Priority 05 · Pillar two
Growth without infrastructure. Aging populations. Schools.
Maury, Williamson, Hickman, and Lewis - the Middle Tennessee edge of the district - aren’t the same fight as Memphis and the rural West. Property tax pressure on longtime residents. Growth running ahead of roads, water, schools. Farmland disappearing under subdivisions.
The honest version
I have a lot of work to do here. I’m on it.
Here’s the honest version. I don’t have a developed Middle Tennessee platform on day one of this campaign. Memphis and West Tennessee are where I’ve spent my life. Maury, Williamson, Hickman, and Lewis are different - different economy, different problems, different growth patterns, different politics.
The right move is to spend real time there, with the people who live and work there, before I publish a list of specific commitments. A list written from a Memphis office would just be me filling in a template with words. That’s the kind of campaigning I’m running against.
What I already know, from talking to people: in Maury County, the growth is outrunning the roads, water, and schools meant to keep up with it. Property taxes are squeezing longtime residents who never signed up to be priced out of their own county. Fights over school quality keep getting tangled up with the state’s voucher program and its book bans. And farmland is being lost faster than anyone wants to admit - once it’s under a subdivision, it doesn’t come back.
The federal tools that fit here are real - money for roads and water projects, federal programs that help keep farmland in farming, federal education funding - and a member of Congress can move them. Figuring out which ones matter most, and to whom, is work I’ll do in Middle Tennessee, with people from Middle Tennessee.
This page will get longer as that listening tour happens, and the commitments will get more specific. That’s the deal.
Why Pillar 1 comes first
Even the work I haven’t scoped yet runs back through the same blockages.
Whatever the listening tour turns up - money for roads and water, help keeping farmland in farming, school funding - the federal tools are the same ones the rest of this site describes. And how easy they are to move depends on whether Congress can do its job at all.
Growth pressure, property taxes, farmland loss - none of it gets solved by a Congress where the maps protect the people in power, the lobbyists write the bills, and the donors set the agenda. The specifics of this page are still coming. That part doesn’t change.
So Pillar 1 comes first - the six fights to fix how Washington itself works. Fix the gerrymandered maps, the lobbying, and the money in politics, and build a bench of people who can win these counties. That’s the work that makes every priority on this site - including the ones I’m still scoping here - something that can actually get done.
I’ll do the work. The page will reflect it as I do.
If you live in Maury, Williamson, Hickman, Lewis, or anywhere in the Middle Tennessee edge of the district - reach out. The campaign inbox is here. Tell me what I’m missing, what the priorities should be, and where I should be showing up. I’m on it.