NC Senate District 7
Jessica Bichler, Democratic challenger
Career: Small business owner; co-owner of Wilmington Yoga Center and a yoga Instructor for more than a decade; film industry production coordinator
Education: B.F.A., Ithaca College; M.A. in visual and cultural anthropology, University of South Carolina
Q: What qualifies you to serve in the North Carolina legislature?
A: I co-own a small business here in Wilmington, so I know what it takes to make payroll, to respond quickly to changing market demands, and to ensure compliance with state and local laws. I know what the state’s decisions on taxes and regulation do to a local business.
I have a school-aged child and a recent high school grad, so I see what our classrooms are missing and what our teachers are asked to do without.
I found out the day after my son was born that my family drank PFAS-contaminated water for years without knowing it. He was born premature, weighing only three pounds, so protecting our water and holding polluters accountable isn’t just a campaign talking point for me, it's a priority.
I started my career in the film industry, so I know that the industry offers a community in terms of jobs, tourism, and the multiplier effect. I also know what happens to crews and local businesses when the state lets the grant program stall.
Living, working and building my family in New Hanover County has made me very aware of the shortcomings of our elected officials in Raleigh and have been on the receiving end of Raleigh’s decisions rather than making them. I’m running because those decisions affect families like mine, and we need regular people to have a seat at the table where they get made.
Q. What is a bill you would like to sponsor or co-sponsor and what is a bill you want to repeal — or even amend? Why?
A: I would sponsor a Senate version of the PFAS Pollution and Polluter Liability Act. The House passed it 104 to 3 in May 2025, and it has been sitting in a Senate committee ever since. The bill is simple: the company that put PFAS in the Cape Fear River pays the cost of cleaning it up. Right now that cost falls on the customers of CFPUA, our local water utility, who have paid $91 million so far to treat it. Most importantly, we need to propose legislation that has teeth to prevent something like this from happening again. The people of New Hanover County should never have to bear the cost of polluted water.
I would amend Senate Bill 266, the energy law passed last year. It lets Duke Energy start charging customers for a new power plant while the plant is still under construction, years before it produces any electricity. I would strip that provision. If a company wants to build a plant, it should carry the financial risk of building it, not pass that risk on to families who have no other utility to choose from.
We need to ensure that public money is going to support kids in our public school, not to subsidize families who are already comfortable affording private options. We must cap the allowable income for school vouchers. I would also amend the private school voucher program so that any private school taking state money has to meet the same requirements as our public schools: give the same state tests and publish the scores, report which students it admits and which it turns away, and provide the same services to children with disabilities that public schools are required by law to provide. If taxpayers are paying for a school, they should be able to see how it performs and whom it serves.
Q: What will you do to hold industry accountable for pollution of toxic chemicals, such as PFAS or 1,4 dioxane, in the water or air? Will you support enforcing additional maximum contaminant levels of PFAS compounds, aside from PFOA or PFOS; how, if so?
A: Make the polluter pay first. I will push to pass the polluter-liability bill so that Chemours, not the customers of our local water utility, pays for the filters that keep PFAS out of our tap water. The $590-million settlement announced this month is a good start, but CFPUA is not part of it, and its own lawsuit against Chemours continues.
Second, give the state Department of Environmental Quality limits it can enforce. The state’s current proposal for PFAS and 1,4-dioxane in our rivers is called “monitoring and minimization.” It asks a polluter to sample its discharge for a year and write its own plan to reduce it, with no hard number it has to meet. That is not a standard. I support hard limits on how much of these chemicals a polluter can put in the river. A judge ruled in February that DEQ has the authority to set 1,4-dioxane limits on Asheboro and Greensboro, which discharge that chemical into the river upstream of us. The legislature should write that authority into law so no one has to go to court over it again.
Third, yes, I support state drinking-water limits for PFAS compounds beyond PFOA and PFOS, especially GenX. In May the EPA proposed dropping its federal limits for GenX, PFHxS, and PFNA. GenX is the chemical Chemours put in our river. If Washington won’t set a limit for it, North Carolina should. I would vote to direct the state Commission for Public Health to set those limits, and to fund DEQ and the state lab to enforce them.
Q: Is the public school allotment formula sufficient or does the legislature need to change it? Explain what your plan is for this issue.
A: The formula needs to change, and I would start with three fixes.
First, funding for students with disabilities. The state gives each district money for these students, but only up to a fixed percentage of the district’s enrollment. If more students than that qualify, the district gets nothing for them. I would lift that cap so every child who qualifies is funded.
Second, the extra funding for low-wealth counties and small counties has not kept up with costs. Bring it up to date.
Third, any change to the formula should come with a guarantee that no district ends up with less money than it gets today. And school funding should keep flowing through the Department of Public Instruction, the agency that exists to run our public schools, not be moved somewhere else.
Changing the formula alone will not be enough, though. North Carolina ranks near the bottom of the states in the share of its economy it spends on public schools, and more than one classroom in 16 has no licensed teacher. Moving the same dollars around in a new formula does not fix that. The state has to put more money in.
Teacher pay is part of this. This year’s budget gave beginning teachers raises of 10 to 17 percent, but a teacher with 20 years of experience got about 5.5 percent, and a teacher with 15 years of experience will not see another raise for experience until year 25. New Hanover County fills that gap with a local supplement paid from our property taxes. I would fund a salary schedule that keeps experienced teachers in the classroom.
In April the state Supreme Court dismissed the Leandro case, the decades-old lawsuit over whether the state gives every child a sound basic education. So no court is going to require the legislature to fund our schools. That is up to the people we elect.
Q: State law allows law enforcement agencies, including the State Bureau of Investigation, to store data captured by license plate reading cameras (Flock cameras) for up to 90 days. Since the CEO of Flock cameras has now recommended agencies reduce the time camera data is stored down to seven days, would you make it a priority to change state law to follow this recommendation?
A: Yes. I would support a seven-day limit, and I would be open to going shorter.
Flock’s own CEO says more than 90 percent of police searches happen within a week of a license plate being captured. If the company selling the cameras says the data doesn’t need to be kept longer than that, the state has no reason to keep it for 90 days.
We have already seen the problem here. Police agencies from outside our county have searched New Hanover County’s camera data nearly 3 million times since 2025. This month a former Wrightsville Beach officer was arrested for misusing the system, a Brunswick County sheriff’s employee resigned during an SBI investigation, and our county commissioners voted 4 to 0 to end the sheriff’s Flock contract for ALPRs. Wilmington’s police chief has called the cameras “an incredible tool” that needs guardrails and I think those guardrails are long overdue.
The place for guardrails is in state law. We can start with a seven-day limit on keeping the data, a written case number for every search so each one is tied to a real investigation, records of who conducted searches that the public can see, and real penalties for misuse. This year’s budget made the SBI’s highway cameras permanent without adding any of that. The rules should come first.
Q: Do you support how the film grant program currently operates? Do you think the $31-million annual cap on award disbursements should be lifted? Do you think the General Assembly should allocate more money to the program?
A: Prior to 2014 we had a rebate program that was working well. The rebate was based on a percentage of qualified expenditures that was reviewed using forensic accounting conducted by the state. Since 2014 we have turned the rebate into a grant and allowed a public/private partnership to spot check the accounting that determines the payout. I believe we should return to the previous model. It was more efficient and effective.
I think the $31-million annual cap should be lifted because we are seeing the threat of that flawed model right now. About $106 million in grants has already been promised against a fund that gets only $31 million a year, so the commerce department can't approve a single new production until around 2029. If we have gaps in the time periods when grants are available, productions will relocate and they will not return. They need stability.
Film does not operate on a 365-day fiscal year and this money is not a handout. It is a rebate of a portion of the revenue that a production has raised for the state because of economic activity it brought to our area. The rebate is capped at 25 percent of what was spent here, so for every dollar the state pays out, a production has already spent at least four dollars in North Carolina. Last year that was $185 million spent in our state and more than 7,000 jobs. As long as we can keep the revenue from this industry rolling in and budget accordingly to anticipate the rebate, the program can continue to grow and promote more production in our area.
Q: Would you support rolling back the sales and use tax exemption for data centers to build in North Carolina? Explain.
A: Yes. This year’s budget already ended the sales tax exemption on the electricity data centers use, and that was the right call. I will finish the job.
Data centers still pay no sales tax on the servers, cooling equipment, and software they buy. Before this year’s change, the Commerce Department put the cost of the full exemption at roughly $45 to $57 million a year, and it estimates the cost could reach $450 million a year if every proposed data center gets built.
I want to be fair about this. Building a data center brings construction jobs and a large investment for a year or two, and I understand why some counties would want that. But once it is running, a data center employs a few dozen people, and it uses enormous amounts of electricity and water, with costs to the rest of us that no one has fully measured yet. That trade-off needs to be weighed carefully, with real numbers, before a community says yes.
What the state should not do is hand a company a tax break before anyone has done that math. A data center needs power and water from us, and it should pay the full cost of both. That means a special electric rate for very large customers, so a data center covers the cost of the new power lines and power plants built to serve it, instead of Duke Energy spreading that cost across everyone’s bill. It also means telling the public how much water it draws.
No town in our region has a data center proposal yet, and some Brunswick County commissioners have said publicly they don’t want one. Communities in New Hanover and Pender deserve that same say. The state should set clear rules first, based on what these facilities actually cost the power grid and the water supply, and then each community can decide whether it wants one.
Q: The current gas-tax funding system for the NCDOT no longer seems to efficiently support necessary projects – including the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge replacement. Is tolling the answer; what other funding mechanisms would you support? Would you vote on legislation to allow the Turnpike Authority to toll the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge if it comes before you?
A: The Cape Fear Memorial Bridge carries three U.S. highways and opened in 1969. Replacing it will cost more than a billion dollars. The federal government has committed $242 million and the state has committed $85 million, and the current plan is to cover the remaining $800 million with tolls paid by the people who drive across it to get to work.
Wilmington’s City Council voted unanimously against tolls, and every speaker at the Wilmington and Leland public hearing opposed them. I agree with them. I will not support putting the cost of a state highway bridge onto the commuters of our region, and I would work in Raleigh for a funding plan that does not depend on tolls.
This year’s budget also added a rule that makes the towns in our regional transportation planning group reimburse NCDOT for planning costs, about $26 million so far on this bridge, if they vote to pull the project out of the state’s transportation plan. That rule punishes local governments for objecting to tolls and it does not put a dollar toward the bridge.
On funding more broadly, the gas tax brings in less every year as cars become more efficient, and everyone in Raleigh knows it. In 2022, the state began moving a share of sales tax revenue into the fund that pays for roads and bridges, and that share should grow. I would also support a dedicated state fund for replacing critical bridges, so the next aging bridge doesn’t depend on tolls or on winning a federal grant.
Q: Would you vote to implement an independent commission to draw legislative and congressional lines? Why or why not?
A: Yes. Politicians should not get to choose their own voters, and I would say that no matter which party was drawing the maps.
We don’t have to look far to see problems. In 2023 the mapmakers moved the six Wilmington precincts with the largest Black populations out of District 7. Last October the legislature redrew
the congressional map in the middle of the decade to take one seat. Neither of those maps was drawn for the voters. They were drawn to keep a supermajority in power in the legislature.
My opponent answered this same question in 2024. He said he would support an independent commission “provided it was possible to secure independence in the process,” and then explained why he doubts that is possible: in California, someone tried to coordinate testimony to sway the commission; in Michigan, commissioners argued over whether compactness or community mattered more; in Colorado, both parties complained and a court settled it. Those are the ordinary disagreements of people trying to draw fair lines in public, and none of them produced anything close to the maps North Carolina’s legislature produced in private. No commission anywhere has ever been free of pressure, disagreement, and lawsuits, and none ever will be. He is giving a reason to do nothing, when what we need are reasons to be thoughtful about how a commission is set up.
But doing nothing is not neutral. It leaves the maps with a legislature that used them to build a supermajority in a state where no party comes close to a supermajority of voters. The people drawing our maps face two pressures above all others: keeping their own seats and increasing their party’s power.
I would vote for the Fair Maps Act, which creates a 15-member citizens’ commission with five Democrats, five Republicans, and five unaffiliated voters, and puts it before the voters as a constitutional amendment. Let the voters decide. Forty-three percent of the voters in this district belong to neither party. Every voter deserves as fair a representation as the state can give them. It’s a responsibility that I take seriously.
Q: In terms of economic development, North Carolina gets high marks for business, but middling and lower marks for worker satisfaction and quality of life. What would you do to improve these metrics for state residents?
A: Rankings for business measure what it costs a company to be here. Rankings for quality of life measure what it costs a family. CNBC ranks North Carolina second in the country for business this year. The same report ranks us 34th for quality of life and 35th for cost of living, and both of those got worse since last year. That’s the gap I want to close, and closing it means bringing down the bills families actually pay.
Housing: I would put state money into workforce housing and give property tax relief to seniors and longtime homeowners. The state has cut income taxes year after year, and in that time 92 of our 100 counties have raised property taxes. Homeowners feel that every year.
Child care: This year’s budget finally set a floor on child care subsidy rates. The next step is keeping the centers we have open. Family child care homes in North Carolina are down 41 percent since 2018, and a parent can’t take a job if there’s no one to watch the kids.
Health care: Fund Medicaid on time, keep maternity care open, and let a second hospital system compete in New Hanover County so patients have a choice.
Schools: A licensed teacher in every classroom is a quality-of-life measure and so is a teacher who can afford to stay in the classroom past year 15.
Paid sick leave: Nobody should have to choose between a paycheck and a sick kid.
Companies come to North Carolina for the workforce. If that workforce can’t afford to live within an hour of the job, the business ranking won’t hold either.