A Better Quality of Life. A Stronger Future.
Growing up and building his career in Ventura County, Michael has watched too many friends, young families, and working people leave the communities they love — not because they want to, but because they can no longer afford to stay.
The reason is straightforward: we have not built enough housing for the people who live and work here. When housing is scarce, prices rise. When approvals take years, costs increase. When fees, regulations, and construction costs continue to climb, those costs ultimately show up in the price of a home or the rent families pay.
The result is a generation being priced out.
Michael believes we have to address the causes if we want to change the outcome. California must build more housing, build it faster, and bring down the cost of building it — while giving communities the tools and infrastructure they need to grow responsibly.
Michael’s housing priorities include:
• Build more housing to bring down costs: California's housing shortage has driven up rents and home prices. We need more homes at every level — affordable, workforce, missing-middle, and responsible market-rate housing — to increase supply and give working families more choices.
• Remove barriers that make housing slower and more expensive: Every unnecessary delay adds cost. Streamline permitting, expand by-right approvals for projects that meet established standards, and eliminate duplicative reviews so compliant projects can move from approval to construction.
• Lower the cost of building: When construction costs, impact fees, financing, and regulatory expenses rise, housing becomes more expensive. Encourage modular and prefabricated construction, examine excessive fees, and expand the skilled construction workforce to help bring costs down.
• Create certainty so approved housing actually gets built: Unpredictable and conflicting requirements make projects riskier and more expensive — and sometimes prevent them from being built altogether. State and local governments should provide clear rules and predictable timelines so communities, nonprofit developers, and homebuilders know what is expected from the beginning.
• Pair housing growth with infrastructure: More housing requires sufficient roads, water, schools, transportation, public safety, parks, and other community infrastructure. The state should be a partner in helping communities accommodate growth, not simply mandate housing and leave local governments to manage the consequences.
• Restore the path to homeownership: Building more housing is essential, but supply alone is not enough. California should expand opportunities for first-time buyers, workforce housing, starter homes, townhomes, condominiums, and other attainable ownership options so working people can build equity and put down roots.
Michael believes the people who make our communities work should be able to afford to live in them. Teachers, nurses, firefighters, service workers, public employees, young professionals, and families should not have to choose between the community they love and a future they can afford.
If we want housing to cost less, we have to make it possible to build more — and if we want the next generation to stay in Ventura County, we have to give them something they can afford to call home.
For decades, California has led the country in recognizing the threat of climate change and setting ambitious environmental goals. But recognizing the problem is no longer enough.
Climate change is already affecting how much Californians pay, where we can build, how reliable our water supply is, how we produce energy, and whether families can afford to insure their homes.
When temperatures rise and droughts intensify, water becomes more scarce and expensive. When extreme weather damages infrastructure, taxpayers pay to rebuild it. When the electric grid cannot keep pace with growing demand, energy becomes less reliable and more expensive. And when environmental goals are adopted without enough infrastructure or attention to affordability, working families can end up bearing costs they cannot afford.
The consequences of climate change are no longer theoretical — Californians are paying for them.
Michael believes the next generation of climate leadership must move beyond simply setting goals and start delivering measurable results.
California should reduce emissions and protect our environment, but we must also build the clean energy, water, transportation, housing, and resilient infrastructure necessary to actually achieve those goals. A climate policy that exists on paper but cannot be implemented affordably is not enough.
Michael’s priorities include:
• Build the clean energy infrastructure our goals require: California cannot electrify transportation, housing, businesses, and industry without dramatically increasing reliable energy generation, storage, transmission, and grid capacity. If we want people and businesses to transition to cleaner energy, the infrastructure has to be there first — and the electricity has to remain affordable.
• Make climate action lower costs, not simply shift them: When environmental policies increase electricity, transportation, housing, or consumer costs without providing realistic alternatives, working families bear the burden. Michael believes climate policy should be measured not only by emissions reductions, but by whether it makes clean energy, transportation, and technology more affordable and accessible.
• Secure California's water future: Climate change is making traditional water supplies less predictable while California's population and economy continue to depend on reliable water. Investing in recycling, groundwater recharge, stormwater capture, conservation, storage, and modern water infrastructure can turn periods of abundance into greater security during periods of drought. If we capture and reuse more water when it is available, communities become less vulnerable when it isn't.
• Make clean technology an economic opportunity: The transition to a lower-carbon economy will create enormous demand for new technologies, skilled workers, manufacturing, construction, and infrastructure. If California develops those industries here, climate investment can create good-paying jobs and strengthen our economy. If we simply mandate the transition while allowing the jobs and manufacturing to happen somewhere else, Californians will bear the costs without receiving enough of the economic benefit.
• Protect our coast and natural resources: Rising seas, erosion, extreme weather, and changing ecosystems threaten the coastline, agriculture, open space, and natural resources that define Ventura County. Investing earlier in adaptation, restoration, water management, and coastal protection can reduce the environmental and financial cost of responding after damage has already occurred.
• Demand measurable results from climate spending: California spends billions pursuing environmental and climate goals. Taxpayers deserve to know what those investments actually accomplish. Michael supports greater transparency around outcomes — how much emissions were reduced, how much clean energy was produced, how much water was secured, how much infrastructure was built, and whether projects were delivered on time and on budget. Good intentions are not a substitute for results.
Michael believes California does not need to choose between protecting the planet and protecting people's quality of life. We have to do both.
For decades, Sacramento has debated climate change, passed laws, established targets, and promised a cleaner future. Those efforts helped establish California as an environmental leader.
But the challenge facing the next generation is different: we have to actually build that future.
If we want electrification, build the grid. If we want water security, build the infrastructure. If we want people to adopt cleaner technology, make it affordable. If we want a green economy, create the jobs here. And if taxpayers are investing billions, show them the results.
Michael believes the next chapter of California's environmental leadership should be measured not by how many promises Sacramento makes, but by whether emissions fall, infrastructure gets built, costs come down, and Californians see their quality of life improve.
Immigrants are essential to California’s identity, economy, and future. Across Ventura County, immigrant families help power our agriculture, construction, healthcare, hospitality, small businesses, and local economy. They are our neighbors, coworkers, students, business owners, and community leaders.
But when families are afraid that going to work, taking a child to school, seeking medical care, or interacting with government could put them or someone they love at risk, that fear doesn't stop with one family — it affects the entire community.
When people are afraid to report a crime, public safety suffers. When workers are afraid to speak up about exploitation, bad employers gain an advantage over businesses that follow the law. When families avoid healthcare, schools, or public services because they fear immigration consequences, problems become more difficult and expensive to address. And when workers are suddenly removed from industries already struggling to find employees, local businesses, consumers, and the broader economy feel the consequences.
Fear makes communities less safe, workers more vulnerable, and our economy less stable.
Michael believes California must stand firmly with immigrant communities, defend due process and civil rights, and push back against unlawful or indiscriminate federal overreach. Immigration policy is primarily a federal responsibility, but California has a responsibility to protect the rights, safety, and economic security of the people who live and work here.
Michael’s priorities include:
• Protect due process and civil rights: Every person deserves to be treated with dignity and afforded the protections guaranteed by law. California should defend constitutional rights and challenge unlawful enforcement practices that violate them.
• Keep families together: When families are unnecessarily separated, children, schools, employers, and entire communities experience the consequences. Michael supports policies and legal resources that help families understand and exercise their rights while ensuring enforcement respects due process.
• Keep communities safe by maintaining trust: People should be able to report domestic violence, wage theft, trafficking, fraud, or other crimes without being afraid that asking for help will expose their family to immigration enforcement. When victims and witnesses trust local authorities enough to come forward, law enforcement can solve crimes and communities become safer.
• Protect workers and responsible businesses: Fear of immigration enforcement can make workers easier to exploit through wage theft, unsafe working conditions, or other abuses. Enforcing workplace protections helps immigrant workers while ensuring businesses that follow the law are not undercut by employers who exploit vulnerable people.
• Expand access to legal assistance and reliable information: Immigration law is extraordinarily complex, and misinformation can leave families vulnerable to exploitation and fraud. Expanding access to qualified legal assistance and trusted community resources helps people understand their rights, navigate the legal system, and avoid predatory practices.
• Expand economic opportunity: Immigrant workers already contribute enormously to California's economy. Expanding workforce development, apprenticeships, education, entrepreneurship, and career pathways allows people to earn more, fill critical workforce shortages, start businesses, and contribute even more to their communities.
• Protect the industries that keep Ventura County moving: Agriculture, construction, healthcare, hospitality, food service, and other industries depend heavily on immigrant workers. Sudden workforce disruptions do not happen in isolation — they affect businesses, food production, housing construction, services, prices, and ultimately every family in our region.
Michael believes protecting immigrant communities and protecting Ventura County's future are not competing priorities — they are connected.
When people trust their community, they report crimes. When workers are protected from exploitation, responsible businesses can compete. When families can access schools and healthcare without fear, communities are healthier. And when people have the opportunity to work, learn, start businesses, and build a future, our entire economy becomes stronger.
California is stronger because of its immigrant communities. Leadership means making sure fear does not weaken the safety, prosperity, and sense of community we all share.
Michael believes public safety starts long before someone calls 911. When communities wait until a crisis happens to act, emergencies become more dangerous, more expensive, and harder to recover from. When we invest in prevention, preparedness, and strong first responders before disaster strikes, we save lives, protect property, and make our communities safer.
Ventura County knows these risks firsthand. Wildfires, floods, earthquakes, medical emergencies, mental health crises, and other disasters can quickly overwhelm families and communities. And as these threats grow, simply spending more money responding after something goes wrong is not enough.
We have to address the risks before they become disasters.
That means making sure police officers, firefighters, paramedics, dispatchers, and emergency personnel have the resources to respond when we need them — while investing in the people, infrastructure, and prevention strategies that reduce the number and severity of emergencies in the first place.
Michael’s public safety and resilience priorities include:
• Give first responders the resources to respond: When police, fire departments, paramedics, dispatch centers, and emergency agencies are understaffed or under-resourced, response times and public safety suffer. California must invest in the staffing, training, equipment, technology, and resources necessary to respond quickly and effectively when people need help.
• Build a California Resilient Workforce: Wildfire prevention and disaster preparedness require an enormous amount of work before an emergency ever begins. Michael wants to create career pathways that put Californians to work clearing hazardous vegetation, creating defensible space and community wildfire buffers, hardening homes and critical infrastructure, restoring watersheds, reducing flood risks, and completing other resilience projects. By partnering with fire agencies, local governments, labor, community colleges, conservation corps, and workforce programs, California can reduce disaster risk while creating good-paying careers at the same time.
• Prevent disasters from becoming catastrophes: When we invest in vegetation management, community hardening, evacuation routes, emergency communications, water infrastructure, and disaster planning before an emergency, we reduce the loss of lives, homes, businesses, and public infrastructure afterward. Prevention costs less than rebuilding communities after they are destroyed.
• Expand mental health care before a crisis becomes an emergency: When people cannot access treatment early, mental health challenges can escalate until police officers, paramedics, emergency rooms, or jails become the response of last resort. Expanding behavioral healthcare, crisis intervention, and early treatment can improve outcomes while allowing law enforcement to focus resources where they are needed most.
• Address homelessness before instability becomes permanent: Leaving people indefinitely on the street is neither compassionate nor safe. Expanding shelter, treatment, supportive services, and pathways to permanent housing — paired with accountability — can help people regain stability while keeping neighborhoods, parks, businesses, and public spaces safe and accessible.
• Invest in prevention to reduce crime: When young people have stronger connections to education, employment, mentorship, recreation, and opportunity, we can intervene before problems escalate. Prevention and violence-intervention programs should complement effective law enforcement by addressing the conditions that contribute to crime while strengthening trust between public safety agencies and the communities they serve.
Michael believes the safest community is a prepared community. We should not wait for the next wildfire, flood, crime, or crisis to decide public safety matters.
If we invest before disaster strikes, we can prevent emergencies from becoming catastrophes. If we intervene before people reach a crisis, we can improve outcomes and reduce pressure on first responders. And if we build the workforce and infrastructure to prepare today, we can make Ventura County safer and more resilient for the future.
California is entering one of the biggest economic transformations in generations. AI and automation are changing jobs, an aging population is increasing demand for healthcare, climate change is creating new risks, and emerging technologies are reshaping entire industries.
Change is coming whether California prepares for it or not. The difference is who benefits — and who gets left behind.
If we wait until jobs disappear to retrain workers, until people are sick to invest in their health, until infrastructure fails to replace it, or until industries leave to improve our business climate, we will spend more money solving bigger problems later.
Michael believes California must stop governing from crisis to crisis and start addressing challenges before they become crises. Preparing earlier means creating more opportunity, reducing long-term costs, and giving workers, families, and businesses the ability to succeed through change.
California has always helped shape what comes next. We should lead the next economy, not react to it.
Michael’s priorities for California’s future include:
• Prepare workers before jobs disappear: AI and automation will change how millions of Californians work. Waiting until workers are displaced makes economic transitions harder on families and communities. Investing now in education, apprenticeships, retraining, and lifelong learning can help workers adapt as industries change and move into the good-paying careers being created by the next economy.
• Train people for the jobs we know we will need: California faces workforce needs in healthcare, skilled trades, construction, clean energy, advanced manufacturing, technology, agriculture, and public service. When employers cannot find skilled workers, projects are delayed, services suffer, and costs rise. Stronger partnerships between K–12 schools, community colleges, universities, labor, trade programs, and employers can connect education directly to real careers and build the workforce California needs to grow.
• Invest in healthcare, not just sick care: When we wait until people are sick to intervene, conditions become harder and more expensive to treat. Health insurance is important, but it primarily determines how the bills get paid after someone needs care. Michael wants California to focus more of its attention on what keeps people healthy in the first place — primary and preventive care, mental health, nutrition, early intervention, healthier communities, and access to care close to home. Keeping people healthier improves lives while reducing the long-term cost of treating preventable illness.
• Make it easier for small businesses to grow: When starting or expanding a business requires navigating unnecessary delays, complicated regulations, and costly permitting processes, entrepreneurs have less money to invest in workers and growth. Cutting unnecessary red tape, modernizing permitting, and improving access to capital and technical assistance can help local businesses spend less time navigating government and more time creating jobs.
• Diversify our economy so communities can withstand change: Communities that depend too heavily on a small number of industries are more vulnerable when technology, markets, or economic conditions change. Ventura County should attract emerging industries and good-paying jobs while strengthening agriculture, tourism, healthcare, manufacturing, energy, and the small businesses already driving our regional economy. A more diverse economy means more opportunity and greater economic resilience when change comes.
• Build the infrastructure the next economy requires: Aging transportation, water, energy, broadband, schools, and public facilities make communities less competitive and more expensive to operate. Investing before systems fail costs less than emergency repairs and gives businesses and communities the foundation they need to grow. California cannot build a 21st-century economy on infrastructure designed for the last century.
Michael believes California already has the ingredients to lead the next generation of American innovation — extraordinary workers, world-class universities, entrepreneurs, agriculture, technology, natural resources, and communities filled with talent.
The choice is whether we prepare now or pay the price later.
If we prepare workers before jobs change, we create opportunity instead of displacement. If we invest in health before people get sick, we improve lives and reduce costs. If we modernize infrastructure before it fails, we strengthen our economy instead of reacting to emergencies. And if we embrace innovation while preparing people for its consequences, California can shape the future instead of simply responding to it.
Insurance is supposed to provide security. Increasingly, it has become another source of financial uncertainty for California families.
Homeowners are seeing premiums rise or policies disappear. Renters feel the impact when rising insurance costs increase the cost of operating apartment buildings. Small businesses face higher costs just to keep their doors open. And when insurance becomes too expensive or unavailable, it becomes harder to finance, build, buy, or maintain housing.
The result is a vicious cycle: fewer insurance options mean less competition, less competition means higher costs, and higher costs make California even less affordable.
Michael believes we have to break that cycle.
California needs an insurance market that protects consumers and actually works — one where responsible insurers compete for customers, homeowners and renters have real choices, businesses can afford coverage, and the FAIR Plan returns to being a safety net instead of becoming the only option for too many Californians.
Michael’s priorities include:
• Restore competition to bring down pressure on prices: When insurers stop writing policies or leave California altogether, consumers are left with fewer choices. Fewer choices weaken competition and put more pressure on premiums. California must create a stable, competitive market that attracts responsible insurers back to the state while maintaining strong consumer protections. More competition means more choices — and consumers should be able to shop for coverage instead of taking whatever policy they can find.
• Fix the FAIR Plan before the problem gets bigger: When homeowners cannot find private coverage, they are pushed onto the FAIR Plan. As enrollment grows, so does the financial exposure of the system — and ultimately the broader insurance market. California must restore the FAIR Plan to its intended role as a true insurer of last resort by expanding private-market options and creating pathways for homeowners to transition back to traditional coverage.
• Protect renters from the insurance crisis: Insurance costs do not stop with the property owner. When the cost of insuring apartment buildings rises dramatically, maintaining and financing rental housing becomes more expensive, adding another cost pressure to California's already unaffordable housing market. Stabilizing insurance costs can help protect existing rental housing, encourage new construction, and reduce another source of upward pressure on rents. Renters also deserve access to affordable renters insurance and meaningful assistance when disasters displace them from their homes.
• Make sure prevention actually pays off: Californians who invest their own money to make their homes and properties safer should see those investments recognized by insurers. California should establish clearer standards for how verified risk-reduction improvements affect underwriting, renewals, and premiums. If we ask people to invest in making their property safer, doing the right thing should make it easier — not just as difficult — to get insured.
• Protect consumers while modernizing the market: Consumer protection and a functioning insurance market are not competing goals. California should maintain protections against unfair practices and unreasonable rate increases while modernizing outdated processes that contribute to uncertainty, delays, and insurers withdrawing from the market. Regulation should protect consumers by producing better outcomes — not simply preserve a system that is no longer working for them.
• Make insurance part of California's affordability strategy: Insurance affects far more than a monthly premium. When insurance costs rise, mortgage payments rise. Rental housing becomes more expensive to operate. Small businesses face higher overhead. New housing becomes harder to finance and build. Those costs ripple throughout the economy. If California is serious about affordability, we cannot treat insurance as a separate problem.
Michael believes Californians should not have to wonder every year whether they will lose their coverage, whether their premium will become unaffordable, or whether the home or business they worked years to build will suddenly become impossible to insure.
The cause and effect is clear: when insurance disappears, competition falls. When competition falls, costs rise. When insurance costs rise, housing and doing business become more expensive — and families ultimately pay the price.
California needs to reverse that cycle: restore competition, expand choices, reward prevention, protect consumers, and bring stability back to the market.
Because whether you rent, own a home, or run a small business, you should be able to afford to protect what you've worked so hard to build.
California has some of the most ambitious policies in the country, but too often the people with the greatest access to government have the greatest ability to shape what government does.
The result is a political system where too many Californians wonder whether government is actually listening to them.
Michael believes democracy works best when elected officials are accountable to the people they represent — not the biggest donors, the most powerful lobbyists, or the institutions most invested in keeping things exactly as they are.
That doesn't mean refusing to work with business, labor, environmental organizations, public safety, advocates, or any other stakeholder. Good governing requires bringing people with different perspectives to the table.
But everyone deserves a seat at the table — no one should be able to buy the table.
Michael’s priorities include:
• Reduce the influence of money in politics: When campaigns become increasingly dependent on large contributions and powerful interests, ordinary voters can feel like their voices matter less. Michael supports stronger campaign-finance transparency and reforms that make it easier for voters to see who is funding campaigns and attempting to influence their government.
• Shine a light on who is influencing decisions: Californians should be able to easily understand who is lobbying their representatives, what interests they represent, and how money is flowing through the political process. Transparency creates accountability — and accountability makes it harder for influence to operate behind closed doors.
• Challenge the power of incumbency: Experience matters, but government should never become a permanent institution for the people already holding office. Over time, incumbents accumulate fundraising networks, endorsements, institutional relationships, and political advantages that make competition increasingly difficult. When elected officials face less competition, voters have fewer meaningful choices — and without competition, there is less pressure for government to change.
• Make government answer to outcomes, not intentions: Sacramento is very good at announcing programs, passing legislation, and spending money. Michael believes elected officials should also be accountable for what happens afterward. Did the program work? Did costs go down? Did housing get built? Did services improve? Government should measure success by results, not press releases.
• Make government easier for people to participate in: If engaging with government requires taking a day off work, hiring an expert, understanding complicated bureaucracy, or knowing the right person to call, people with money and connections will always have an advantage. Technology, accessible public meetings, language access, open data, and clearer government processes can give more people a meaningful voice in decisions that affect their lives.
• Bring a new generation of leadership to Sacramento: New leadership brings new questions, new ideas, and a willingness to challenge assumptions that have become accepted simply because "that's how we've always done it." Michael believes public service should be about solving problems, not protecting political careers or preserving the status quo.
Michael believes the longer a political system goes without meaningful competition, the easier it becomes for relationships, money, and institutional power to reinforce themselves.
Special-interest money creates access. Access creates influence. Incumbency compounds that influence. And over time, the people government was created to serve can become the people with the least access to it.
That cycle has to change.
Michael is running because California cannot solve new problems with the same politics that helped create them. We need leadership willing to challenge the status quo, bring new voices to the table, measure government by results, and put political power where it belongs — back in the hands of the people.
tHIS CAMPAIGN IS ABOUT YOU. WHAT ISSUES MATTER MOST TO YOU?
