Planet Detroit Candidate Survey
What are the three most pressing environmental issues facing the communities you seek to serve? Please rank them in order of priority and briefly explain why you chose each.
First, water infrastructure safety, specifically preventing toxic contamination and ensuring affordability, is our highest priority. Recent ongoing investigations into local containment sites—such as tracking historical PFAS firefighting foam runoff near the Battle Creek Executive Airport and the neighboring Air National Guard base—highlight the constant vigilance required to protect our local water tables. Beyond chemical runoff, our community faces localized water quality challenges, including managing quarterly regulatory compliance spikes like total trihalomethanes (TTHMs) in municipal or township water systems. Clean water is a baseline necessity for public health and human dignity. At the same time, we must protect families from skyrocketing utility rates. Implementing income-based billing and robust utility accountability ensures that while we aggressively monitor and eliminate emerging contaminants from local infrastructure, working families are never priced out of an essential human right. Second, we must address childhood lead exposure driven by our aging housing stock. Over 80% of homes in Battle Creek—and tens of thousands of structures across Calhoun County—were constructed prior to the 1978 lead-based paint ban. Compounding this risk, less than 20% of eligible young children in the county are actively tested for lead exposure. As an educator, I look at environmental issues through the lens of protecting our kids. Lead poisoning causes permanent, preventable neurological damage, learning disabilities, and developmental delays. This is a hidden crisis that directly disrupts our children's futures before they even step foot into a classroom, making it a moral imperative to fund remediation efforts, upgrade legacy lines, and expand local testing accessibility. Third, we must tackle utility grid reliability and the resulting energy burden on our neighborhoods. Our communities bear an unfair double burden: paying higher utility rates while suffering through consistent, preventable power outages during severe weather events because multi-billion-dollar utility providers are not being held properly accountable. Unreliable power isn't just an inconvenience; it's an environmental and economic hazard that spoils food, cuts off medically vulnerable neighbors, and drains working-class budgets. True environmental justice requires tying state utility structures to strict reliability metrics, lowering the energy burden on household incomes, and ensuring a just transition to clean energy that creates good, union jobs right here at home.
Michigan law requires utilities to reach 100% clean energy by 2040. If elected, would you support maintaining this law, or would you support revising or repealing it? Please explain your position.
Maintain the current law and timeline
Transitioning to a sustainable energy future is essential to protecting our environment, creating high-quality local jobs, and lowering long-term utility costs for working-class families across our state.
More than two dozen Michigan communities are considering or have approved large-scale data center developments. These facilities can consume as much electricity as a small city and place significant demands on local water and energy infrastructure. What role should state government play in overseeing data center development, and what guardrails should the state legislature enact to protect communities where data centers are proposed?
The state government must play a proactive, regulatory role to ensure that massive tech infrastructure does not compromise our natural resources, strain our electric grid, or place an unfair financial burden on working-class families. To achieve this, the state legislature should enact strict guardrails requiring hyperscale facilities to fully cover their own massive energy and water footprints. First, we must prohibit public utilities from passing infrastructure expansion costs onto residential ratepayers, ensuring large-load tech corporations sign long-term utility contracts and establish separate rate classes to pay their own way. Second, we must protect our Great Lakes and local drinking water from being drained by massive cooling systems by capping daily water consumption, instituting rigorous water-use permitting, and giving EGLE clear oversight to monitor wastewater discharge. Finally, the state should ban public officials from signing restrictive non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that keep local residents in the dark, while legally mandating robust Community Benefit Agreements and project labor standards so that any proposed development directly secures local union jobs and genuinely respects the health, safety, and welfare of the host community.
PFAS contamination has been detected in drinking water, groundwater, and surface water across Michigan. Cleanup efforts are underway, but many affected communities are still waiting for action. What is the single most important step the officeholder in this position should take on PFAS in the next term?
The single most important step a state lawmaker must take next term is enacting comprehensive "Polluter Pay" legislation to shift the financial burden of PFAS cleanup from everyday taxpayers onto the corporations responsible for the contamination. We must hold historical corporate polluters legally and financially accountable by extending the statute of limitations under the Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act, allowing the state to recover full damages for compounds like PFAS.
Michigan residents in some communities face disproportionate exposure to air pollution, contaminated water, and industrial waste. Do you support requiring Michigan regulators to assess cumulative environmental and health impacts on overburdened communities before approving new permits for polluting facilities?
Yes
Utility rate cases directly affect what Michigan residents pay for electricity and gas. DTE and Consumers Energy have requested frequent significant rate increases in recent years. Should elected officials play a greater role in holding utility companies accountable for rate hikes and rising energy costs?
Yes, elected officials must play a far more aggressive role in holding multi-billion-dollar utility providers accountable for continuous rate hikes and rising energy costs. It is entirely unacceptable that working-class families across Michigan are being asked to pay some of the highest rates in the Midwest while enduring a fragile, unreliable grid that routinely leaves them in the dark during severe weather.
Enbridge's Line 5 pipeline runs through the Straits of Mackinac and carries crude oil and natural gas liquids between Wisconsin and Ontario. A proposed tunnel beneath the lakebed to house a replacement pipeline has faced legal and regulatory challenges for years. What is your position on the future of Line 5?
I oppose the continued operation of Enbridge's Line 5 pipeline and the proposed tunnel project without clear, tangible, and enforceable protections for our water and environment developed alongside our Tribal communities, but I believe the path forward must actively protect and elevate Michigan's building trades unions. True environmental stewardship means recognizing that decommissioning this aging pipeline and building a sustainable, independent energy future will require a massive volume of highly skilled, union-backed construction jobs.
Drinking water is becoming increasingly unaffordable for Michiganders in both rural and urban areas, leading to water shutoffs. Would you support legislation that caps water bills for low-income Michiganders and adds shutoff protections?
Yes, I fully support the bipartisan water affordability legislation to establish the nation’s first statewide low-income water residential affordability program. Access to clean water is a fundamental human right, and this critical policy would protect vulnerable families in both our rural townships and urban centers by capping water bills at an affordable percentage of household income while implementing robust, statewide shutoff protections.
Michigan is home to more than 18,000 contaminated sites. Do you support or oppose legislation to hold polluters accountable for cleaning up these sites?
Support
For too long, our weak cleanup laws have protected corporate entities at the expense of working families, forcing everyday taxpayers to foot the multi-million-dollar bill for environmental neglect while contaminated sites sit fenced off rather than restored. I strongly back the "Polluter Pay" legislative package to reinstate strict statutory accountability, giving state regulators the authority to mandate thorough cleanups, expand public transparency, and extend the statute of limitations so that those who poison our land and water tables are legally and financially responsible for fixing the damage.