Every few blocks in Senate District 8, I hear the same thing.
A mom answers the door with a toddler on her hip. A dad steps onto the porch, still holding his coffee. Neither one brings up taxes first. Or schools. Or crime rates.
They bring up the tent camp two streets over. The one that used to sit on the empty lot down the road. The pile of belongings near the park where their kids play.
I've knocked on thousands of doors this year. Nobody asks me about policy. They ask me about their kids.
Grandparents raising grandkids who now drive them two blocks instead of letting them walk.
A mom who moved her son's basketball hoop from the front yard to the backyard because of who started hanging around the street at night.
A dad who walks his daughter to the corner every morning, rain or shine, because he doesn't trust what she'd run into alone.
These aren't people who lack compassion. Most of them have dropped off blankets or food themselves.
They haven't lost empathy. They've lost faith that anyone in government is thinking about their kids first.
Here's what nobody wants to say out loud: when a camp sets up near a park or a school route, families don't get a vote. They’re just forced to adjust.
They stop walking. They stop letting their kids play outside after dark. They start driving the long way home.
Quietly, without ever being asked, parents in this district have been absorbing the cost of a government failure that was never theirs to fix.
That ends with me.
If I'm elected to Carson City, the walk to school and the walk to the park won't be a side issue. It'll be the first question I ask about any homelessness policy that crosses my desk.
Before we argue over funding formulas or which agency owns which program, families deserve a straight answer to the only question that matters: what are you doing to protect our kids?
That means real coordination between schools, law enforcement, and whoever is responsible for clearing encampments near school zones and parks.
It means a camp forming near a bus stop isn't something a neighborhood finds out about after the fact.
It means a tent camp next to a playground gets treated with more urgency than one on a stretch of empty desert, because proximity to children changes the stakes.
And it means telling families the truth instead of managing them into silence.
Nobody in this district owes an apology for wanting their kid to walk to school without a parent trailing a block behind, watching.
I don't have all the answers yet.
But I have a list of parents who are done being told this is complicated. What they're asking is simple: will you make sure my kid gets to school safely?
That's the job. I intend to do it.
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