ECONOMY

What I'll fight for in Columbus

Here is what I'll push for as your representative. Lowering the cost of care is part of this plan too, on the healthcare page, and the full public schools plan is on the education page.

1. Housing people can afford on local wages. Allen County has just 33 affordable and available rentals for every 100 of its lowest-income renter households, and Ohio is short more than 264,000 affordable homes overall (COHHIO 2025 Gap Report). The market keeps building for the top while local paychecks stand still. I'll fight for state funding that builds starter homes and affordable rentals here, push for down-payment help for first-time buyers, and vote for limits on investment firms buying up single-family houses to rent back to the families who used to buy them.
2. Hit pause on new data centers, then give communities a real say. Ohio is handing out fifteen-year tax breaks for data centers faster than it can write the rules that protect the people living next to them, and the bill for the power, the water, and the roads keeps landing on everybody else. I'll vote for a statewide pause on new large-scale data centers until that research is done and those protections are law. The Google project here is permitted and moving forward, and I'm not proposing to relitigate it — my concern is the next one, and the one after that, because people in this district are already asking who decides. Ohio law gives county commissioners a binding say before a large solar or wind project is built (Senate Bill 52, Ohio Power Siting Board summary), but no such say over a $500 million data center. Ours was negotiated behind a shell company, and the public learned Google was the buyer only after the agreements were signed (Hometown Stations, March 2026). So alongside that pause I'll sponsor the same binding local approval for data centers, a community veto, plus a ban on NDAs in public economic-development deals like the one now moving as House Bill 695, clawbacks that void the tax break when job promises aren't kept, disclosure of who really stands behind any shell company asking for public money, and rules that make data centers pay their own power and grid costs instead of your household (PUCO's AEP data-center tariff and House Bill 706 point the way). If a project is good for this district, it can survive a public meeting; that's not anti-development, it's how a community gets deals worth keeping.
3. Property tax relief that doesn't gut local services. Reappraisals raised residential values about 30% in Auglaize County and nearly 18% in Allen, and tax bills followed (Lima News, Aug 2024). Columbus has answered with a relief package and a one-time $350 million homestead credit, roughly $450 for some senior and disabled homeowners, arriving on January 2027 bills (Statehouse News Bureau, June 2026). None of it restores the state's share of school funding, which is why levy after levy still lands on your ballot. I'll push for a circuit breaker that caps property taxes for seniors and working families, and vote for budgets that restore the state share so relief stops being paid for out of your local schools and services.

I'll also fight for

• State tax fairness, and the giveaways paid for out of your property taxes. Every abatement Columbus hands out is a bill somebody else pays, and around here that somebody is a homeowner. The value of tax-abated property in Ohio went from $5.7 billion in 2004 to $26.6 billion in 2024, and under Ohio's flat tax a millionaire pays the same income tax rate as your kid's teacher, with the average millionaire taking a $19,000 yearly cut. I'll push to rebalance who carries the load and to put what we recover into local infrastructure, small business grants, and workforce training — money that stays in this district instead of leaving with the next company that gets a fifteen-year break.
• Childcare parents can afford. Allen County went from 60 in-home providers to 15 in eight years (Ideastream/WYSO) while roughly 1,700 jobs sit unfilled within ten miles of Lima; I'll fight to raise Ohio's childcare aid cutoff, among the strictest in the nation, so working parents qualify.
• Lower energy bills. Columbus scrapped the state's energy-efficiency programs in 2019 and its 2025 energy rewrite left them out; I'll push to restore the cheapest tool Ohio ever had for cutting a utility bill.
• A wage floor that covers the basics. More than a third of Allen County households earn too little to cover the basics, and nearly half of them are working (United For ALICE, 2024); I'll fight to raise Ohio's wage floor so a full-time job pays for a life here.
• Invest in the schools that train our workforce. Rhodes State College and The Ohio State University at Lima are two of the best assets this district has for growing its own workforce, and both have been building programs that put people into good jobs without making them leave home. I'll fight to make higher education and vocational training more affordable and to invest in the campuses already doing that work here, because a young person shouldn't have to choose between a career and staying in Allen County.
• Farmland and farm incomes. Protecting the ground and the people who work it, from input costs to who gets to buy the farm next door; the full plan is on the agriculture page.