What actions would you take as a state legislator to protect and strengthen Washington’s food security safety net, including both public nutrition programs and the food banks and food pantries serving communities across the state?

The Lake Chelan Food Bank is the organization I know best, because I spent two years as Board President of Chelan Valley Hope helping it finance, permit, and build a 2,200-square-foot addition that opened in June 2025, precisely because the old space couldn’t handle the demand anymore. That addition solved a square-footage problem. It didn’t touch the underlying one: a food bank can hand out what it has, but it can’t replace the scale of a program like SNAP.  My first commitment as a legislator is defending the public programs that do that scale of work. That means using state resources to backstop SNAP, school meals, and senior nutrition programs if federal funding is cut or restricted, the same commitment I’ve made on Medicaid. It means fighting any work requirement or eligibility restriction designed to shrink the SNAP rolls rather than serve the people on them. And it means language-accessible enrollment, because I’ve watched immigrant and farmworker families in my own district go without a benefit they qualify for because the application wasn’t built for them.  For food banks and pantries themselves, the state’s role goes beyond an emergency grant after a bad year. I’d support sustained funding for the state’s Emergency Food Assistance Program, tied to actual demand rather than a fixed appropriation that falls further behind every biennium demand grows and costs rise. I’d also support farm-to-food-bank purchasing that solves two problems with one dollar: getting Washington-grown food to pantries at a price that also supports the growers producing it, an approach that fits a district like mine, where the food and the need for it exist twenty miles apart.

What have you done to understand food insecurity in the communities you seek to represent—including engaging with people experiencing hunger or local hunger-relief organizations—and what policies would you prioritize to address the root causes of hunger and ensure Washington residents can afford and access the food they need?

Wages haven’t kept pace with housing and healthcare costs, and the 12th District’s agricultural economy runs substantially on the labor of farmworker families who are often food insecure themselves despite growing the food on every grocery shelf in this state. Seniors on fixed incomes, people with disabilities, and rural households without reliable transportation to a grocery store or food bank face the same math with fewer options to close the gap.  My priorities follow directly from that: housing policy that keeps rent from eating the budget that used to cover groceries; a tax code that stops asking the most from people who have the least, so the state has the progressive revenue to fund SNAP outreach, WIC, and senior nutrition at the scale the need actually requires; language-accessible enrollment for food assistance and Apple Health, because a benefit nobody can successfully apply for isn’t really available; wage and labor protections, including closing the agricultural worker exclusion from collective bargaining, for the farmworker families whose own food security is tied to their paychecks; and rural transit and broadband investment, because a food desert isn’t only about whether a grocery store exists, it’s about whether anyone without a car can get to it.

What policies or investments would you support to strengthen Washington’s food system, increase access to locally produced food, support Washington farmers and producers, and reduce food waste?

I’d support expanding farm-to-food-bank and farm-to-school purchasing programs that pay Washington growers a fair, predictable price for food that goes directly to pantries and school cafeterias. That helps producers plan around a stable buyer and gets fresher, more nutritious food to families who need it, instead of routing everything through a supply chain that discards what doesn’t meet a retailer’s cosmetic standard. I’d support state investment in food recovery and gleaning infrastructure, the cold storage, transport, and staffing that let a food bank actually accept a farmer’s surplus instead of turning it away because there’s no way to move it before it spoils. And on water, which is the resource this entire food system depends on, I’ll keep pushing for snowpack and water supply planning and agricultural conservation investment, because none of this works if the growers in Chelan and Douglas counties can’t count on the water their orchards and farms need.  On the farmer’s side of the ledger, the same labor standards I support elsewhere apply here too. Growers can’t get a fair price for their crop while also being squeezed by rising costs, and the workers who pick that crop deserve wages and protections that let them afford the food they’re growing. I don’t think Washington solves food insecurity by asking either farmers or farmworkers to absorb more of the cost. I think it solves it by building the purchasing and infrastructure pipeline that gets abundance to the people going without it.