Campaign Priorities
Public Safety
David walks into court each day and fights for survivors, victims, and witnesses of crime. As an Assistant District Attorney, David is the only candidate in the race who works full time in public safety. He is the district court trial prosecutor for Wilmington Police Department cases, and his caseload covers domestic violence, impaired driving, and firearms offenses. David also leads our local Community Recovery Court and Veterans Treatment Court, which allow defendants with a substance use disorder to complete a probationary sentence with court-ordered addiction counseling instead of sending them to jail. David’s top priorities for public safety are gun violence, the opioid crisis, and violence against women.
The Environment
David’s passion for environmental justice and conservation was cultivated from an early age, having grown up in the Boy Scouts. He’s from the generation that cites climate change as their top public policy concern. A self-described climate change candidate, David believes that we have both an individual and collective responsibility to protect the planet, and especially our waterways here in Wilmington. This includes making changes at the local government level to hold polluters accountable, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and protect our wetlands and tree canopy when city council approves when and where future growth will occur. David’s faith informs his belief that we have a duty to care for God’s creation, which is why he started a partnership between his church and Cape Fear River Watch to sponsor monthly clean-ups in our urban streams.
Housing Affordability
David’s housing affordability strategy focuses on this question: can our city’s teachers, nurses, and first responders afford to live here? Until they can, we will not have achieved affordable housing. With a growing population, we must conscientiously focus on multi-family and multi-unit housing solutions, building higher while preserving our wetlands and natural resources. David will fight for housing-first solutions to chronic homelessness, respecting the dignity of our neighbors experiencing homelessness rather than criminalizing poverty.
Transportation
David is a leader who knows that our transportation strategy must set the course for where Wilmington is headed in the next ten, twenty, and thirty years as our population continues to grow. Rather than being reactive to outdated infrastructure, David will fight to build a walkable and bikeable city with a long-term strategy to reconnect Wilmington to the state’s passenger rail system. David will proactively work with the Wilmington Urban Area Metropolitan Authority and the N.C. Department of Transportation to bring transportation infrastructure investments to our region, and he is committed to fully funding WAVE Transit as we work to build a transit system that runs on time and gets folks where they need to go.
