Priorities
Ensure Safety in Our Community
Everyone in our community deserves to be safe and secure.
In these last, most challenging weeks, I have spent much of my work responding to numerous calls, trainings, and planning with social workers and others about the impacts of ICE actions on the vulnerable children and families we serve. We have children being dropped off at daycare, and parents, who are taken during the day, not returning to pick them up at the end of the day. We have residents, neighbors, employees, and business owners who are terrified to leave the house, and for good reason, because they being targeted and hunted by the ICE presence in our streets – whether they are undocumented or not.
Commerce in some communities is coming to a standstill. We are support-planning for access to food, medical care, health care, documentation, legal counsel, court proceedings, and ultimately survival for the children and families we serve. We are all stretched thin, and we all feel broken by the events in our communities, heartbroken, and in many ways helpless.
We are at exactly the point now, however, where we find strength in each other, and we stand up for each other. Those affected are our friends, neighbors, employees, business owners, and families. This federal action is not about making us safer, it is about destabilizing our community. It needs to be met with truth-telling, peaceful and law-abiding resilience, and vigorous advocacy. This is our country too.
We need to stand up to fear, intimidation, and violence in all of its forms to ensure all Minnesotans are safe and secure.
Support Affordable Lives
All Minnesotans should be able to afford their own lives. The cost of health care, daycare, and groceries continues to rise. Our families struggle to make ends meet.
Health care costs had already been rising before the expiration of ACA subsidies. As a state, we need to ensure our community has lower premiums. We can accomplish this through expanding preventative care and Medicaid benefits, providing limits on prescription drug prices, and promoting healthy, fair competition among providers.
We also need to expand opportunities for affordable daycare. As parents of two young kids, we know this need very well. We need to provide streamlined licensing for providers, develop scholarship funds for families, provide tax credits as a state, and expand options to include more types of providers.
Our state also needs to level the playing field to ensure fair competition and attack price-gouging to reduce our grocery costs. We should also support our local agriculture hurt by tariffs and connect our local agriculture with our local markets to help reduce costs. We should further provide assistance and incentives for affordable groceries wherever we can.
Everyone should be able to afford their lives, and, as a legislator I will support these and other common-sense reforms and efforts to help make that happen.
Create Affordable Housing
We should all have access to affordable housing in our community.
In my role as chair of the Eagan Advisory and Planning Commission, I work with the City of Eagan’s excellent staff to review proposals for developments in our community. I also have the great privilege of serving as our local district representative on the Met Council Land Use Advisory Committee. Through these roles, I get to see first hand the work of our local officials in advocating, planning, and providing for affordable housing in our communities. I care deeply about these issues.
I believe we have a crisis in affordable housing. Whole new generations of Minnesotans can’t afford to purchase a home. I also believe, however, that we are on the cusp of a great, new expansion of building in this state. In Minnesota, we are best when we do big things.
In order to reach this goal, we need to ensure that we support fast-tracking construction, in a sustainable way, to help support a broad mix of housing options in our communities and in our state. These include supporting multi-family and multi-use developments to provide direct access for our residents and employees to work at and help grow our strong, thriving, local businesses.
As a state, we also need to further support and expand programs like LAHA and SAHA, Local Affordable Housing Aid and Statewide Affordable Housing Aid. We need to invest in affordable housing projects and help organizations provide affordable and supportive housing, especially to our most income-vulnerable residents, in existing development. Through this work, and an all-of-the-above strategy, we can further support a healthy, thriving community where everyone can afford housing in our state.
Invest in Education and Child Welfare
All Minnesota children should benefit from a robust, supportive education system.
Education lies close to my heart. Both of my grandmothers were teachers, and my mother was a Minneapolis Public School elementary teacher for her entire career. I helped her unpack her classrooms each fall and pack them up again for the summer. She sometimes had to buy her own materials to support the learning of her students. She inspired us, deep in our hearts, to love education and see the value of education for everyone.
My sister obtained her Masters in Education from the University of Minnesota, and I was a teacher for a year through the Fulbright Program in Dortmund, Germany. Each day, I would show up to students from immigrant backgrounds and watch their eyes light up as they learned something new. There was life created there.
In my work as a child welfare attorney, supporting the most vulnerable children and families in our community, I see the direct effects of lack of educational support at home, and sometimes at school, on children. I firmly believe we need to ensure that social-emotional learning remains a core of our local education curriculum. This includes providing adequate funding for children’s mental health and supportive services, with all school budget formulas matched to track inflation.
We also need to ensure that our children, families, and social services systems have the financial support they need to ensure that kids can be safe, have the nutrition they need, and can focus on learning and growing.
Investing in education and systems is key for ensuring the success of future Minnesotans, and it is critical for attracting new residents, businesses, and jobs. As a legislator, I will work to ensure a robust, supportive education and child welfare system remains in our state.
Eliminate Fraud
We should have absolute confidence that our public dollars are going to those they are intended to help. Fraud—at any level—is a serious problem, which needs to be vigorously rooted out and prevented from happening again. Fraud is particularly a problem with our government services. It is not just public theft. It undermines our trust in institutions, and it inhibits our ability to engage in good, responsive government. It is of utmost importance that we find those responsible for committing fraud, prosecute and hold them accountable, and install guardrails to ensure fraud never happens again.
If elected, I will help lead in detecting and prosecuting fraud, reforming our systems, and preventing any future fraud from occurring in our state. I fully support the new legislative fraud oversight committee, frequent service audits, new detecting technology, independent monitoring procedures, and all-electronic tracking of services provided and payments made. Good, responsive government grows in light of review.
The current fraud investigations are also being used as an excuse for federal action and backlash against our Somali and immigrant communities. This is wrong, deeply disturbing, and misguided. Our Somali neighbors are law-abiding local business-owners, employees, active community members, and students at our local schools. We will eliminate fraud in our systems and prevent it from occurring again while also standing up for all of our friends and neighbors.
Support Organized Labor and Strong Local Business
Everyone deserves to have a good paying job and the benefits necessary to support a high quality of life.
My mom was a Minneapolis public school teacher in elementary education for her entire career, and a strong union member and supporter. My father was a local towboat deckhand and operator on a tug boat on the Mississippi River for most of his career. He is a strong Local 49 union member and supporter. I grew up watching documentaries on the labor rights movement and the civil rights movement, and I knew in my bones that I would join that work someday.
I am a strong supporter of labor. I have served 7 and a half years as an AFSCME union steward and leader. In that role, we tirelessly support excellent public service through partnership with the employer and strong, livable wages and benefits for employees, who help make the employer’s vision a reality. I will continue to stand up for labor and to strongly support labor in my time ahead.
I also support a strong local and state business community. Our businesses are our partners in building community, good-paying jobs, and ensuring the high quality of life we all have here in Eagan, Burnsville, and Minnesota. I look forward to continued partnership with businesses to meet their needs and the needs of the communities to which they belong.
Prevent Gun Violence
All Minnesotans deserve to live a life free of gun violence. We deserve to be safe in our homes, in our neighborhoods, and in our schools.
There is no place in our society, other than the military, for assault weapons. I support an assault weapons ban. If anyone wants to see the effects of assault weapons outside of the military, and I do not recommend this, simply look to the pictures of the classrooms in Uvalde, Texas, and at Annunciation Catholic Church. I believe that no child should ever have to go through an active shooter drill in their school; and yet that is today’s reality.
As a state, I applaud our DFL work to close the loophole and require private pistol and semi-automatic weapons’ sales to undergo a background check. The DFL also passed needed “Red Flag” laws that allow courts to suspend someone’s access to firearms if they are a danger to themselves or others. I see the direct need for these laws in the work that I do to support victims of domestic violence and hold perpetrators accountable, who are suffering from chemical addiction and/or mental illness issues.
I believe we can go further than this with mandatory reporting of stolen guns, safe storage requirements, better registration (eliminating ghost sales), preventing home manufacture of guns, and better identifying and treating of mental health issues.
We need common-sense gun reform to ensure that we are all safe from gun violence.
Support Government That Reflects Our Community
We celebrate diversity in our communities and among those we serve. We work to make people whole. And we include everyone in responsive government.
These principles form the core of the work both at my office and of the work that I do and care about every day. We recognize the tragic legacy, in particular on our communities of color, of discrimination, oppression, and disinvestment. Grounded in this history, we commit, with new energy and understanding, to right the wrongs of the past and create the community we hope to see.
My goals are as follows:
1. Attract and support citizens in our diverse state – and ensure we have a government which reflects the community we serve;
2. Build an inclusive community – one which welcomes, supports, and draws upon diverse perspectives from a fully-engaged, creative, and empowered citizenry; and
3. Develop intercultural expertise, understanding and responding to the diverse needs of our state. I am committed to these principles every day in my life and my work, and they will continue to form a core part of my values as a legislator at the capitol.
Ensure Clean Air, Clean Water and a Healthy Environment
I grew up outdoors. Leaving at dawn in South Minneapolis, exploring parks on my bike with my friends, and returning only when we got hungry. I also had the great privilege of going to Wolf Ridge in 5th grade, where I became a voyageur and won the outdoors award for our school class.
That early love of the great outdoors, has led to weekly park trips with our kids, camping and scouting activities with cub scouts, summers at YMCA family camp, and a proposal to my wife on an island in the Boundary Waters. I want my kids, and their kids, to enjoy the same outdoors and quality of life that I have enjoyed in my life, for even more generations to come.
As Minnesotans we must support an end to the pollution damaging our climate, speed the transition to clean energy, and create a just and healthy future for us all. This must also include all diverse voices — our Indigenous neighbors, our communities of color, and our urban and rural populations in this transition.
We have the unique opportunity as Minnesotans to lead a green revolution, with sustainable energy consumption and a high quality of life. As a legislator, I will work diligently with our state and our businesses to combat pollution, promote a healthy co-existence with our environment, develop the green jobs of our future, and maintain the great natural resources and beauty we all enjoy.