Change You Can See

People who work in Johnson City should have a realistic chance to live here. That means building more homes at different price points while protecting the affordable housing we already have from displacement, speculation, or conversion.

What I’ll push for:

• Incentivize building more housing choices, including starter homes, apartments, townhomes, duplexes, and other “missing middle” housing in places where they make sense.
• Put Tennessee’s attainable-housing tools to work locally, evaluating and implementing the opportunities created by the State’s Regional Planning Attainable Housing Incentive Program to preserve and expand housing within reach of working families.
• Protect existing affordable housing, including exploring a registry of qualified preservation buyers such as nonprofits and housing authorities that can help keep at-risk properties affordable.
• Bring basic accountability to short-term rentals (STRs), establishing appropriate registration or licensing so the City knows where STRs operate, can understand their effects on neighborhoods and housing supply, and can enforce reasonable standards.
• Make short-term rentals contribute to housing solutions, exploring whether legally available STR-related revenues can be dedicated to workforce and affordable-housing initiatives.
• Discourage the speculative loss of attainable housing, using the tools available to the City to preserve existing homes and neighborhoods while respecting property rights.
• Tie development incentives to affordability, making sure that when taxpayers help support development, the community receives meaningful value in return.
• Support responsible infill, adding housing where infrastructure and services can support it while protecting the character and quality of established neighborhoods.

The goal is to make sure Johnson City has homes that teachers, nurses, first responders, service workers, young families, retirees, and everyone who keeps our community running can actually afford.

Healthcare and childcare are two of the biggest pressures on family budgets. City Hall doesn’t control either system, but city leaders can use their voice, relationships, and influence to make them work better for Johnson City residents.

What I’ll push for:

• Demand real accountability from Ballad Health by asking tough questions about quality of care, costs, access, wait times, staffing, and patient outcomes (looking beyond headlines and selected statistics to understand what residents are actually experiencing).
• Build a constructive relationship with Ballad Health so the City can advocate for residents while also working together on community health, prevention, and other shared priorities.
• Strengthen partnerships with the Washington County Health Department and local nonprofits to identify service gaps, coordinate resources, and connect residents with existing community support.
• Make affordable childcare a city priority by bringing together providers, employers, nonprofits, schools, and other partners to expand capacity and identify ways the City can remove barriers or support new options.
• Use the City’s influence beyond City Hall, advocating with state and regional leaders when decisions about healthcare, public health, or childcare affect Johnson City families.

Johnson City cannot solve these challenges alone. But we can bring people to the table, demand answers, build partnerships, and fight for better access to the care families need.

Residents should not automatically be asked to pay more whenever City Hall wants to spend more. Johnson City needs disciplined budgeting, responsible capital planning, and a clear strategy for rebuilding its financial reserves without everyday residents paying the price for leadership mistakes.

What I’ll push for:

• Walk back the tax raise related to the aquatic center project. Delay that project in favor of Freedom Hall repairs and a community-supported public-private partnership.
• Require clearer public explanations of major spending decisions and their prioritization.
• Establish a transparent, long-term plan for rebuilding city reserves.
• Scrutinize major capital projects before raising taxes to pay for them.
• Publish easy-to-understand information showing residents where their tax dollars go.
• Consider affordability trade-offs when evaluating fees, taxes, and major investments.
• Expand tax incentives and rebate programs for vulnerable residents.

South Johnson City deserves the same attention, investment, and quality of life as every other part of our city. For too long, parts of South Johnson City have not received their fair share of public investment. We should change that, not with a collection of disconnected projects, but with a coordinated plan developed with the people who live there.

What I’ll push for:

• Create a South Johnson City investment plan, working directly with residents to identify priorities for infrastructure, transportation, recreation, housing, public spaces, economic development, and city services.

• Close longstanding infrastructure gaps, using a clear, needs-based approach to identify where public investment has fallen behind and prioritize those areas in the City’s capital planning.

• Bring City Hall into the neighborhood, with regular town halls, community meetings, and direct engagement in South Johnson City, so residents can help shape investments before decisions are made.

• Use Horizon 2045 to guide reinvestment, ensuring that zoning, housing, infrastructure, transportation, and economic-development decisions help build the future South Johnson City residents envisioned through the City’s planning process.

• Coordinate public investments instead of making them one project at a time, aligning improvements to streets, sidewalks, transit, parks, recreation, public spaces, and other city services so they reinforce one another.

• Support neighborhood-scale economic development, helping attract and retain businesses, services, housing, and amenities that meet residents’ everyday needs and strengthen the community.

The goal is to make sustained, equitable investment in the neighborhood part of how Johnson City plans, budgets, and grows.

An affordable city isn’t just a place with lower bills, but a place where people can get to work, reach essential services, enjoy their neighborhoods, and participate in community life without everything requiring a car or costing money. Johnson City should invest in the everyday infrastructure and public spaces that make that possible across the city, while prioritizing communities where those connections and amenities are missing today.

What I’ll push for:

• Build a connected sidewalk network, prioritizing missing links that connect residents to jobs, schools, grocery stores, healthcare, parks, bus stops, city services, and other essential destinations — especially for people who don’t have a car.

• Build safe, useful bike connections, linking neighborhoods with downtown, schools, parks, trails, employment centers, and other destinations rather than creating isolated stretches of bike lanes.

• Expand Johnson City Transit, improving routes, frequency, hours, and connections so public transportation becomes a practical option for more residents.

• Modernize our transit fleet responsibly, pursuing state and federal funding and transitioning toward electric buses as vehicles reach the end of their useful lives and the necessary infrastructure can be put in place.

• Explore fare-free transit on Election Day, so transportation isn’t an obstacle to exercising the right to vote.

• Invest in parks and recreation where they’re needed most, improving neighborhood parks, trails, recreation opportunities, and connections to them, with particular attention to South Johnson City and other historically underinvested communities.

• Create dedicated funding for public art, including a line item in the City budget for murals, installations, performances, and placemaking throughout Johnson City, with community input, responsible planning for long-term maintenance and stewardship, and grants, partnerships, and private funding used to make public dollars go further.

• Explore a percent-for-art program for appropriate City capital projects and select development, creating a sustainable way to incorporate art and local identity into the public spaces and infrastructure we’re already building.

Sidewalks, transit, bike connections, parks, recreation, and public art make everyday life better — and make more of Johnson City accessible to everyone.

Affordability is also about creating good jobs, helping local businesses succeed, attracting responsible investment, and growing our tax base so the burden doesn’t keep falling on residents.

What I’ll push for:

• Support the businesses already here, making it easier for local businesses to start, expand, hire, and navigate City Hall.
• Invest in entrepreneurs and small businesses, strengthening partnerships with organizations that provide technical assistance, financing, mentoring, and other support.
• Attract good jobs and responsible investment that fit Johnson City’s workforce, infrastructure, neighborhoods, and long-term vision.
• Use economic-development incentives strategically, with clear expectations for jobs, wages, investment, community benefits, and measurable returns to taxpayers.
• Grow and diversify the tax base, pursuing development that generates sustainable revenue and helps fund city services without continually asking residents to pay more.
• Connect economic development to Horizon 2045, so the investments we pursue help build the city we’ve said we want to become.

Economic development is about building an economy where local businesses can thrive, people can find good jobs, and growth helps make Johnson City more affordable for everyone.

Not every cost facing Johnson City families is controlled by City Hall. That doesn’t mean city leaders should stay silent. Johnson City has successfully advocated in Nashville when local priorities were at stake. We should bring that same energy to the cost-of-living crisis.

What I’ll push for:

• Create an Affordability Impact Review of major city policies, investments, fees, and tax decisions to understand the effect on household budgets before we vote.
• Call on the General Assembly to repeal Tennessee’s state grocery tax, putting money back into people’s pockets every time they buy food.
• Advocate for temporary gas-tax relief when fuel prices spike to give working families and commuters some breathing room.
• Build coalitions with other Tennessee cities to advocate for state policies that lower everyday costs.
• Make affordability part of Johnson City’s legislative agenda every year, not just something we talk about during budget season.

City government cannot set every price. But it can use every tool and every bit of influence it has to make life here more affordable.

Industrial-scale facilities do not belong next door to homes simply because an outdated zoning map says they can go there.

What I’ll push for:

• Complete strong regulations (noise, vibration, lighting, and other environmental concerns) against data centers and crypto mining facilities.
• Initiate work on regulations to future-proof our city against potentially destructive new technologies (such as BESS factories and SMRs).
• Continue implementing the Horizon 2045 plan to reduce incompatible industrial zoning over time.
• Require major developments to demonstrate how they will mitigate impacts on nearby residents.
• Expand the residential notification perimeter to ensure all potentially affected residents are informed and can partake in decision making.

Johnson City has already done the work of imagining its future. Horizon 2045, the Future Land Use Map, and our community’s vision plan should actively guide what we build, where we build it, and how our neighborhoods grow. The Commission should lead that work proactively instead of waiting for the next rezoning or development controversy.

What I’ll push for:

• Turn Horizon 2045 into an action plan, with priorities, timelines, responsible departments, and regular public updates on implementation.
• Use the community-approved Future Land Use Map (FLUM) to guide zoning, infrastructure, transportation, housing, and development decisions toward the future residents said they want.
• Continue and strengthen JC Builds to reduce unnecessary administrative friction and make it easier for responsible developers and builders to invest in Johnson City.
• Create the resident-side equivalent of JC Builds to make City Hall easier to navigate for homeowners, renters, neighborhood groups, and residents seeking to solve problems or improve their communities.
• Grow without paving over what makes JC special by protecting mature trees and green space, reducing unnecessary surface parking, and encouraging smarter use of already-developed land.
• Work proactively with neighborhoods before major changes arrive, using community meetings, neighborhood conversations, and town halls to translate Horizon 2045’s citywide vision into plans for individual parts of Johnson City.
• Align public investment with our growth strategy, so decisions about roads, sidewalks, transit, parks, utilities, and other infrastructure help build the city envisioned in Horizon 2045.

Good planning should provide more certainty for everyone: developers should understand where and how Johnson City wants to grow, and residents should understand what the future of their neighborhoods could look like. Let’s build the Johnson City we planned for, instead of reacting one project at a time.

Parks, pools, community centers, trails, libraries, and other shared spaces are part of what makes a city a community. When public facilities reach the end of their useful lives, residents deserve a plan rather than a surprise closure.

What I’ll push for:

• Create long-term maintenance and replacement plans for major public facilities, so we are not “surprised” by structural issues and their financial consequences.
• Build public input into decisions about community assets, one town hall at a time.
• Explore partnerships when they can preserve or expand public amenities, leveraging the extensive ecosystem that makes Johnson City a shining beacon in northeast Tennessee.
• Plan capital investments years ahead instead of waiting for emergencies; we should already be talking about 2045 investments.

→ Read my statement about the Freedom Hall Pool

Public safety matters. So does our right to go about our daily lives without the government building a searchable record of where we travel. I oppose Johnson City’s Flock camera system and the normalization of mass surveillance it represents. It’s time to deflock Johnson City and put strong rules in place so the next surveillance technology isn’t deployed without public debate, clear limits, and meaningful oversight.

What I’ll push for:

• Deflock Johnson City with a moratorium on use and further deployment. End the City’s use of Flock automated license plate readers and remove the cameras rather than expanding a mass-surveillance network across our community.
• Hold a series of special sessions on surveillance and privacy, giving residents the full picture of what technologies the City uses, what information is collected, how it is used and shared, and what risks come with it.
• Adopt strong rules governing surveillance technology, requiring public notice, review, and Commission approval before the City acquires or deploys new technologies capable of systematically monitoring residents or collecting information about their movements and activities. For example:
  • Require cybersecurity and privacy reviews before deployment, including independent assessment of vulnerabilities, data security, retention, third-party access, and the consequences of a breach.
  • Make the rules understandable and public, clearly explaining what information can be collected, how long it can be retained, who can access it, what searches are permitted, and when information can be shared outside the City.
  • Put strict guardrails around access and use, including role-based access, audit logs, limits on external agency access, prohibitions on unauthorized uses, and meaningful consequences for misuse.
  • Create ongoing governance and public oversight, with regular audits, public reporting, clear responsibility for enforcement, and Commission review when technologies, vendors, capabilities, or policies change.
  • Require the City to justify surveillance, not residents to justify their privacy. Any future technology that intrudes on privacy should face a clear test: What specific problem are we solving? Is the technology necessary and effective? Is there a less intrusive alternative? And do the benefits justify the risks?

Technology can support public safety without turning Johnson City into a place where everyone’s movements are recorded just in case they might someday become useful. Privacy should be the default. Surveillance should be the exception.

Homelessness cannot be solved through policing alone. Johnson City should strengthen coordination among housing providers, nonprofits, healthcare organizations, outreach programs, and government agencies while expanding pathways into stable housing. That includes housing rehabilitation, shelter and housing development, fair housing outreach, stronger support for the professionals already doing this work, accountability for behavior in public spaces, and the replication of programs that are already working in other municipalities.

What I’ll push for:

• Build a real shelter system, not an emergency patchwork. Invest at least $1 million locally to expand year-round emergency shelter capacity for individuals and families beyond inclement-weather overflow and one-time responses. Use that commitment to leverage additional federal, state, philanthropic, healthcare, and nonprofit funding.
• Create a year-round day center. Partner with community providers to establish a professionally operated day shelter where people can access basic necessities and connect with case management, healthcare, benefits, employment assistance, and pathways to housing. This would replace reliance on individual volunteers with a scalable, coordinated system.
• Invest directly in effective local providers. Establish a transparent, competitive local funding program for shelter, housing, prevention, outreach, and evidence-based services, open to qualified nonprofit, faith-based, and secular providers. Federal Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG) funding should complement meaningful community investment rather than substitute for it.
• Prevent homelessness before it happens. Strengthen housing rehabilitation, eviction prevention, emergency rental assistance, rapid rehousing, and affordable-housing development, with particular attention to older adults on fixed incomes and families struggling with housing and childcare costs. Addressing the gap between incomes and housing costs must be part of any serious homelessness strategy.
• Connect housing with healthcare and recovery. Build stronger partnerships among housing providers, healthcare systems, behavioral-health providers, recovery organizations, and government agencies. Support evidence-based approaches such as medical respite and supportive housing for people whose health, disability, or substance-use challenges make exiting homelessness more difficult.
• Measure and publish to reinforce evidence-based strategies. Improve local data on who is experiencing homelessness, where they lived before becoming homeless, how long they have been unhoused, the barriers they face, and which interventions lead to stable housing. Augment the “homelessness dashboard” and publish an annual community report so investments can follow evidence and outcomes.

Johnson City already has dedicated outreach workers, nonprofits, housing providers, healthcare professionals, volunteers, and faith communities doing difficult work every day. We need to connect those efforts into a scalable community system that prevents homelessness when possible, provides safe shelter when necessary, and moves people toward stable housing as quickly as possible, while keeping public spaces safe and accessible for everyone.

Downtown Johnson City should be one of the places that defines our community, a destination for residents and visitors to eat, shop, experience art and music, attend events, spend time together, and enjoy our city. We should build on what’s already working while creating more reasons for people to come downtown, stay longer, and come back.

What I’ll push for:

• Bring Back Beer. Repeal Johnson City’s restrictive “last call” rules and restore a level playing field for local businesses, while maintaining responsible rules that protect public safety and surrounding neighborhoods.
• Strengthen the events and programming that already work, supporting festivals, markets, concerts, community gatherings, and other activities that regularly bring people downtown.
• Make Johnson City a stronger home for live music and performance, reducing unnecessary barriers and encouraging venues where local and visiting musicians, performers, comedians, theater groups, and other artists can find an audience.
• Create more reasons to be downtown after work and on weekends, expanding the mix of arts, entertainment, food, recreation, events, and activities for people of different ages and interests — not just bars and restaurants.
• Support the businesses that make downtown distinctive, working with locally owned restaurants, shops, entertainment venues, and entrepreneurs to understand barriers and help them succeed.
• Grow Johnson City as a destination, working with Visit Johnson City, local businesses, and community partners to showcase our downtown, outdoor recreation, trails, arts and culture, music, food, festivals, and events to visitors from across the region and beyond.
• Make tourism work for our local economy, connecting visitors with locally owned businesses and experiences so more tourism dollars stay in Johnson City and support local jobs.
• Invest in things residents and visitors can enjoy together. Tourism investments should strengthen the community we live in year-round — our public spaces, arts, recreation, events, local businesses, and quality of place — rather than creating experiences solely for visitors.
• Make a more active downtown a safer downtown, pairing appropriate public-safety strategies with more programming, businesses, events, and people on the streets throughout the day and evening.

The best tourism strategy starts with building a place residents love. A vibrant downtown, thriving arts scene, great local businesses, outdoor recreation, and memorable events improve our quality of life and give visitors more reasons to come, stay, spend, and return.

Residents should not need to become experts in government procedure to understand what their city is doing.

What I’ll push for:

• Make budgets, major contracts, development proposals, and supporting documents easier to find and understand.
• Publish plain-language explanations of major Commission decisions.
• Improve public dashboards for finances, development, capital projects, and strategic priorities.
• Make public information available earlier in the decision-making process, such as by initiating budget discussions in the spring rather than under a tight deadline.

A three-minute comment immediately before a vote is not meaningful public engagement. For consequential projects and policy changes, the City should engage residents while alternatives are still being considered.

What I’ll push for:

• Earlier public meetings for major projects.
• Neighborhood-specific outreach when decisions directly affect an area.
• Online and in-person participation options.
• Meaningful and proactive media engagement so they are welcomed and supported at all public business.
• Lifting restrictions on public comments (total number, split per positions, etc.).

→ Watch my public comments to the City Commission

At my company, we have a saying: “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.” It’s something I practice every day, and I believe City Hall should too. Making Johnson City better requires more than goals and good intentions. We need qualitative and quantitative measures that tell us where we’ve been, where we are today, and whether our decisions are actually working. And those measures need to be precise enough to help us decide what to do next.

What I’ll push for:

• Create a public City performance scorecard with a focused set of measures residents can easily understand, covering priorities such as affordability, housing, public safety, infrastructure, transportation, development, parks, finances, and service delivery.
• Establish clear measures before launching major initiatives, so we know what success looks like and can determine whether an investment or policy is delivering the results we expected.
• Track trends, not snapshots, using historical and current data to identify what is improving, what is getting worse, and where the City needs to intervene.
• Combine numbers with residents’ experiences, using surveys, town halls, neighborhood feedback, service requests, and other qualitative information to understand what the statistics alone cannot tell us.
• Make reporting actionable for the Commission, with regular performance reviews that identify problems, explain likely causes, and recommend specific actions rather than simply presenting data.
• Report results publicly and consistently, including progress toward Horizon 2045 priorities, major capital projects, and other Commission commitments.
• Change course when the evidence tells us to. Measurement only matters if we’re willing to learn from the results, acknowledge when something isn’t working, and make a better decision.

Residents should be able to answer three simple questions about their city: What did we say we would do? Are we doing it? Is it making things better?

Johnson City residents deserve to know their city is on a solid financial footing. Recent losses to our reserves and unexpected financial liabilities have made stronger oversight and long-term planning especially important. Commissioners have a responsibility to understand the consequences of financial decisions, ask hard questions before committing money, and give residents a clear picture of the City’s financial health.

What I’ll push for:

• Adopt clear targets for rebuilding and maintaining our reserves, with a public plan, timeline, and regular progress reports so residents know whether we’re on track.
• Strengthen long-range financial planning, looking beyond the next annual budget to understand how today’s decisions will affect taxpayers and city services five, ten, and twenty years from now.
• Require better financial risk analysis before major decisions, including realistic assessments of long-term costs, liabilities, maintenance obligations, and potential impacts on taxpayers.
• Improve oversight of major capital investments, with clearer priorities, lifecycle costs, funding strategies, and public reporting before projects receive significant commitments of taxpayer dollars.
• Make the City’s finances easier to understand, with plain-language dashboards showing revenues, spending, debt, reserves, major capital commitments, and trends over time.
• Connect spending to results, so major investments come with clear goals and measures that show residents whether they are delivering the value promised.
• Plan for the unexpected, using scenario planning and financial stress tests to understand how the City would respond to economic downturns, major liabilities, emergencies, or unexpected revenue losses.

Fiscal responsibility is about planning ahead, understanding risk, spending wisely, and making sure Johnson City can keep its commitments without handing the bill to the next generation (not just spending less, but spending better, within our means, and for the long-term).

Accountability starts with the people entrusted to make decisions. Residents should expect City Hall to apply its rules consistently, explain its decisions, manage conflicts openly, and put the public interest first. Good government shouldn’t depend on who you know, who asks, or which issue happens to be getting attention.

What I’ll push for:

• Strengthen ethics and conflict-of-interest rules, with clear expectations for disclosure and recusal when commissioners, board members, or senior officials have personal or financial interests in a decision.
• Review how appointments are made to city boards and commissions, making the process more transparent and expanding opportunities for residents from different neighborhoods and backgrounds to serve.
• Apply city policies consistently, so residents, neighborhoods, businesses, and developers know what rules apply and can expect them to be enforced fairly.
• Require clearer justification for major decisions, including the evidence considered, alternatives evaluated, fiscal consequences, and reasons for the final choice.
• Strengthen accountability for major contracts and outside vendors, with clear deliverables, performance expectations, responsible contract management, and follow-through when commitments aren’t met.
• Regularly review city policies and ordinances, identifying rules that are outdated, ineffective, unnecessarily burdensome, or producing unintended consequences.

Accountability is ultimately about a simple expectation: the same rules, the same standards, and the same responsibility to the public, every time.

The aftermath of the Sean Williams case demands more than moving on. Victims deserve truth, justice, and accountability, and Johnson City residents deserve confidence that failures are identified, corrected, and not repeated. At the same time, accountability and support for effective policing go together. Johnson City is growing, and JCPD needs the people, training, equipment, and clear mission required to keep our community safe.

What I’ll push for:

• Keep pursuing truth and accountability in the aftermath of the Sean Williams case, including transparency about what went wrong, meaningful implementation of corrective actions, and justice and support for victims.
• Strengthen professional training for JCPD, including evidence-based training in implicit bias, cultural competency, de-escalation, trauma-informed interactions, and working effectively with people from different backgrounds and communities.
• Stop asking police officers to be social workers, identifying calls involving homelessness, behavioral health, substance use, and other social needs that can be handled more effectively by trained civilian professionals or community partners when there is no public-safety threat.
• Invest in the police services we actually need, ensuring JCPD staffing, equipment, training, and technology responsibly keep pace with Johnson City’s population growth and public-safety needs.
• Measure and publicly report performance, using meaningful data on response times, complaints, use of force, outcomes, staffing, training, and other measures to identify problems and continuously improve.
• Strengthen independent oversight and accountability, ensuring complaints and serious incidents receive credible review and that residents can understand how concerns are investigated and resolved.
• Keep local police focused on local public safety. I oppose Johnson City entering into a 287(g) agreement with ICE that delegates federal immigration-enforcement functions to local officers. JCPD resources should be focused on keeping Johnson City safe, investigating crimes, and maintaining the trust needed for residents and victims to work with law enforcement.

Public safety requires both trust and capacity. We should hold law enforcement to high standards, learn from failures, give officers the resources to do their jobs well, and make sure we’re asking them to do the right jobs in the first place.