Why I'm Running

I want to give you the honest answer to this question. Not the campaign version.

I didn’t wake up one day and decide to run for county clerk. I took a job there first. I was just looking for some consistency and a reprieve from the stressors of my previous roles.

In June 2025 I walked into the Kitsap County Superior Court Clerk’s office as a deputy clerk. I came from a decade of executive leadership — Amazon and Microsoft, high-growth startups that scaled and sold for billions. I’d managed $100M+ marketing budgets. I’d built systems from the ground up and fixed ones that were broken. I knew what operational accountability looked like at scale.

What I found inside that office was a gap between what it was and what it could be.

What I actually saw

Every week I worked with self-represented litigants — people navigating divorce, custody disputes, and financial crises without a lawyer. People who couldn’t afford one. People who walked in holding a stack of papers they’d printed from the internet, with no idea what came next.

By law, we can’t give legal advice. We can’t tell them if their forms are filled out correctly. We can point out obvious errors and missing fields, and that’s it. The line is clear, and it exists for a reason.

But I kept watching people fall through gaps that didn’t have to exist. Resources that could help them — courthouse facilitators, the informal trial process, the NW Justice Project — weren’t being surfaced. A process that could save litigants months of preparation wasn’t being explained. Documents were getting rejected for avoidable reasons. Cases were not being heard, litigants left crying as serious decisions on parenting time or support got continued again.

This wasn’t malicious. It was invisible. The office had become so accustomed to operating below the radar that it had stopped thinking about what it could be for the people it serves.

The larger picture

I grew up poor in Seattle. I know what it means to navigate systems without a guide. I know what it costs — financially and emotionally — when the people who are supposed to help you either can’t or won’t.

The Clerk’s office is one of the most consequential points of contact between county government and the residents it serves. Jury duty. Passports. Court records. Case filings. Every person who walks through that courthouse door — whether they’re a lawyer or a first-generation immigrant trying to understand a custody order — comes through our office at some point.

And most of Kitsap County doesn’t know we exist.

Five years into the current administration. No competitive election. No annual report. No public office hours. No transparency report. A projected $9.8 million countywide budget shortfall for 2027 that nobody in that office is positioned to address with any real operational fluency.

I looked at all of that and thought: I know how to fix this.

Why me, why now

I’m 36. I’ve never run for anything. I’m not a politician and I don’t want to be one.

What I am is someone who has spent a career building systems that work — and fixing ones that don’t. Someone who has operated at the executive level inside some of the most scrutinized organizations in the world. Someone who grew up with nothing and built something, and who has never once forgotten what it felt like to need a system to work for you and have it fail.

The Clerk’s office doesn’t need another career politician. It needs someone who can read a budget, build an accountability system, and actually explain what this office does to the people who depend on it.

That’s why I’m running.

And if you’ve read this far — that’s why I’m asking for your vote on August 4th.