Christian Bartulovich for Pennsylvania State Representative, District 122

Decisions about what gets built in our communities should be made by the people who live in them, not by Harrisburg or a developer's lobbyist. As a township supervisor, I helped write the local ordinances that protect our neighborhoods and our land, and I have watched the state try to strip that authority away.

I will defend the right of our townships and boroughs to control their own zoning and land use, and I will oppose state mandates that override local decisions and hand more power to high-intensity development. The closer a decision is made to home, the more it answers to you.

In Pennsylvania, you never really stop renting your home from the government. Fall far enough behind on school property taxes and the county can take a house you already paid off. That is not ownership, and it falls hardest on seniors and working families on fixed incomes.

I support eliminating school property taxes entirely and funding our schools through broader, fairer sources, so that paying for education no longer depends on whether you can keep up with a bill that climbs every year.

This is not a rebate that covers a sliver of the increase. It is ending the one tax that can cost you the roof over your head.

Healthcare in rural Pennsylvania too often means driving farther for less. We have roughly half the primary care doctors per resident that our cities do, hospitals have quietly dropped services like maternity and emergency care, and too many families put off care simply because the nearest option is an hour away.

I want care you can actually reach. That means letting nurse practitioners and physician assistants practice to the full extent of their training where doctors are scarce, treating telehealth and the broadband it runs on as real healthcare infrastructure, and protecting the local clinics and hospitals that keep care close to home.

It also means standing behind the volunteer fire and EMS crews who answer the call at 2 AM. They are running short on both people and money, and I will fight for the recruitment, training, and certification support they need to keep showing up. The people who show up for us deserve a state that shows up for them.

For too long, the only path Harrisburg sells is a four-year degree and a move to the city, while the trades that built this county go short-handed and our young people leave to find work. That is backwards.

I will push to reinvest in the skilled trades, vocational education, and the small employers who actually hire here, so a young person in Carbon County can build a good life without leaving home. An economy that works only for the cities is not working for us.

A house should be where a family lives, not where a Wall Street fund parks its money. When investors buy up homes by the block, they bid against your kids and your neighbors and turn ownership into rent you can never escape.

I will work to move single-family housing back toward family ownership. That means giving families and current residents the opportunity to buy their home before corporate investors do, with real penalties for homes left vacant and land banked. Working families and landowners are the backbone of this county, and they should own their piece of it.

Safe communities depend on the local police, fire, and EMS who show up when things go wrong, and on a justice system that protects the law-abiding instead of second-guessing them. I will make sure the people who keep us safe have the backing and the resources to do the job.

I will also defend the constitutional rights of Carbon County residents against efforts in Harrisburg to chip away at them. Public safety and individual liberty are not opposites. They protect the same people.

Harrisburg too often acts like it has a revenue problem when what it really has is a spending problem. As a township supervisor, I have never treated tax dollars as an endless income stream, and the record shows it: services delivered and problems solved without treating residents like a bottomless account.

I will bring that same discipline to the state. Every dollar government spends came out of a family's paycheck or a small business's payroll, and it should be spent like it matters, because to the people who earned it, it does.