Voters will have the choice between two candidates for state senator for the 30th District on Nov. 5.

The choice is between incumbent State Senator Brian Chavez and newcomer Ari Faber.

The 30th District they are vying for covers Washington, Athens, Belmont, Meigs, Morgan, Monroe, Noble, Harrison and Jefferson Counties and a portion of Guernsey County.

Chavez has held the seat less than a year; he was appointed in December 2023 after the retirement of former Sen. Frank Hoagland to serve the rest of the term which ends Dec. 31.

Chavez said his campaign is going really well so far.

“It’s keeping me very, very busy,” he said.

Chavez is making sure to cover every corner of the district, he said. He said he is 100% committed to being the state senator for the 30th district.

“Everything I do I take very seriously,” Chavez said.

Chavez decided to run for the state Senate seat when he heard Hoagland was retiring.

“Who better to represent me than me,” he said.

Chavez said he brings a lot of experience with him as a business owner for many years who employs more than 45 families. He said he has experience in a lot of industries and aspects of business.

“I’m an engineer, not a politician,” Chavez said.

The 30th District has a lot of challenges due to its terrain that are different than the challenges “flat Ohio” faces, Chavez said, and he feels like he “has the ability to represent that.”

One area that Chavez is focused on is energy.

“My background is energy … we have some challenges in front of us with power generation,” he said.

Chaves said Ohio sits “on enormous natural resources and we need to figure out how to best use it.”

Crypto mining, data centers and others consume a lot of power and the state needs to figure out how to make more power, according to Chavez.

He said he also wants to “dig in” on health care.

“It’s a very big deal in this area,” Chavez said.

He said health care issues include access, Medicaid, paying for health care and more.

Chavez said he needs people involved in health care to spend a portion of a day with him and walk him through what the issues are so he “can get the best picture possible of what the reality is.”

He said he is also concerned with breaking the cycle that many people are in and he wants to figure out how to put them on the right path by giving them skills such as trade skills.

Chavez said he wants to “give folks something to get up and join the workforce for.”

He believes that most politicians in Ohio are all “going down the middle road” and “have the same goals” but their visions on how to get there might be different.

Chavez said he is going down the middle road too.

“I’m trying to get away from the voices on the extremes,” he said.

Chavez does not have any specific legislation that he plans on working on if he gets elected in November.

“I’m still the new guy,” he said. “I’m still learning how the process works,” he said.

Chavez believes he has done a good job earning the respect of his colleagues.

“I don’t intend to ever be a single-issue candidate,” Chavez said.

He said the state Senate is a good mix of people from different professions and he will have a conversation with anyone.

“But I’m not going to have an argument,” he said.

If Chavez wins the state Senate seat, he plans on letting his actions speak for themselves.

Faber, who has never held public office and who has lived as a man for several years, will be listed on the general election ballot under his dead name Iva Faber, due to state law requiring candidates who have had a former name in the past five years to list the name on election petitions.

Faber said this is the “least important thing about me” and he is here to “talk about the issues.”

He said his campaign has “been good so far” and has been “busy, but good.”

Faber decided to run for the state Senate because as an outreach director at an Athens nonprofit he has seen the issue that face communities every day, he said.

He said nothing is being done to change these issues so he decided to “be the change” he wants to see and he believes the way to get to the heart of the issues is through policy.

Faber said the issues he is interested in mostly come down “to health care, food insecurity, housing insecurity and the opioid crisis.”

He said if he wins the general election he thinks it is important to work on getting legislation passed that has just been sitting in the Legislature.

The bills Faber would like to work on getting passed include legislation that would create the Ohio Health Care plan which would provide universal and affordable health care coverage to all Ohio residents; a bill that would establish a pilot program to provide grant funding for the provision of remote methadone treatment to people with opioid use disorder; and a bill that would expand the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for seniors, according to Faber.

He would like to work on “allowing SNAP benefits to be used at local farmers markets” so people have better access to local food, Faber said.

Faber said there is “a lack of investment in our region” and there is a “lack of good union jobs.”

He said if the area starts investing in its infrastructure then they will get union jobs to come.

“There’s no reason we shouldn’t be next” for things like the Intel semiconductor project in New Albany or the solar farm in Toledo “other than we don’t have the infrastructure to be competitive in those ways,” Faber said.

He said to help the housing crisis he wants to work on the creation of Accessory Dwelling Units to help drive housing prices down.

He said this could be done through subsidizing the units through the state government and this would not only help the housing crisis but also create income for people.

Faber is also interested in fixing the Ohio education system, something that “has been broken for a long time,” he said.

Banning books won’t solve the problems in the education system and the state of Ohio needs to “stop using taxpayer money to fund schools that aren’t public,” Faber said. “Our public schools are already drastically underfunded … until we can fix those issues we can’t allow public funds to go into charter schools.”

Faber said he believes schools need to stop teaching to the test and let teachers teach in the ways that work for their students.

Overall, Faber said he believes the state should focus on everyone being able to meet their most basic needs.