I moved to Leadville about 12 years ago, like so many people who end up here, I wasn't born in Lake County, but it became home. Over the past decade I've worked in the Lake County restaurant industry, served youth and families through the local Wraparound program, and built relationships across this community from the dining room to the school hallway.

I've seen Leadville change. Some of those changes have been genuinely good, a growing economy, new faces, renewed energy. But some of those changes have come at a real cost to the people who have been here their whole lives: rising rents, a childcare crisis, wages that don't keep up, and a local government that too often treats community engagement as a checkbox rather than a commitment.

I don't have all the answers. I'm not here to tell Lake County what it needs. I'm here to listen, to connect the right people to the right conversations, and to make sure that the decisions made in our county government reflect the people who actually live here, all of them.