Lower costs. Stronger middle class.

Middletown is a place people move to because they're building something. Too many of them are getting squeezed by child care, by housing, by utility bills, by a tax assessment nobody could explain. Here's what I'll fight for.

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1. Strong Schools, From Pre-K On

A great start for every child and relief for families crushed by the cost of raising one.

 

I don't have children. And I'll be honest with you: when I look at what child care costs, I debate whether I even want to. I don't feel supported in that decision, mainly because of the cost.

 

Child care in Delaware starts around $1,100 a month. I can't afford that, and I make a decent salary. And that's not even for the ones with high-level security and cameras, where you can be sure your child is being cared for properly in those early years when they can't speak for themselves. In Middletown, the cost can easily be upwards of $2,500 a month.

 

For a single-income household, I truly don't know how people are doing it. You can't earn an income without child care, and you can't afford child care without an income. It's circular, and families are stuck inside it.

 

I will support efforts to:

 

• Deliver universal full-day pre-K

• Cap child-care costs at a fair share of income

• Protect and expand SEED free community college and apprenticeships

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2. A Home You Can Afford and Keep

Housing that works for the people who already live here renters and owners alike.

 

A community cannot survive without affordable housing. Not the way Delaware envisions itself with different income levels living with each other.

 

The average new one-bedroom starts at $1,300 a month or more, and salaries are nowhere near aligned with that. The average young adult from Delaware can't afford it. How we treat people who don't have high incomes tells you exactly what kind of society we're trying to build.

 

It's not only renters. Our teachers, firefighters, and police officers are being priced out of the market they serve. To me that's the whole argument for affordable housing in one sentence. If we want people to want those jobs, they have to know the community and the government will support them. They need to know that if they dream of owning a home, they can, and they can raise their families, and build their own generational wealth, while they're teaching and protecting our families.

 

And on property taxes, I bring something rare: this is literally my profession.

 

Reassessment is one of the hardest things a municipality does. Delaware isn't the first to struggle, Philadelphia went through the same thing a few years ago, and so have municipalities across the country. But I can tell you specifically what went wrong here.

 

Mass appraisals pull sales data to determine values using broad neighborhood markers. That's a normal method, and it's fine in rural areas and areas of low density. It stops being fine when nobody on the team understands the particulars of individual neighborhoods. You end up comparing one side of a street to the other as if they're the same market, when they can be two different neighborhoods with two different value ranges. The core failure was a lack of neighborhood-level knowledge.

 

You can hire the vendor but you still need people who know neighborhoods locally to guide them. I want to dig into this so that the next time Delaware does a reassessment, it's organized, and families and small businesses aren't the ones absorbing the mistakes.

 

I will support efforts to:

 

• Protect longtime homeowners from property-tax spikes

• Help first-time buyers with down-payment assistance

• Build more homes including workforce housing for the people who serve our community

• Stop Wall Street from buying up our neighborhoods

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3. Health Care That Doesn't Bankrupt You

No family should go broke because someone got sick.

 

Delaware has some of the highest health-care costs in the nation, and families are buried in premiums, drug prices, and medical debt.

 

I will support efforts to:

 

• Create a Prescription Drug Affordability Board

• Cut premiums for families and small businesses

• End surprise medical bills

• Get medical debt off Delawareans' credit reports

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4. Lower Bills Make Big Tech Pay Its Share

Your electric bill shouldn't go up so a billion-dollar company can move in.

 

I absolutely support data centers paying their own way. Honestly, I've yet to hear a good argument for the alternative because if they don't pay, the people picking up the cost are the rest of us. These aren't nonprofits. They make money.

 

Historically, when we courted a company to come here, the deal was jobs, or something real for the community. Data centers have minimal workforce requirements. So we're offering tax incentives and credits to build them, with no long-term benefit laid out. I'm glad to have the conversation but let's actually determine what value we get.

 

And I don't want to be another generation that ignores an environmental problem until we're already standing in it. I remember being told not to waste water. I remember learning about climate change in elementary school. We're still talking about it. Now we're adding something at an enormous scale that affects our environment and our water, and we need to ensure we are having the conversation about who's responsible for that.

 

I will support efforts to:

 

• Make data centers pay their own way

• Protect ratepayers from rate hikes with a strong advocate

• Lower bills with efficiency rebates and community solar

• Limit shutoffs and end utility profiteering

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5. More Money Back in Your Pocket

Reward work, grow the middle class, and make the economy work for the people who do the work.

 

Small businesses are the backbone of our community. When we start abandoning them, that's when we lose our way.

 

I want a community where you walk into a salon and know the owner. Small business owners are the boots on the ground. A corporation doesn't know what's happening on every block, but a small business owner does. They know when the street is changing. They're the ones who'll actually read the comprehensive plan. (Most people don't know the comprehensive plan exists.)

 

And it connects straight back to land and legacy: small businesses bring in the accountants, the lawyers, the wraparound and commercial services and those are what lift property values. Being able to reach a grocery store a mile away instead of five miles away is a property value issue. Your small businesses are the umbrella over your whole community.

 

I will support efforts to:

 

• Create a Delaware Child Tax Credit and expand the EITC

• Crack down on corporate junk fees and price-gouging

• Back small businesses and good union jobs

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6. Growth With a Plan

Middletown is growing fast and our infrastructure has to keep up.

 

I want to support bills that address the strain our fast growth is putting on communities like ours before families are stuck with traffic, plumbing and electrical problems nobody planned for.

 

I also want to talk seriously about transportation. Delaware has a lot of land and we are deeply car-dependent. There's real room to improve our transit system to ease traffic, to give people an option that isn't a car, to help on gas and on the environment. And frankly, to let people actually see what's around them.

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7. Workforce, Legacy, and the Careers of the Future 

This is one I'm genuinely hopeful about. Delaware has been leaning into workforce development and looking at the careers of the future, including AI, and I strongly support that.

 

My fear is holding our children back by preparing them for the world we understand, instead of the one they're actually going to step into. And I think about who gets left behind, who very often are the most vulnerable of our population. 

 

When computers became a household thing, the people who got left behind were the ones who never learned to type. As we move into the next wave of technology, I don't want that to happen again, especially to our young people and to older workers who still have years until retirement and can't afford to lose their income because they didn't get the training.

 

I also want to expand education around ownership and legacy clear title, wills, estate preservation because that's how families keep what they build.

 

Delaware could be an example for the rest of the country. Not a guinea pig, an example. Our size and population let us build programs and then scale them to bigger states. I'd love us to be the model on affordable housing, on the benefits we offer our public servants, on education around ownership and legacy, and on workforce training.​