Your town

Rockport

Rockport carried Spencer County's tax base for fifty years. What replaces the plant, and what gets built beside it, should not be decided without the people who live here.

Two units retiring, and everything depends on what comes next

Both units of the AEP plant retire by the end of 2028 under a federal court agreement. The plant's assessed value has been over 22 percent of the whole county's and more than half of South Spencer schools'. Whatever eventually replaces it, Rockport lives with the gap in between: the jobs, the school budgets, and the question of what this riverfront becomes.

That is a district problem too, not just a Rockport problem. When one town carries a tax base this big, the whole district has a stake in a fair landing. My job is to make sure the people closest to the plant are heard first, and that the costs of whatever comes next are shared honestly.

What I'm hearing in Rockport

I'm listening

The nuclear question

Indiana Michigan Power wants to explore a small modular reactor at the Rockport site, on a timeline its own executives put in the mid-2030s. As of July 2026 there is no application before nuclear regulators or the state utility commission. County ordinance guarantees advance notice and a public hearing before any construction work begins, and I will be at that hearing.

Here is what is missing from the public record: no plant worker and no Rockport or Grandview neighbor has spoken publicly that I can find. That silence is not consent. It is a gap, and I am asking you to help me fill it.

I'm listening

The gas plant and the aquifer

A developer wants to build a large gas power plant next to the AEP site. Commissioners rezoned the ground in June 2026, and the county council then rejected the proposed tax abatement after residents raised water use from the local aquifer, air quality, and the suspicion that the plant would end up serving data centers. The company promised neighbor well testing in the fall of 2026. If you run a well near the site, I want your reading on it, literally.

Where I stand

The riverfront still works

A farm co-op announced more than 20 million dollars in early 2025 for a fertilizer river terminal at Rockport, and the city kept its wastewater plant project moving through July 2026. River town infrastructure is unglamorous, essential, and exactly the kind of state level work I will own. The Ohio River made this town. It can keep making it.

What am I missing?

Plant workers, retirees, neighbors along the river bottoms: the next fifty years of this town are being sketched right now. Tell me what you want on that drawing before it hardens.

Tell me what I'm missing Meet me in person

Page last updated July 18, 2026.