Issues

As a Perinton homeowner, Jen knows all too well the burden on middle-class families. In Albany, she helped secure $2.2 billion in property tax rebates for New York homeowners and worked to accelerate the middle-class tax cut to the lowest rate families have seen in 70 years. She voted to expand and simplify the STAR program and increased eligibility for senior and veteran property tax relief programs. With her partners in Monroe County, Jen also passed a law to give property tax relief to volunteer first responders.

Jen is also taking on the bills that hit hardest. She helped return money back to taxpayers with inflation reduction and utility refund checks for New York households. She was instrumental in the 2026 fight to lower car insurance rates by taking on the big insurance companies and requiring them to cap their profits and return the excess back to the ratepayers. And she helped to fully fund the state's obligation to our public schools to reduce the burden on school taxpayers.

Since taking office, Jen has secured over $140,000 in direct state grants to law enforcement agencies in our district for necessary equipment and technology upgrades, as well as workforce support. With the majority delegation, she has helped deliver over $20 million in Gun-Involved Violence Elimination funding to Monroe County, resulting in the lowest homicide rate in over 25 years, and an overall reduction in property and violent crime to below pre-COVID levels. She has voted for New York's strongest gun-safety measures — Red Flag laws, a ban on ghost guns, limits on body armor sales, and permit requirements for purchasing semi-automatic rifles before age 21.

Jen is a leading voice in Albany on domestic violence. She hosts a yearly roundtable with Mayor Malik Evans with local law enforcement, attorneys, and survivor groups, as well as the New York State Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence (OPDV). She has toured area non-profits with the OPDV commissioner to better understand the resources available and the gaps that need to be filled, and she sponsors a bill to make it easier to hold domestic abusers accountable.

Jen has also prioritized prevention by hosting yearly community Narcan trainings to help neighbors respond to community overdoses, and offers free Narcan for anyone who wants it in her East Rochester office.

One of the key platforms of Jen's first run for office was a promise to finally, after more than a decade, fully fund Foundation Aid for our public schools, and she delivered. New York's Foundation Aid formula is now fully funded, and Jen has managed to help secure additional funding on top of that formula each year to help our schools keep up with inflation. Jen was also a loud voice in the fight for upstate/downstate parity in Universal Pre-K funding, finally securing a $10,000 minimum rate for every 4-year-old in the state to help start UPK programs in every district.

Jen has also helped raise TAP funding to close the gap for higher education students who struggle to pay for tuition. She has fought against tuition increases at SUNY and CUNY and helped deliver tens of millions of dollars in capital funding to our state universities for necessary improvements and upgrades to keep them competitive.

Jen is also a proud champion of the district's student robotics teams. She hosts STEAM Day at the Capitol every year, giving robotics teams an opportunity to demonstrate their skills to legislators. She sponsors a bill to provide funding to Title 1 schools to help them start their own robotics teams. She also helped secure increased funding to provide Career & Technical Education to students beginning in 9th and 10th grade.

Jen is the only local delegation member to sit on the Assembly's Environmental Conservation Committee. In that role Jen prioritizes the issues that matter most here in the 135th: reducing waste that goes into our landfills, building out renewable energy production to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and drive down costs to ratepayers, and eliminating harmful toxics from the products we use, including a bill to prevent the sale of playground surfacing containing PFAS. She helped secure the $4.2 billion Environmental Bond Act and twice helped secure a $1 billion Sustainable Futures Fund in the state budget to fund our renewable energy priorities.

Jen has delivered millions in direct investment to the towns and villages of the 135th — $1 million for the new Perinton Park skatepark, $265,000 for canal-front improvements on Liftbridge Lane in Fairport, $250,000 to restore East Rochester's West Filbert Street sewers, $250,000 for an ADA-accessible elevator in the Eyer Building, and technology upgrades for our local libraries.

She also fights for the institutions that hold communities together: sponsoring the LOCAL Act, a tax credit to help small businesses advertise in local news outlets, and showing up — year after year — for the schools, libraries, fire departments, and main streets of every town she represents.

Jen uses her extensive background in healthcare law and her experience working with sick and disabled New Yorkers to help every New Yorker access quality, affordable healthcare. Jen has fought year over year to increase Medicaid funding for nursing homes, group homes, direct service providers and oral health providers. She was instrumental in securing the first increase in Early Intervention rates since 1994 and heads the Early Intervention workgroup as part of the Special Education Caucus.

Jen is also a vocal advocate for New Yorkers with life-threatening allergies. Following a harrowing incident involving her own child, who has an anaphylactic nut allergy, she sponsored and passed a bill requiring any retail business that prepares food ready-made for sale on site to label the packaging to indicate any ingredients containing the 9 most common allergens. She also sponsors a bill to require allergy labeling on restaurant menus.

In 2026 alone, Jen helped secure $750 million for hospitals, nursing homes, and assisted living facilities across the state, $50 million for hospice care, and raises for direct-support professionals. She has also been a champion for people with eating disorders, providing over $180,000 in funding to Upstate New York's first residential eating-disorder treatment facility for adolescents, which is opening right here in the 135th District.

Jen's commitment to reproductive freedom predates her time in office, when she organized alongside reproductive-justice law students and attorneys with If/When/How. In the Assembly, she helped pass the New York Equality Amendment twice, enshrining reproductive freedom protections in our state constitution so that our rights are insulated from the whims of Washington. Jen also sponsors a bill to protect reproductive healthcare information from being inadvertently disclosed without a patient's permission.

She voted for the Equal Rights Amendment and its reproductive-health protections, and as other states roll back care, her position is simple: in New York, decisions about pregnancy belong to patients — and Jen is working to keep it that way.

When Jen took office, she was paying more for childcare than she paid for her mortgage. She knows that families all across the state are in the same boat, and she vowed to make a difference when she got to Albany. As a member of the Assembly #MomSquad, Jen has worked with other Assembly moms to expand access to childcare subsidies, provide direct workforce retention funding to providers and to secure grants for capital upgrades to create more slots in childcare deserts, including $400,000 to the Eastside YMCA.

She has provided $30,000 to in-district, school-based before and after-care programs, to expand access to much-needed wrap-around care. And she passed a bill to ensure that families that unexpectedly lose childcare can access unemployment benefits while they look for new care. Jen also sponsors a bill to help childcare providers access IDA capital grants to help expand slots and provide better care.

Jen has been one of the Assembly's loudest voices on the nursing-home funding crisis, fighting year after year for the Medicaid reimbursement our senior-care providers need. She has provided $150,000 in state grants to local nursing homes for workforce training to up-skill their existing staff, as well as helping secure $15 million for the Monroe County Transformational Community Care Coordination (TC3) program to help move patients from hospitals into long-term care.

Jen has published an elder resource guide for towns across the district and hosted an elder tax credit webinar with community partners to educate our older neighbors about tax programs and benefits they may not know about. Jen helped secure $500,000 to allow Lifespan to provide state-wide elder fraud & scam prevention services, and she has hosted elder-fraud seminars with Attorney General Letitia James to help protect older New Yorkers.

Jen took office in the depths of the pandemic, when local unemployment hit 8.6% — and went straight to work on recovery, voting for $800 million in small-business recovery grants and the state's restaurant resiliency program. Today she sponsors a Rochester Chamber–backed tax credit to help small businesses advertise in local media, and keeps fighting for the workforce that keeps our region running.

Jen has fought for over a billion dollars in capital, including increases in CHIPS and other road construction money to put our local construction industry to work for the improvement of our community. She also helped deliver $500 million for the Rochester School Modernization Program and $100 million for the Inner Loop projects.