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.
1. Corporate Pollution and Accountability (The Gelman Dioxane Plume & PFAS): For decades, multi-billion-dollar corporations have polluted our water and used high-priced lawyers to drag out cleanups while families wait for answers. In my own community, the Gelman dioxane plume is a constant reminder that the system favors powerful interests over public health. This corporate foot-dragging must end. That’s why I’ve been the House leader on advancing polluter pay legislation to hold polluters accountable to clean up their messes. We need real accountability and immediate, aggressive cleanup. 2. Monopoly Utility Accountability and Energy Burdens: Corporate monopolies like DTE and Consumers Energy are price-gouging Michigan families with frequent, unjustifiable rate hikes while delivering some of the least reliable service in the country. Our clean energy transition must put regular people first—not the bottom lines of corporate executives. We must aggressively implement our climate goals while breaking the stranglehold these monopolies have on our state. 3. Building a Union-Led Clean Energy Economy: Achieving a 100% renewable energy standard by 2040 is an absolute ecological necessity, but it is also an opportunity to build an economy that works for ordinary people. We must direct state investments into green energy to create high-paying, family-sustaining union jobs. True environmental justice means ensuring working-class communities are the ones driving and benefiting from this new economy.
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?
Maintain the current law and timeline
Explanation for Question 2 (1-2 sentences)
I proudly helped pass the Clean Energy and Jobs Act because we cannot let multi-billion-dollar utility monopolies slow down our transition to a clean energy future just to protect their corporate profits. This aligns with the work I led in Washtenaw County to set a 2030 carbon-neutral goal - real climate action means holding corporations accountable, sticking to aggressive targets, and putting regular people first.
More than two dozen Michigan communities are considering or have approved large-scale data center developments. What role should state government play in overseeing data center development, and what guardrails should the state legislature enact?
Data centers are coming to Michigan, but their growth must be accompanied by transparency, accountability, and protections for the communities that host them. State government should ensure that residents are not left paying the price for increased demands on our energy grid, water resources, and local infrastructure. That means requiring transparency around energy and water use, protecting ratepayers from subsidizing private developments, establishing strong environmental safeguards, and ensuring communities have a voice in decisions that affect them. I have introduced legislation to protect Michigan's water resources by requiring large data centers to use closed-loop cooling systems or municipal water systems. The Great Lakes are one of our state's greatest assets, and we have a responsibility to safeguard them for future generations. If data centers are coming to Michigan, then Michigan residents deserve transparency, accountability, and a fair deal.
PFAS contamination has been detected across Michigan. 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 we must take is passing comprehensive, ironclad "polluter-pay" legislation. For too long, the system has worked beautifully for corporate polluters, allowing them to pocket massive profits, dump toxic chemicals like PFAS into our environment, and then stick taxpayers with the multi-million-dollar cleanup bill. Having fought the Gelman dioxane plume since my time as a county commissioner, I know that legal delay is just a corporate strategy to wait out the public. The state legislature must treat toxic contamination as the urgent public health and environmental justice crisis that it is. We must mandate strict corporate liability, enforce absolute transparency on contamination disclosures, and require robust financial assurances up front so that corporate executives—not Michigan families—finally pay to clean up their own messes.
Do you support requiring Michigan regulators to assess cumulative environmental and health impacts on overburdened communities before approving new permits for polluting facilities?
Yes
Should elected officials play a greater role in holding utility companies accountable for rate hikes and rising energy costs?
Yes
What is your position on Line 5?
Line 5 poses an unacceptable, catastrophic risk to the Great Lakes and our shared drinking water, and I do not support its continued operation as proposed. A single spill in the Straits would be an irreversible disaster for twenty percent of the world’s fresh surface water, and continuing to rely on this aging fossil fuel pipeline runs directly counter to our state's climate goals. While the urgent threat to our ecosystem makes decommissioning necessary, I deeply value our labor partners who maintain our current infrastructure. Our path forward must combine aggressive environmental protection with a worker-first transition, ensuring skilled tradespeople are seamlessly moved into equal or better-paying union jobs within Michigan's rapidly growing clean energy and resilient infrastructure sectors.
Would you support legislation to cap water bills for low-income Michiganders and add certain shut-off protections?
Yes
Do you support or oppose legislation to hold polluters accountable for cleanup costs?
Support
Please explain your position on polluter accountability.
I want to thank Planet Detroit for highlighting this critical issue, as I am proud to be the lead sponsor of the "polluter-pay" legislative package in the Michigan House to finally fix this broken system. For too long, big corporations have padded their bottom lines while leaving toxic messes behind for everyday taxpayers to clean up. Our legislation sets more stringent cleanup standards, increases public transparency, and prevents sites from being "orphaned" by forcing corporate polluters to pay to restore our land and water to a usable condition. Every year of delayed accountability is another year of prolonged harm to public health and our environment, and it is time we put Michigan families first.