Tonya is a former (Colorado) General Assembly member of the House of Representatives for northern Colorado (House District 48), elected Weld County Council President, publisher, multi-business owner, educator, and community volunteer. She is a National Council of State Legislature Child Welfare Fellow and nominee to The Energy Security Council (Rocky Mountain Region of the US and Canada). Additionally, she serves on the Foster Source Board of Directors in the state of Colorado. Tonya has provided professional expertise to the media, legislators, public, and major US energy task forces about energy resiliency and reliability.

With degrees in Social Sciences/Psychology and an M. Ed. In Leadership, Tonya has run large educational processes and served as both an educator and in leadership for school districts for over 20 years. Additionally, she has owned several business systems in her community such as marketing, publishing, excavating, property ownership and rentals and educational consulting and professional development. The elected positions required budgeting appropriation for the state of Colorado where she developed policy, provided cost analysis, and gave professional input on other legislation as both a stakeholder, committee member and constituent. She ran and passed over a dozen pieces of legislation in the child welfare, energy, medical, tax reduction, education, agriculture, and mental health arenas.

Tonya applies her background over the last 30 years to educate others through various types of media and live events about the legislative process, government relations, successful issues campaigning and the legalities of local, state, and federal intersection when it comes to statute. Most importantly, she is focusing on the fragility, reliability and resiliency issues concerning the nation’s infrastructure of electricity, water, wastewater, communications, oil and gas and transportation and the necessity of emergency planning and hardening these systems against all-hazard threats for public safety needs here in the United States.