Adam Johnson posed with Nancy Pelosi's lectern on Jan. 6, 2021. Now he's running for Manatee County Commission. Here's where he lands on local issues, in his own words.

Rapid Growth and Development

“No one likes the developers. There was a study done, I forget what it was, but [it was about] who the most hated people in Florida are. It was developers. Even higher than murderers and pedophiles. How do you convince them to do something that the general population wants? You dangle a carrot. Wouldn’t it be nice if once in a while there was an article that promoted [developers’] good work to the public? ‘Look, they did a good thing here.’ You have to work with these people at some point because they are going to develop everything. If you are just constantly hated, what good is that going to do other than piss them off? They’re going to say, ‘I’m going to do twice the amount of development now.’

“You can't do a moratorium on development. What you need to do is actually look at a comprehensive plan and then alter it [and] add addendums to it to address the failing infrastructure we have. It’s a 10-year plan. And then you move forward from there.

“Without looking through what we're spending, doing cutbacks, and then putting money into infrastructure, parks and services are going to hurt. Libraries are going to hurt. The other option is to have a five-cent tax for the next five years to build the road infrastructure that we need. Tax proposals are never popular, but you can't have it both ways.”

Building Affordable Housing

“It’s a Band-Aid that won’t fix the problem. There needs to be a market correction. The market does need to crash. We need our homes to reflect the actual value of the U.S. dollar. When you print out 60 percent of all currency across a few years during Covid, you are going to experience hyperinflation, and I think we keep putting Band-Aids on the economy over and over.”

Traffic and Roads

“Two things. Impact fees don't really pay for roads. Roads are very expensive. So what you have to be able to do with Tallahassee is to get state funding and federal funding to address the traffic needs. The best way you do that is you set up traffic studies at choke points, you go through the amount of accidents that have happened, and you build an actual logistics with evidence-based reviews of how these things happened. This is why we need the state [and] federal government to come in and help us make our roads safe.”

Improving Emergency Services

“People are going to hate this, [but] there needs to be some type of increase in folks' taxes to build out EMS because you do not want to be reactive; you want to be proactive. But you can [bypass] that by going through your budget and cutting back into the barriers to make sure that public safety is more important than, you know, our medians getting their grass cut every single week. Maybe we go to more renewable plants, you know, Florida-based plants instead of putting in things that require water.”

Flooding

“This goes back to the comprehensive plan. You could address these things by adding addenda, saying, ‘Listen, we have flood areas. When we build up things with lots of concrete that's not permeable by water, we have runoff that's flooding all the neighborhoods that are older.’ The water has to go somewhere. So it goes back to comprehensive plans, looking at the places that are flooding, adding in addendums that say until we have water treatment places, until we have the infrastructure to make sure the floods don't happen, we're not building up anymore.”

Homestead Tax Exemptions

“I am actually very much against it. One, you're basically saying the state is now in control of all of the developments within your county. They're going to control all of the infrastructure, all the development in your county. And if they don't like you, if you're speaking out against them and they have a lot of developer friends, you're not going to get state funding. Manatee County is going through that right now. Things that were supposed to be funded by the state all got shut down last budget session.”

*These responses have been edited for length and clarity.