The Issues

Nine fights. One lifetime of picking them.

Peter's positions aren't policy papers. They're the record of a custodian's son who became a trial lawyer and spent thirty-four years fighting the people who shortchange working families. Read where he stands — and where it comes from.

01Labor

Unions made him. He won't forget it.

Peter's great-grandfather worked the South Boston docks in the longshoremen's union. Both grandfathers were union men. His father carried a custodians' union card for forty years. Two brothers — a Boston firefighter and a plumber — carried theirs for decades more.

That's not a talking point; it's the reason his family made it. Union wages and union pensions raised seven kids in a Hyde Park housing project and put Peter on the path from Boston Latin to law school. So when Tallahassee passes laws designed to starve public-sector unions — banning paycheck dues deduction, imposing recertification thresholds no corporation or political party could survive — Peter doesn't see "reform." He sees an attack on the ladder his own family climbed.

In Tallahassee, Peter willvote to repeal the anti-union certification laws, restore paycheck dues deduction, and defend collective bargaining for every Florida worker — public and private.
02Education

Public money belongs in public schools.

Peter's father kept a Boston public school running for forty years. Peter tested into Boston Latin — the oldest public school in America — and that exam changed the trajectory of his life. For the last twenty years he's been at Miami Shores Elementary as a coach, a reader, and five years running as Santa Claus.

He knows what a public school looks like when it works, and what one looks like when it's being starved. Florida now diverts nearly $4 billion a year to private-school vouchers — schools with no obligation to take every child, no comparable testing, no real financial oversight. Public schools take everyone who walks through the door. That's the whole point of them, and it's why they come first.

In Tallahassee, Peter willfight to curtail the voucher drain, hold every school that takes public money to public standards, and put the money back in the classrooms that serve 90% of Florida's kids.
03Education

Pay the people who make schools run — all of them.

When Peter says "school staff," he doesn't just mean teachers. He means the custodian who kept the building running for forty years — because that was his father.

Florida's teacher shortage is not a mystery. The state pays some of the lowest educator salaries in the nation, strips teachers of professional autonomy, and then publicly demonizes them for doing their jobs. The same squeeze hits bus drivers, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers, and counselors. You can't recruit the best people into a profession you've made miserable — and you can't run a school without the whole workforce.

In Tallahassee, Peter willpush to raise pay across the entire education workforce, end the book bans and classroom gag orders, and defend the pensions that let people retire with dignity after careers of service.
04Healthcare

Close the coverage gap. Expand Medicaid.

As a young prosecutor in Janet Reno's office, Peter was the sole ASA on the domestic-violence unit and handled the Baker Act mental-health docket. He saw, up close, what happens to people in crisis when there's no coverage, no treatment, and no safety net.

Hundreds of thousands of working Floridians — home health aides, service workers, childcare providers, construction laborers — earn too much for Medicaid and too little for marketplace coverage. The federal government will pay 90% of the cost of covering them. Florida has refused, leaving billions on the table to score a political point. The result: working people in HD 108 using the emergency room as a family doctor, at the highest possible cost to everyone.

In Tallahassee, Peter willfight to expand Medicaid without reservation — and to make the managed-care companies that handle Medicaid dollars spend them on patients, not shareholders.
05Economy

A tax code that works for the other 90%.

Families in HD 108 pay sales tax on nearly everything — groceries, school supplies, clothes for their kids. The wealthiest Floridians and the biggest corporations pay through a web of exemptions, rebates, and loopholes. Guess who comes out ahead.

Then Tallahassee tells working families there's "not enough money" for their schools and their services. The money is there. The tax code is just built to protect the people who have it. Peter's answer isn't higher taxes on working people — it's making the people who've profited most from Florida's growth pay what they actually owe.

In Tallahassee, Peter willpush to close corporate tax loopholes, sunset sweetheart exemptions with a public accounting of who benefits, and attach real strings — clawbacks, living wages, local hiring — to every public subsidy.
06Workers' Rights

When you get hurt on the job, the system should catch you.

Peter won roughly $750,000 for a critically injured truck driver by piercing workers'-compensation immunity — something other lawyers told him was near impossible. He's spent years watching insurance companies deny, delay, and wait for injured workers to give up.

Workers' comp was a bargain: workers gave up the right to sue in exchange for guaranteed, no-fault benefits. Florida has spent decades breaking its side — cutting benefits, letting insurers choose the doctors, capping legal fees so no competent lawyer can afford to take a worker's case against a billion-dollar carrier. And Florida's public employees — the people who staff our schools and run our water plants — still have no OSHA-style right to a safe workplace at all.

In Tallahassee, Peter willfight to restore lost comp benefits, give injured workers the right to choose their own doctor, kill the fee caps for good, and create real workplace-safety protections for Florida's public employees.
07Economy

A safety net that actually catches people.

Florida's maximum unemployment benefit is $275 a week. Try paying Miami-Dade rent on that.

The benefit hasn't meaningfully increased in decades. Eligibility was deliberately restricted in 2011. The online-only system was so hostile that it collapsed entirely in 2020, when Floridians needed it most. None of this is an accident — the system was engineered to keep people from using the insurance they and their employers already paid for.

In Tallahassee, Peter willpush to raise the maximum benefit and index it to the cost of living, expand eligibility to part-time and gig workers, and rebuild the application system so it serves workers instead of discouraging them.
08Democracy

Tallahassee, hands off Miami-Dade.

When Miami-Dade tried to crack down on wage theft, Tallahassee preempted it. When local governments tried to require paid sick leave or rein in short-term rentals hollowing out their neighborhoods, Tallahassee preempted that too.

The same legislators who preach local control keep stripping cities and counties of the power to protect their own residents — because local governments were doing things the donors didn't like. Peter's rule is simple: state law should set a floor, not a ceiling. If this community wants stronger protections than the state minimum, that is our right.

In Tallahassee, Peter willvote no on any preemption bill that lowers the ceiling to protect a narrow interest — on wages, sick leave, licensing, housing, or the environment.
09Democracy

Show us who's really writing the laws.

As a trial lawyer, Peter has spent thirty-four years fighting fine print — the buried clause, the deal done in the dark. Tallahassee runs on it.

Billionaire-funded think tanks draft bills and hand them to legislators who file them as their own work. Leadership jams major policy into budget bills in the final hours of session, when nobody can read them and the public can't object. The people of HD 108 deserve to know whether a law was written for them — or for the donors who bankrolled the organization that drafted it.

In Tallahassee, Peter willpush for on-the-record disclosure of outside bill authorship, donor transparency for policy organizations, and a 72-hour public reading period before any budget vote.

"He cares about me and mine."

That's what Peter wants HD 108 to remember on election day. Nine fights, one standard: does it serve the people of this district? Help him take that standard to Tallahassee.

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