For too long, Long Island has been Albany’s ATM; sending billions upstate while getting shortchanged in return. I’ll fight to bring our fair share home. Take High Tax Aid for our schools: it’s been frozen for over a decade, with many of our districts still stuck at amounts dating back to 2008; even as costs and property taxes keep climbing. That’s money our communities are owed and simply aren’t getting. I’ll push updating and raising High Tax Aid and the outdated funding formulas that have left Long Island behind, so our tax dollars come back to our schools and our neighborhoods. Long Island comes first and we’re done being taken for granted.

Our kids, our friends, and young families are being priced off of Long Island; and Albany’s answer is to dictate to our communities how and where to build. I know Albany doesn’t know our neighborhoods better than we do. I’ll be an advocate for housing that lets young families put down roots and stay near the towns they grew up in; built the way our communities choose, not forced on us by top-down state mandates. That means partnering with local leaders, respecting the character of our neighborhoods, and giving our towns the tools and resources to create the housing that actually fits them. Keeping the next generation here starts with trusting the people who actually live here.

After Hurricane Sandy, New York put me in charge of safeguarding over $500 million in federal disaster-recovery funds. I led the environmental approval process every reimbursement had to clear and I made sure not a dollar went out the door until the work was actually done right and met every standard. Public money followed results, not promises. That’s the discipline Albany is missing. In the Assembly, I’ll bring that same standard to how our state spends: tying every dollar to real oversight, refusing to rubber-stamp cost overruns and unfinished work, and treating taxpayer money like it belongs to the families who earned it; because it does.