Every position on this page is something I will say to your face at a kitchen table. No party language, no consultant polish — just the five things that matter most in this district and what I intend to do about them.
Wages have not kept pace with the cost of living in most of Montana, and the legislature has consistently prioritized corporate tax environments over the conditions that let working families stay stable. Healthcare access in rural communities, childcare availability, and basic housing affordability all deserve direct legislative attention. The market-will-sort-it-out answer has been the standing answer in this district for a long time; the results are visible to anyone paying attention.
Working Montanans are not asking for complicated policy architecture. They are asking whether their wages cover their rent, whether there is a doctor within a reasonable drive, and whether childcare costs less than a second job would bring in. Solvable problems, all of them, provided the legislature treats them as priorities rather than talking points deployed before primaries and forgotten about afterward.
Pragmatic representation means asking what works, what can pass, and what actually reaches the people it is intended to help. Ideological purity on either side of these questions has not produced results in this district. Something more direct is long overdue.
The nurses at the hospital, the teachers in the schools, the mechanics, the tradespeople, the people running businesses on Main Street; these are the people this campaign is built for, not an abstract version of their interests. Showing up for them specifically is the job.
Cattle raised on a Central Montana ranch, grass-fed and well-managed, a product of a family that has worked the same ground for three or four generations, goes to a processing facility in another state, gets packaged under a brand owned by a corporation headquartered somewhere else, and lands in a grocery store with nothing on the label indicating it came from Montana. The rancher gets a commodity price. Someone else builds the margin. The value that this state's land, water, and generations of accumulated knowledge created flows out of Montana as reliably as the seasons turn.
Direct-to-consumer sales change that math in a fundamental way. A family ranch that ships beef directly to subscribers across the country, with their name alongside the Made in Montana mark, keeps the margin here. Customers who care about where their food comes from will pay a meaningful premium for that direct connection; the relationship builds over time into something more durable than a commodity contract and far more resilient than commodity price swings. This is not a niche play for boutique buyers. It is a structural shift in how agricultural value flows, already happening in states that have made it legislatively straightforward.
Montana produces things people will pay a premium for, specifically because they come from here and because knowing who made them matters. Unlocking that value means removing the regulatory barriers that make direct-to-consumer shipping difficult for small and mid-size producers, strengthening the Made in Montana label as a genuine quality signal, and putting real legislative support behind keeping multi-generational farm and ranch families on their land.
Supporting the Made in Montana program means more than a logo. Building traceability into the supply chain, supporting small-scale USDA-inspected processing infrastructure in rural Montana, and making it possible for a family operation to reach customers anywhere in the country without surrendering most of the value to a middleman all belong in the same conversation. So does succession planning, because losing a multi-generational ranch is not a market transaction. The land endures; the families who know it and love it are considerably harder to replace.
Housing costs across Montana have climbed sharply over the past several years, driven by outside investment, limited inventory, and a construction market that responds to demand at the higher end of the price range long before it touches the working end. For people who grew up here, work here, and want to stay here, the gap between wages and what a decent house actually costs has become a real and practical barrier. Not a talking point; a lived condition that shows up in who leaves and who stays.
Rural communities face a version of this problem distinct from what is playing out in Missoula or Bozeman. Stagnant wage growth relative to a housing stock that has not meaningfully expanded in decades is the driver here, and modest-income families, teachers, medical workers, and tradespeople are getting priced out quietly, one lease renewal at a time. The people who keep this community functioning deserve to afford a home in it.
Workforce housing investment, zoning reform that actually enables construction of modest homes, and policies that prioritize long-term residents over short-term investment returns are the real levers available in Helena. Using them requires treating housing affordability as an economic necessity rather than a social program.
Local communities should still shape how they grow, and residents deserve genuine authority over what gets built in their neighborhoods. The state's role is to set conditions that make affordable housing easier to build and harder to speculate away. Right now it largely does neither, and that is a policy choice, not an inevitability.
Outside capital that arrives with fanfare, captures available tax incentives, repatriates profit to distant shareholders, and leaves when the incentive structure changes is not economic development for Central Montana. It is a lease on the appearance of progress, paid for by the public. Real investment stays, hires locally, pays into the tax base, and builds something that functions after the ribbon-cutting photo fades from the local paper.
Broadband access remains foundational infrastructure for rural Montana and remains incomplete throughout much of this district. Small business support, agricultural infrastructure, and keeping young people here rather than watching them leave for Billings are the actual economic foundations of a community like Lewistown. These receive considerably less legislative attention than large headline projects, and the slow drift of population and commerce that any long-time resident can name without looking at a census table is the result.
Economic development policy that works for Central Montana looks different from policy written for the I-90 corridor. A representative from this district should be making that case in Helena rather than deferring to frameworks designed for someone else's community.
Prioritizing local ownership structures, enforceable local hiring requirements in public contracts, and broadband investment over data center tax breaks reflects a simple judgment about whose economy is actually being developed. The answer should be the people who were already here, and a legislature that means it should be able to show its work.
Large-scale data center developments are moving through the legislature with minimal public scrutiny and substantial public subsidy. Facilities of this size consume enormous amounts of water and electricity, generate relatively few local jobs for the footprint they require, and lock communities into long-term infrastructure obligations that outlast the political moment that created them. Reading the actual bills, rather than the summaries prepared by the people who want them to pass, tells a meaningfully different story than the press releases do.
Central Montana sits in a region where water is not an abundant resource and where rural power reliability matters to everyone who lives here year-round. Committing meaningful portions of that capacity to serve outside interests is a decision that demands an honest accounting before any vote. Tax incentive structures being written right now carry limited clawback provisions; a project that fails to deliver on its promised employment figures faces minimal financial consequence, and that risk lands on the public, not the developer.
Any project of this scale should require full public disclosure before approval, a genuine accounting of water and grid impacts, and local hiring provisions with real enforcement. "Economic development" is not a blank check, and proximity to a ribbon-cutting photo does not make something good for the people who were already here.
Spending years as an intelligence officer, where the gap between what an agreement says on paper and what it actually commits to is a professional concern, gives me a particular orientation toward documents like these. Bringing that reading to the legislative process is a specific thing this candidacy offers that neither party candidate can match.