructure — when it disappears, oversight of government disappears with it, and I'm running on accountability. The state's most powerful tool costs nothing: transparency. I'd require agencies to answer public records requests promptly and completely, because reliable local news depends on a government that doesn't hide from the reporters covering it. Where the state helps directly — the B&O exemption for news publishers, the Murrow News Fellows program — I'd apply the same test I'd apply to every tax preference and program: prove the civic return. And one firm guardrail: any support must be viewpoint-neutral, with no editorial strings. Government should strengthen the conditions for independent journalism, not become its editor.
The 2021 process showed the flaws: a missed deadline, maps negotiated privately against the spirit of open-meetings law, and a commission built around the two parties rather than the public. For 2031 I'd support a genuinely independent citizen commission — members selected for impartiality, not appointed by caucus leaders — with binding open-meeting and public-comment requirements, all draft maps and negotiations on the record, earlier deadlines with a clear tie-breaking mechanism, and strict Voting Rights Act compliance. Districts should be drawn for communities of interest, not incumbent protection. As a candidate unaffiliated with either party, I have no stake in gerrymandering — only in maps voters can trust.
Affordability. Families in Mercer Island, Bellevue, Newcastle, and Sammamish are being squeezed. Your PSE electric bill is up 45% in two years — roughly double 2020 — and individual-market health premiums jumped 21% this year, with insurers seeking 22% more. Olympia keeps adding to the burden instead of easing it. The state's role: put PSE rate hikes under real scrutiny at the state's utility regulator, and finally build the grid for cheap, homegrown renewable power; streamline permitting so housing supply can grow near jobs and transit; require real price transparency from hospitals and insurers; and stop layering new taxes onto household budgets. I answer to the voters of the 41st — nobody else — and I'll measure every vote against whether it makes living here more affordable.
Biography (max 750 char)
Representative My-Linh Thai is the first refugee elected to serve in the Washington state legislature. While her extensive knowledge focuses on Healthcare and Education, she cares deeply about the wellbeing of people and understands widely the connectivity of other conditions impacting humanity and the environment. Elected in 2018, My-Linh has lead legislations such as Working Families Tax Credit, Tenants protection, Language Access in Healthcare, Protections to Access to Healthcare, and more.
My top budget priorities continue to be funding Education, protecting people rights to counsel, Food insecurities, and Housing. To ensure these priorities being appropriately fund, Washington needs to reform our regressive tax code.
Elections and civic participation goes hands-in-hands. It is important that we continue to encourage and to participate in community engagement while practicing active listening; that is to listen to understand and to learn from one another.
Build resources to support cares and provide services for those in needs.
Education: attract people to pursuit the career of journalism.
Workspace: liveable wages and policies that support reporting facts and create spaces where journalists have access to power structure
Community: buy-in to sources of information that are credible!
Continue counting marginalized communities through intentional outreach.
Affordability!
State government can put more emphasis on Housing, Childcare, and public Transportation.
