About This Questionnaire
Thank you to each candidate for participating in the Inform Cabarrus 2026 Cabarrus County Commissioners General Election Questionnaire. We appreciate their willingness to serve and their commitment to the citizens of Cabarrus County. These responses are intended to help voters better understand each candidate’s priorities, values, and vision for our community’s future.
All answers are published exactly as they were submitted, without editing for content, grammar, or spelling, to ensure full transparency. Questions left unanswered are marked “no answer submitted,” and candidates who did not participate are noted as “no response received.”
1. Cabarrus County is growing quickly. As a commissioner, do you favor providing the necessary infrastructure to support that growth?
Yes—with discipline. Growth is not an argument for a blank check.
Cabarrus is adding people, students, and traffic. Commissioners cannot pretend the roads, school seats, water and sewer capacity, and public-safety coverage will appear on their own. Refusing all infrastructure is how you get crowding, failing facilities, and then a panic bond. Writing every developer and agency a subsidy is how existing residents pay twice.
I favor infrastructure that is necessary, costed in public, and tied to the growth that creates the demand. Core systems first: safe roads and intersections, school buildings students actually need, and capacity the county is legally on the hook to provide. Not wish lists, prestige projects, or “economic development” extras dressed up as must-haves.
Who pays matters. New growth should cover more of its own way through lawful fees and responsible phasing—not automatic tax hikes on families already here. I will ask what it costs, what happens if bids run over, and what we will not build.
Support the growth. Do not let the growth run the county.
2. At current tax rates, most residences don’t pay enough property tax to support the public services provided for them by the county and cities (schools, law enforcement, utilities, fire protection, etc.). Property taxes would be much higher if we didn’t have business property taxes to make up the difference. Considering that businesses require the county to spend much less tax money than residences, what is your position on supporting business recruitment to bring new businesses to our county and to encourage local businesses to expand?
A healthy tax base includes employers. That does not mean the county should hunt trophies with other people’s money.
Residences do drive much of the cost of schools and neighborhood services. Businesses use roads, public safety, and courts too—and they already pay property tax on buildings, equipment, and inventory. Calling recruitment “free money for households” skips the incentives, infrastructure, and political favors that often come with it.
My position: welcome businesses that want Cabarrus. Make it easy to start and expand here with a competitive tax rate, clear rules, and fast, honest permitting. Do not confuse that with writing checks, long tax abatements, or deals that pick a favored firm over the shop already on the highway.
Recruitment that merely shifts cost onto neighbors or existing firms is not growth; it is a subsidy. If a company needs a special package to come, ask why the ordinary rules are so bad. Fix the climate. Stop shopping for winners.
3. The Water and Sewer Authority of Cabarrus County is responsible for operating our wastewater treatment plant on Rocky River. Currently, the plant is near capacity and requires several expansion projects to handle our continuing residential growth. Do you see helping expand sewer treatment capacity as part of your role as commissioner?
Yes—but as oversight and coordination, not as plant manager.
WSACC operates the Rocky River plant and issues its own revenue debt. The County Commission does not run the facility day to day. Growth policy still sits with commissioners: how fast we rezone and approve housing determines how fast that plant hits the wall. Pretending sewer is “someone else’s problem” is how you get moratoriums, septic failures, and panicked spending.
A commissioner should back necessary capacity, insist expansions are engineered and paid for by the users and development that create the flow—rates, system-development fees, and WSACC’s own books—not a quiet raid on the general fund. Ask when capacity is actually available, and whether land-use approvals are outrunning treatment.
Help expand what growth requires. Do not treat unlimited sewer as a political gift. Capacity is infrastructure. It is also a budget.
4. County commissioners don’t run schools directly, but their decisions greatly affect them. How would you support strong public schools?
Commissioners do not hire teachers or write lesson plans. We do decide the local tax rate, school operating supplement, and whether the county will borrow for buildings. That is how a board supports strong schools—or starves them and then blames the district.
I will fund what the county is responsible for: safe, adequate facilities and a local contribution that is honest and predictable. Bond and budget votes should name projects, costs, and overruns in public. More money is not automatically better schools; hiding the books is not support.
I will not turn the school budget into a culture-war podium or a patronage account. Educators teach. Parents raise children. The county pays for roofs, seats, and debt service and then demands an accounting.
Strong schools need classrooms that are not bursting and a county that neither shortchanges the basics nor signs blank checks. Support the buildings and the local share. Measure results. Leave the chalkboard to the people in the room.
5. How important do you feel public services, such as parks and libraries, are to the quality of life in Cabarrus County?
They matter—after the county has done the jobs only government must do.
Parks and libraries can make a place worth living in: a playground, a trail, a quiet room with books. Families use them.
They are not luxuries in the cartoon sense. They are also not the first purpose of a county. Public safety, courts, records, and the fiscal discipline that keeps people in their homes come first.
I will not campaign to strip parks and libraries for sport, and I will not treat every new wing or festival as a moral necessity. Quality of life includes a tax bill a working family can pay and evenings not spent in traffic because growth outran roads. Voluntary groups, churches, and private fields already add a great deal; county amenities should complement that, not crowd it out.
Keep what residents actually use, maintain it well, and add capacity when growth and the budget honestly require it. Amenities serve the public. They do not define the whole public.
6. Please list what, if elected, will be your top three priorities and how they affect the Cabarrus County citizens.
1. Honest taxes and spending. Commissioners set the rate and the budget. I will treat every dollar like job-site money: no sloppy contracts, no quiet debt, no “investment” that is just a higher bill. Citizens keep more of what they earn and can plan a household around a government that is predictable.
2. Growth that pays its way. Cabarrus is adding people, students, and sewer demand. I will support necessary roads, school seats, and treatment capacity—tied to real costs and phased so today’s residents are not billed twice. Citizens get functioning infrastructure without a permanent squeeze.
3. Limited county power and real oversight. Ordinances, contracts, and departments—including social services—should protect life, liberty, and due process, not expand a file on families or punish churches and the unhoused for existing. Citizens get equal treatment under the law and a board that asks hard questions when an agency fails.
Three tests, every vote: Does this keep government limited, the books honest, and people free to live here?
7. In recent years, it has become evident that some commissioners have been influenced by partisan leadership to take actions that benefit party leaders rather than the majority of Cabarrus County citizens. Please explain how you will balance political pressure versus what is best for the citizens.
I am a Libertarian. I do not owe a faction a vote, and I am not running to please party leaders in Raleigh or Washington.
The test is simple: Does this action protect the life, liberty, and property of Cabarrus residents, or does it reward a team? Tax rates, contracts, appointments, and ordinances either serve the public or they serve a machine. When those conflict, the public wins. I will say so in open session, not in a closed huddle.
Pressure is real—endorsements, scorecards, and “stay in line” calls. The answer is sunlight: read the packet, ask what it costs, who is paid, and who is burdened. I have already stood with people who had no party utility: an unhoused veteran, a church fined for sheltering neighbors, families facing child-protection agencies. That habit does not change on a dais.
Citizens hired a commissioner, not a whip. I will take the heat before I take the whip.
8. Many residents of our county feel strongly about retaining their rural and agricultural identity. How would you balance the desire to retain open land with the increasing need for housing, schools, roads, and businesses as our population grows?
Rural Cabarrus is not a museum, and it is not a blank lot. People who bought land to farm or live quietly have rights. People who need a house have rights too. The county’s job is not to pick a tribe. It is to apply clear rules so neither side is ambushed.
I will defend property rights first. If land is lawfully rural, do not rezone it by surprise or bury it in process until the owner surrenders. If growth is approved, require the housing, schools, roads, and sewer to be planned and paid for in the open—not dumped on a two-lane and a volunteer fire district after the fact.
Open land stays open when owners can afford to keep it and when sprawl is not the only legal use. Density belongs where infrastructure already exists. Farm and timber land should not be taxed or regulated as if it were a subdivision waiting to happen.
Balance is honest maps, honest costs, and no favors. Growth can happen without erasing the countryside—if we stop pretending every acre must be one or the other.
9. Please list what activities of civic engagement you have participated in that helped develop and inform your interest in serving the citizens of Cabarrus County through elected office. Things such as: What organizations are you a participating member of; what non-profit organizations have you contributed to or volunteered for; and any other activities that you feel have helped prepare you for elected office?
Civic life, for me, has meant showing up when government leaned on people who could not hire a lobbyist.
I volunteer with and give monthly to You Are The Power, which stood with unhoused veteran Joshua Rohrer after his arrest and the loss of his service dog, Sunshine. I give monthly to the Institute for Justice, which fights for property rights, due process, and limits on official power.
I spoke publicly for accountability after Kemari died in Person County DSS custody (#justiceforkemari). I also stood with Pastor Moses Colbert and Faith, Hope, and Love Enrichment Ministries in Gastonia when the city fined the church and threatened the property for sheltering people in the cold.
Those fights taught the same lesson my years as a journeyman electrician and foreman did: read the rules, follow the ones that protect people, and do not look away when power is abused. That is the habit I would bring to the Commission.
10. If elected, are you willing to work with members of political parties other than your own to serve the needs of the citizens of Cabarrus County?
Yes. The county does not run on caucus math.
I am a Libertarian. I was not sent to wage a national culture war on Church Street. Taxes, contracts, school buildings, sewer capacity, and whether an agency is crushing a family are practical questions. I will work with Republicans, Democrats, or anyone else who will cut waste, tell the truth about costs, respect property and due process, and vote for residents instead of a whip.
Cooperation is not surrender. I will not trade my vote for a party favor or sit silent on a bad deal because “our side” sponsored it. The test stays the same: Does this protect life, liberty, and a chance at happiness for people who live here?
Citizens hired five commissioners, not two armed camps. If a colleague has a better number or a cleaner ordinance, I will say so and vote for it. Party labels do not build schools or keep a child safe.
