What are your top three priorities for the next legislative session?
As your current State Representative, my three top priorities are reversing rising Colorado inflation, addressing current unemployment by helping people get back to work, and ensuring community safety for our families and children. My highest legislative priority is focused on Colorado’s economy including inflation, unemployment, rising consumer prices, high cost of energy and gasoline, supply shortages, homeless, crime, drugs, and many other symptoms of economic recession. I am also currently planning my first Legislative Session with proposed bipartisan legislation including five House Bills in areas of improving our economy, ensuring community safety, guaranteeing criminal justice, and preserving community standards.
The chamber may see split Democrat-Republican control next year. On what issues do you see common ground with the opposite party?
I have an advantage working as a State Capitol Legislative Volunteer the last four sessions and working on 13 bipartisan House Bills of which nine were signed into law. As a result of this work, I have bipartisan working relationships and have already been contacted by several Democratic Representatives regarding proposed legislation for the next session in affordable housing, energy production, and community associations. I believe the common ground for legislation next session will be in improving the economy and reducing unemployment, guaranteeing criminal justice including reducing car thefts, and ensuring community safety for our seniors, families, and children.
What perspective or background would you bring to the chamber that is currently missing?
My education includes three degrees in engineering in the areas of fuels, propulsion, and energy production which will be important in House debates on a future Colorado Energy Policy. As a 30-year leukemia survivor with four sessions working on the House Health & Insurance Committee, I will provide the perspective of a long-term cancer survivor to any committee hearing debates on a one-size-fits-all state healthcare system. As a seven-year Highlands Ranch District Delegate with extensive training, certifications and licensing in community association management,t I hope to prove common sense solutions to current and future community association legislation.
What more can the state legislature do to ease housing costs across Colorado?
I believe the only long-term solution to lowering housing costs is to significantly increase the future supply of new housing including rentals, starter homes, senior housing, and other types of affordable housing. I also believe that construction defects reform has been and still is essential to removing a real barrier to building future affordable housing. My vision is to eliminate any real or artificial barriers to building new affordable housing for first-time home buyers, single people, and single-income families with children so our children and seniors have opportunities to stay here in Colorado.
Do you support the current law on fentanyl possession and resources for treatment?
According to the DEA, fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin. As such, I believe the new Colorado law on fentanyl possession is still too lenient and that felony fentanyl possession needs to be lowered to significantly less than a 1-gram when 2-milligrams is considered a lethal dose. I support the recent HB22-1326 Fentanyl Accountability And Prevention Bill that lowers the limit on fentanyl possession and increases resources for fentanyl prevention, education, and treatment as a start in the right direction.
What are your top three priorities for the next legislative session?
Public safety (includes funding the police, fire mitigation, revising use of personal recognizance bonds for auto theft while making auto theft a felony again and especially bringing back our mental health institutions so that law enforcement is no longer Colorado’s default mental health providers); Public education (improving compensation and respect for teachers while making vo-tech a co-equal educational goal of secondary school again); Environmental protection (ensuring not just the bare minimum clean air and water today, but for generations to come).
The chamber may see split Democrat-Republican control next year. On what issues do you see common ground with the opposite party?
Revising mental health in Colorado saw law enforcement does not have that burden, PR bonding on auto theft, increasing funding and status of Vo-Tech.
What perspective or background would you bring to the chamber that is currently missing?
Was a 30+ year Republican, four years unaffiliated, and only became a Democrat in December (but was voted Democrat of the Year in June, although haven’t even been a Democrat for a year). Understand others’ perspectives quite well and after having been in the Marine Corps for decades, I am a pragmatist who wants to solve a problem, not argue over it and make ideological perfection the enemy of a good solution. Make things a little better each day and in few years things will be a lot better.
What more can the state legislature do to ease housing costs across Colorado?
Look at state legislation to cut across NIMBY zoning laws to allow higher density where needed in as quick a manner as possible to unleash the ability of hundreds of home builders to quickly provide housing.
Do you support the current law on fentanyl possession and resources for treatment?
Yes I do. It seems to effectively make possession of any quantity of it a felony due to its ubiquitous use in other drugs (i.e., even though there is the one gram threshold, that is not likely to be breached as often in pure form as in dispersed within other drugs.) So making it a felony that can be dropped to a misdemeanor with good faith treatment efforts seems to make sense.
How candidate order was determined: A lot drawing was held at the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office on Aug. 3 to determine the general election ballot order for major and minor party candidates. Colorado law (1-5-404, C.R.S.) requires that candidates are ordered on the ballot in three tiers: major party candidates followed by minor party candidates followed by unaffiliated candidates. Within each tier, the candidates are ordered by a lot drawing with the exception of the office of Governor and Lt. Governor, which are ordered by the last name of the gubernatorial candidate.
