Bryan Allen is a lifelong Lower Bucks County resident, a father of three, and a dedicated public servant who has spent more than three decades fighting for the community that raised him. Now he wants to take that fight to Harrisburg. Bryan joins me today to talk about why he is running to unseat Republican incumbent state Rep K.C. Tomlinson.
To start off, Brian, could you tell listeners where you grew up and what your childhood was like?
Sure. Well I’ve lived in Lower Bucks County my entire life. I was born in Bristol at Lower Bucks Hospital, our local community hospital. My parents, my mother’s from Croydon and my father’s from Bristol as well. I’m the the first of three children. And they were they were pretty young when they had me, they were both like twenty. And my father, neither of them had graduated or went to college. My I think my dad took some classes at Bucks County Community College. He went to Penco Tech to be trained to become a machinist. My mother was at home with the young kids and he worked at a local company in Croydon called Gilbreath and they there were times where they would shut down and he’d have a plant shut down and he’d be laid off and it was our things were already tight as it was, and we’d have to go on snap benefits, food stamps to make sure we could have dinner. They knew what it was like to struggle, but we never noticed as kids because they they worked so hard to make a great life for us.
My dad ended up moving on to a job at Nabisco on Roosevelt Boulevard, which was a union position, and worked as a machinist there for a long time and that that really helped improve our lives. My mother actually went back to school at night … once we got into school, she went to work.
and worked odd jobs. She was a cashier at ShopRite. She worked a customer service job. And she ended up going back to school at night while raising us and working a day job while my dad’s working and became a nurse at Lower Bucks Hospital actually and and a few other places. But my dad would chip in while she was at school, give us dinner, everything else. So I really learned how everyone contributes to the house.
They instilled in me a strong work ethic and really showed me what it takes to put your family first and and make a great life.
And when did you first become involved in politics?
Let me just say too, we moved to Bensalem in 1989 when I was 11. So I’ve been in Bensalem for almost 40 years. So but so when I was young, we we were still living in Croydon, and my grandparents actually lived right behind us. And I used to just be able to hop the fence and go visit them, and I would go over and bug them all the time. And my grandfather, he was actually a machinist too at Standard Pro Steel in Jenkintown, before he moved over to sales later because he had a great personality. But he loved tinkering around, building things. He had a little wood shop in his attic. And I would go over and just kind of hang around with him because I just wanted to be in his orbit. And he had a framed picture of John Kennedy hanging on his wall in his wood his little wood shop in the attic. And I was like, Pop Pop, who is who is this guy? And why do you have a frame picture of him hanging there? And he said, That’s President John Kennedy, and he cared about people like us. The Democratic Party cares about working people like us. And that really made an impact on me and really created a burning desire to learn more and commit myself to public service.
So ultimately, as you as you got older and grew intellectually, why why did you decide to become a Democrat?
Well, I think we we see there’s there’s many different wings of the of the party and different ideologies. As far as I go, I don’t really get locked into any of that. It’s to me, it’s does this make sense and does it help the most people? And common sense, practical solutions, which is something I think FDR really brought to the table was it wasn’t so much this is my ideology, and I’m gonna imprint it on everybody, it was all right, we have people a lot of people unemployed, we have big challenges, we have people without health care, we have seniors that are living in poverty. What what can we do? And social security was a practical solution. Works progress administration was a practical solution. So as far as being a Democrat, I feel like the Democratic Party is more committed to strong public education. I’m the father of three public school students. Making sure people have access to affordable quality health care and defending people’s rights as human beings, equal rights for everyone. And that’s really why I’m a Democrat, because I feel our party is much stronger on these issues.
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Brian, you you served as chief of staff to state rep Tina Davis for over a decade. What was that experience like? And what did you learn about how Harrisburg works or, you know, sometimes doesn’t work?
Yeah. Now unfortunately more often than not it doesn’t work. And I’ve seen I was I’ve been there for quite a while and I’ve seen Republican legislatures a few times, Democratic majorities, Republican governors, Democratic governors. I know where things break down and sometimes the legislature gets in its own way. But the most rewarding thing for me was just being able to help people, seeing people face to face coming in. It didn’t matter what political party they were. They they may have voted against Tina that previous election, or we have completely different ideas of what the government should be doing or not doing. And it didn’t matter if they needed help, if they lost their health care, if they were about to lose their home, their kids were suffering, I had the ability to get involved and and really make a difference in their life. And that’s something tangible that you don’t get to see every day. We think of politicians and government as distant from us, but that was a real hands on way that I could help people. And it was very rewarding for me, to kind of cut through a lot of the red tape and and get things done for people.
So why are you running against KC Tomlinson? And why has she, in in your opinion, not lived up to the title of representative for her constituents?
Well, I would just like to go back for a minute and say I got involved in Bensalem and ran for counsel back when people told me you can never win here as a registered Democrat. We had a 2,600 Republican voter registration edge. But I felt like there was, I wasn’t happy with the direction.
Some of the things that I saw in our community as big developers were kind of running the show. There wasn’t a there was a lot of urban sprawl, traffic congestion, flooding. And I felt like I needed to step up and get involved. And I knocked on thousands of doors. We were outspent, five, six to one, going against an entrenched regime. And I got elected to the council here. I worked across the aisle to strengthen our police department. We built the first fire and emergency training facility in Bucks County here in Bensalem. We had the casino coming in, so I made sure I pressed that we get tax relief and we started the casino rebate that people still get to this day every fall, which I know isn’t going as far as it used to for people these days. And that’s something we need to address in Harrisburg.
But to your question, I like I said, I have three children here in our Bensalem schools. And I’ve been coaching, we were raising them. I’ve been off council for about seven years, and I really did not think I’d be putting my name on a ballot again. Politics is divisive. I wanted to be involved in my kids’ lives. I was still involved in the community, but not not as a public face. But when I saw the $17 million deficit that our school district was facing because of years of neglect from the state legislature, I knew it was time to step up. Specifically, my opponent, KC Tomlinson, I felt directly had failed us because we have a brick and mortar charter school in Bensalem, and they do a good job for their students.
But the state has failed us in terms of the funding formulas. And KC promised reform three times at the beginning of each of her terms, circulating co-sponsor memos promising to fix the charter funding issues that were costing our school district millions of dollars. She never introduced the bill once in six years.
It’s not that she didn’t get it passed, she didn’t introduce it.
And six years later, our district is cutting staff, they laid off teachers, staff, cut programs, and still our local community still had the maximum school tax hike because the state has failed our district and our kids. And that’s really the main reason I decided to step up. I’m also concerned about … I got to help families with disabled children get access to health care and my time in Rep Davis’s office. I’m seeing that ripped away at this point because of the failures of the federal government. And we have to pick up the slack here at the state level. So those are some of the reasons I stepped up and decided to run this year.
Are there any other major issues that you’d like to highlight that you’d specifically differ with Tomlinson on?
Well, I think a big one is the data center issue. KC voted in 2021 to establish tax breaks to incentivize data centers to come here.
She just again this earlier this year, she voted for a failed amendment that would have added more tax breaks for data centers as well as expedited permitting. And I just think that’s the wrong approach here. Data centers compete with us for energy. Energy is a finite resource. I’ve knocked, like I said, I’ve knocked on 12,000 doors and people’s electric bills are through the roof. And PJM, which runs one of the largest grid operators in auctions off the capacity, they just projected, it was in the Inquirer in July, a $6.5 billion increase over the next three years in energy costs. And they pointed directly to data centers. So to subsidize tech billionaires to come here, build these massive AI data centers and drive up our electric bills is the wrong approach. I was happy to see Governor Shapiro, there’s lot there’s lot of good things in his grid plan. but I was happy to see the executive order basically making all of those requirements mandatory. But I think we need to as a legislature, codify those and and put those into statute so that a future governor can’t rescind that those orders. We have to protect we have to protect our residents. People can’t afford with gas prices and everything else, they cannot afford to continue having these electricity spikes.
In the meantime, would you support a moratorium like something Senator Katie Muth has proposed, until Harrisburg is able to kind of get everything in order to make sure that we’re not only protecting consumers, but local communities and the environment.
So we just had three new council members elected in November. And the Democratic party took the majority there, but that’s the point. The point is that they’re very concerned about the community. They’re trying to be proactive and do the right things. And they realized we don’t have we didn’t have data centers identified in the township code at all.
That leaves and that there’s a lot of municipalities in that situation. That leaves them open to someone coming in, buying a property, and saying, in Pennsylvania, you have to define every kind, you have to provide for every sort of use that’s out there. And if you don’t, a developer can basically declare a curative amendment and say, You have a flaw in your zoning code. I’m saying I’m allowed to do this here on this property that I own.
And there’s a good chance they would win in court. So they recognized that to their credit, and they declared their own curative amendment, which basically bought Bensalem 180 days of sort of a moratorium where they could go in and they’ve been doing that since May, making sure the community’s protected, doing research, making sure the setbacks and water safety requirements are in there and everything else. But not every community has had the ability to do that. So I’ve committed and I’ve said it publicly to the community should have final say on on these data centers. And I do think we have to give them a chance to update their own code so that nobody has a gun to their head when a big tech billionaire wants to come into their town and build a data center.
So if legislation came across your desk calling for a moratorium, you would or wouldn’t support it?
Yeah, I think we need it, we need to, it has to be happening now. So I won’t take off still January. We need to we these codes need to be updated right now. So I’m happy the governor’s executive order I think accomplishes that because it does provide for the community to do that. So I’m hoping by the time I get there it won’t be necessary, but because we’ll be up to date. But yes, I think we need to give communities a chance, a timeout and a chance to pdate these codes.
An another major issue that you’re running on is health care. Currently there’s a a health care crisis in Pennsylvania, primarily because of the Trump administration’s and the Republican Party’s cuts. How would you fix health care, make it more affordable and more accessible for not only people in your district, but Pennsylvanians across the state?
I was seeing this before I had to leave my position in Rep Davis’s office, but the hoops that people have to jump through. I had one family, the the mother has three disabled children and they’re on Medicaid, the MOD program. The parents both work, but the children are disabled and their healthcare costs are expensive. But they submitted the paperwork, all the verification that was required. They gave it to to our office. We sent it in four different times and then they got a letter saying they were kicked off because they didn’t submit all the documentation. So these are the kind of hoops they’re making people jump through now because of these the big beautiful bill that as they call it.
READ: Thanks to Republican Medicaid and ACA Cuts, Pennsylvanians Find Themselves in a Health Care Crisis
I’m hoping we get a a new Congress that’s gonna address some of that. But I think the big concern is a lot of people are losing health care and a lot of healthy people because they lost their ACA subsidies are voluntarily ditching their health care because they can’t afford it without the subsidies now. And a lot of these people are relatively healthy. You never know what’s coming around the corner and it’s probably not wise to give it up, but you when you don’t have a choice because you can’t afford it, what are you gonna do? So all these healthy people are leaving and that’s driving up the cost even further for everybody else and and us. So we have to look at ways to generate more revenue and help get more people covered, make health care more cost effective. I think we spend billions of dollars on some of these computer systems and everything that are making things more expensive. And that’s money that’s not actually going to care. We have rural hospitals shutting down because of the cuts. And that’s making it less accessible for people and harming our hospitals. You’re going to have more people showing up in the emergency rooms. Again, not seeking preventative care that would have made their care less expensive and also more productive as well. The more people we can cover, I think it’ll bring down the cost in general because of those preventative services that I mentioned. We have to some of the revenue generators I was talking about, I mean recreational marijuana, I know has been on the table. I’ve talked to a lot of people in my community that they think it’s time for that. The surrounding states have it. They can we people in in Bucks County can easily go over to Jersey. So it’s safer than alcohol from every study I’ve seen. So this is just low hanging fruit that we need. almost fifty I think 50% of the corporations in Pennsylvania don’t pay any taxes here. This is all stuff we have to look at because our people are hurting while the top end is is making out very well in this economy.
So you would vote for recreational marijuana use in Pennsylvania.
Absolutely.
And then would you be championing the tax revenue created by that to be funding not only like health care and but also maybe education or are are there any other areas that you would want to kind of divert that money to?
Basically health care, school funding is still the top priority and health care But that’s only like I said, that’s only one of the things. So and there’s only so much I understand to go around. But I think if we do that, we also have to look at tax fairness in Pennsylvania. someone who makes $10 million a year is paying the same tax rate as someone that makes $50,000 a year.
Walmart and Parks Casino are paying the same property tax rate as a senior living on Social Security. To me, that’s not fair. And these are all things we need to look at so that we can give provide more health care coverage for people and also give our kids the education they deserve and give people on fixed incomes a break at the same time.
Are there one or two other issues that you’d like to speak on that Harrisburg has been either grappling with or maybe kicking down kicking the can down the road, so to speak? Are there one or two other issues that you’d like to tell the audience about your positions on?
Well, reproductive freedom, of course, and women’s health care. My opponent is really, if you if you look back, has really flip flopped on these issues. I don’t know where she stands to be to be quite honest with you. We need to make it a constitutional right to provide reproductive freedom in Pennsylvania. And I’m confident with a expanded democratic majority in a democratic Senate, we will get that done.
But the biggest thing for me really, I think, is getting corporate money out of our politics. Not the biggest issue, but the biggest remaining issue, I should say, because I really believe that leads to a lot of the the problems that we have and presents, and I’ve seen this in my time in Harrisburg, presents a lot of roadblocks to progress here in Pennsylvania because insurance companies big energy companies, KC’s taking tens of thousands of dollars from big energy companies and then votes against the governor’s lightning plan to provide energy rebates for people, votes for tax breaks for data centers.
Are we trying to make life more affordable for people? Or are we trying to pay back these corporate donors, that have infested Harrisburg? So really if you clean that up, you’re gonna see a lot of progress.
I mean it’s ridiculous we haven’t had a minimum wage increase since the mid mid-2000’s here in Pennsylvania when every other state around us is $15 an hour. So banning corporate money from politics is is another top priority for me, I would say.
Yeah, that’s great. And there’s actually a bill one bill in con in the state house. exactly.
Joe Webster, I believe. Yeah. And and I’ve committed to supporting that.
And and just for listeners, this bill, House Bill 2728, that would end corporate and dark money political spending in Pennsylvania elections.
I really believe gerrymandering, if you could eliminate gerrymandering and Citizens United and corporate money, our Commonwealth and our country would be in much better shape. I do I would like to say one other thing on, I know we touched on education funding, but specifically charter reform that I talked about with KC failing to introduce that. Rep. Prokopiak had a bill 2634 that I had a press conference in April about basically calling for a whole host of reforms as far as charter funding and the formula that would really help districts like Bensalem save millions of dollars a year. And that’s what this bill would do. get rid of the arbitrary 16% special education population that the formula uses. Bensalem’s a s special ed population is 24%.
So we’re already underfunding by 8% here. And it would basically mandate that we pay for actual cost because we’re overpaying the charter schools by about $20,000 per student, and that’s not money that’s going to education, it’s going into their bank accounts, and that doesn’t come back to the district. So the charter reform piece of the education funding is a way we can help our districts financially without actually spending additional revenue, which is a win, I think, for everybody.
And and Brian, finally, how can listeners learn more, support, and get involved in your campaign?
I appreciate you asking that. Brian Allen for PA dot com. You can sign up for our emails, volunteer, make a donation. They’re spending a lot of money to just like the president circulate their falsehoods. And we’re we have a great positive message that we’re getting out there. It’s resonating with the community and if you help us out, we can continue to amplify that message. We’re knocking on a lot of doors. Our campaign’s knocked on over 30,000 doors collectively. And come help us out, make phone calls, but https://www.bryanallenforpa.com/.
Brian, thanks so much for coming on today and and thanks for your public service over the years. It’s made a real difference in Bucks County and should voters elect you to the state house, I’m convinced you’ll make a real difference in Harrisburg as well.
Thank you so much, Cyril. I really appreciate that.
