Small-business owner. Tech professional. Father and husband. Running for District 34, the West Side of Rapid City I've lived in for more than a decade.
Jennifer and I met in high school in Pennsylvania, and we've been building a life together ever since. A few years in Colorado, and then we went looking for the right town to plant it in. A record store for sale in Rapid City, South Dakota is a strange thing to have tip the decision, but that's what happened. We moved on Christmas Eve 2014. The Black Hills in winter didn't scare us off. The town did the opposite. We stayed.
We've put down roots on the West Side, the part of Rapid City that's now District 34, the seat I'm running to represent. I'm not running for a district I read about on a map. I'm running for the place where I live.
My interest in politics and community didn't start with a campaign. It started in a public high school civics class in Pennsylvania called Project 18. It wasn't a textbook course. The whole point was to get out and do the work: work the polls on election day, sit in on local government meetings, help out on a campaign, and take a trip to the state capitol to watch how a bill becomes a law.
Spending a school year taking part instead of just reading about it changed how I saw government. It stopped being something distant and became something you show up for. The fact that a public high school made room for a class like that is part of why I believe in public education, and it's a big part of why I've stayed engaged in my community ever since.
Black Hills Vinyl at 622 St. Joseph Street has been a fixture of downtown for thirteen years. We've run it for more than a decade of that. We didn't start the store. We bought into one that had already found its voice, and we've spent our time adding to it: a bigger footprint on the block, a disc golf counter alongside the records, a building we own outright, and a bench of neighbors we've hired along the way. Our daughter Melody grew up running between the bins.
The shop is Jennifer's day-to-day. My own full-time work has been in tech since 2019, at a Rapid City company in the kind of small but fast-growing technology sector that's quietly taking root out here on the plains, what some people are starting to call the Silicon Prairie. It's a front-row seat to the new economy I think this city can build.
When we took over the store, we made a short list of what we wanted to do with it. Hire our neighbors. Buy the building if we could. Put something back into the town that had taken us in. We've done those things, and we keep looking for more.
Some of it has been close to home: serving on the Rapid City Parks and Recreation Board, and helping lead the local disc golf club, whose tournaments have raised tens of thousands of dollars for Feeding South Dakota and other local causes over the years. Small shops, local groups, and neighbors looking out for each other. That's how a town actually works.
Between a Main Street shop, a tech job in town, and a young family growing up here, you get to know Rapid City from a few angles at once. You see who can't afford to stay and who's stopping in to say goodbye before they move. You hear from teachers on a long afternoon. You hear from small-business owners worried about what another property-tax year will mean for a lease. You hear from parents looking at starter homes, doing the math and not liking the results.
You watch Feeding South Dakota's demand climb year over year while Pierre argues about things that aren't going to fix any of it.
This isn't my first time stepping up. I ran for the state legislature in 2020, in what was then District 32, and again in 2024, before stepping back to welcome our child. Those campaigns taught me this district, its people, and what serving it really asks of you.
In 2025 I was part of the Billie Sutton Leadership Institute, a nonpartisan South Dakota program that prepares the next generation of leaders to build a stronger state and more vibrant communities through service to others. A year spent alongside South Dakotans devoted to leading with courage, compassion, and integrity reminded me that the best use of everything those earlier campaigns taught me is simple: to serve. That's a big part of why I decided to step up again.
There's a practical reason too. South Dakota runs a closed primary, and in a district like this one the primary usually decides the seat. By November, a lot of voters open the ballot and find only one name on it. I'm running because District 34 deserves a real choice in November: two candidates, two sets of priorities, not a decision that was already made for them in June.
I'm not running to win a national argument. Pierre isn't Washington. The job is close enough to measure: housing a working family in Rapid City can actually afford, healthcare that doesn't bankrupt the people who keep this town running, public schools worth sending our kids to, and good jobs with the people to fill them.
I want this to be the town my daughter's generation chooses to stay in, not the one they leave.
Housing. Healthcare. Schools. Rapid City's future. That's the job to be done.
If any of this sounds like the kind of state senator you'd like representing District 34, here are the two that make the biggest difference right now: chip in, or sign up to volunteer.