 Good evening and welcome to Montpelier's Civic Forum and as you know it's a series of shows that are leading up to November's election that should get you into a position where you really understand your vote better and what you're voting for not what you're voting against. So we have all the candidates for the state senate, we all have all the candidates for the state house. Bill Fraser is on one of these shows talking about the parking garage bond. Bill Fraser is on another show talking about the water bond and basically these are good shows. Tonight we have a state senate candidate and I'm happy to have Anthony Polina sitting next to me. And I'm happy to be here. Thanks for doing this. Appreciate it. Anthony, what part of Washington County are you from? I live in Middlesex, not too far outside Montpelier, about seven miles outside Montpelier in a fairly nice neighborhood. Near the Romney Elementary School our kids went to school so it's a really nice place to be. It doesn't mean that we get directed into Montpelier for most of our shopping and commercial activity but I love Middlesex, it's a great town. People get along well and seem to really care about the place. What's the number one problem amongst your neighbors in Middlesex? What do they look towards the state house for? Well, I don't know. And is it any different than people in Northfield, Montpelier, Barrier or East Montpelier or other parts of Washington County? I don't think so. I think that there's two things that come to mind. One is people are always struggling with the cost of health care and that can particularly as you and your neighbors get older and you end up using the health care system more than you used to. Boy, that's a polite way to talk to a guy in his 60s. Well, that's joint in the club. But you run into a lot of conversations about people, well, I'm going to keep working longer because I need to keep the health care, that kind of thing. So there's not going concern about health care. And then I think the other thing that is of concern to a lot of people in different ways, not always come from the same place, but has to do with the funding of education and the future of our schools and town like Middlesex, for example, which is not a real small town. I mean, it's small, but it's not tiny. The school has really been the center of the town's activities. It's where the kids go to learn how to read and write and do their math, but it's also where they learn to be a part of the community and learn to get along with each other. And there's a lot of events at the school that bring the community together. But I think there's always been a fear that we might lose that connection if we in some way, in any way, lost the schools. I'm not saying we're going to. Well, in Act 46, how did the Consolidation Act play out in Middlesex? Well, not very well. It didn't get a big approval in Middlesex. First of all, I voted against Act 46 because I was afraid that it was going to force schools to close or force districts to do things they didn't want to do. Which it ended up doing. Exactly. I was right in that case. Middlesex, Worcester, Callis, East Montpelier, Berlin, the U32 district, what we call the U32 district has actually decided not to do any kind of merger at all. Are they in court on that? Well, I don't know if they're in court yet, but they're going to end up in court. One of the districts has, when digging in their heels the most and fighting back the most against any kind of forced consolidation, has to do partly with the fact that some towns have a lot of debt and other towns don't have any debt. So you have to pick up the debt of those other towns. But I think that there's more to it than that. I think it's really a feeling that they don't want to lose control of the local schools and don't want to see them, the control of the schools sort of get vested in a larger organization. So I think part of it is not wanting to be forced to take on debt, but I think it's bigger than that. I think it's broader than that. It just has to do with wanting to maintain local control over the school. Was the amount, or it was, were the amount of school districts in Vermont really sustainable over the long run? Having so many micro school districts. You know, I don't think we know that, for a fact, whether or not we ever will. Well, we never will. Right. Now we never will. And I'm not against mergers, or even in a sense, I hate to say it, but I'm not against closing schools if that's what a community chooses to do. I think the problem we're having right now is that people are being forced to do things that they weren't sure they wanted to do, and the timeline's pretty quick and there's a carrot being held out if you do merge, you get certain tax breaks and whatnot. That's more of the way it's gone about. I think that we had this decrease in student enrollment, of course, that we're all well aware of. Well, that's not a short-term thing. That's all we're scared of. Right. But it's going to go down lower, and then it's going to come back up. And when you think about the future of our communities, and you think about we're trying to encourage young families to stay in Vermont, start businesses in Vermont. And come into Vermont. And come into Vermont. And you're not going to want to come into a town that doesn't have a local school necessarily. At least it's not going to be a point that you're going to cherish. You're going to wish that your community you looked at to buy a house, if you're moving up from Connecticut or something, you're going to wonder about the local school and how far is it, how long is your kid going to be on the bus, that kind of a thing. So I think that we could have done more to engage the public in a real discussion about what directions to take our public schools before we passed Act 46, and that was one of the arguments I made when I voted against it. I said, we haven't engaged the public very much in this conversation yet. It's all been rhetoric about declining enrollment, increased cost. But we don't really know what Vermonters want to do about this. So we had proposed that we have like a year-long public engagement process first to make sure that we got out and heard what Vermonters had to say. Unfortunately, there were people who felt the need to get something done. And Act 46 was the result of that need to get something done. And I mean, again, it's working for some people in some parts of the state, but it's causing a lot of aggravation for people in other parts of the state. I just think people are being forced to do something that they weren't necessarily planning to do. But when you have a common pool, doesn't it make it more difficult for those small outliers to make that decision? It does make it harder, but I think it doesn't. I don't think we should give up on trying to help them be able to make those decisions. And I think when you talk about spread out school districts, it's not so much around here in Central Vermont where Montpelier and U32, you practically throw stone at one school or the other. Yeah, but at East Montpelier in Middlesex, that's a jump. That's a little jump, yeah. But it's not as bad as in the Northeast Kingdom areas where kids might have to be on the bus for an hour to get to where they're going if they're in a merged district. So I think there's a lot of impacts that we're not fully aware of yet that we're going to be learning as time goes on. And I just wish we had taken a different approach. Is there a dynamic to this function that you see this being tweaked in the future? You say that it will become apparent as we go on. Sure. So do you see this as a dynamic field that once the incentives are stripped, will change? Well, the problem, my hesitation is that I hope so. But the board of education is kind of digging in its heels and getting ready to probably make people do forced mergers. And the other thing is that once the school is closed or a merger takes place, it's going to be hard to unmerge it or reopen it. So that's the problem is that that's why we should have thought about it longer before we did it. Because tweaking it later might not solve a real dilemma because it's going to, you can't replace something that you've shut down necessarily. It's better to keep it open until you're really sure you want to shut it down or not. What about the Unified Teachers contract, health contract? That was a discussion that went on and on last year. What was your feeling on that? Well, most of the folks that we talked about, I shouldn't say it started that way, my feeling was that we should allow things to be negotiated on the local level. Because that's where people really know what the issues are and know what they're dealing with their neighbors and their employees in a sense, meaning public school teachers. I think there's going to be more of a movement in that direction again to tell you, Julie, I think some of the teacher groups and others are beginning to think that they might be able to live with such a plan if it's done right, if it's going to actually reduce some costs too. And again, I'm not an expert on not to say whether it would or would not, but I would really want to see the evidence that it's going to be good for us. But you're open to that. I'm more open to it now than I was before. The more I've thought about it, the more I've talked about it with folks, seems that there's an increasing openness to at least exploring it more. You don't want necessarily to go to a statewide teachers contract necessarily, because then you've got the state determining the direction of your local school and paying benefits and whatnot. And then the problem is if there's dissatisfaction with the contract, statewide contract. Because statewide teachers strike. Yeah, statewide teachers strike, which would not be such a great thing to have happen. And the thing is, the right to strike is a fundamental right that teachers have and that other folks in organized labor have. And we have to be really careful. In fact, we should refuse to take that right away. We haven't had a lot of teacher strikes. We've had a couple of, they were a big deal all the time. So we focus on them, but it's not as if there's a strike going on all the time. There's actually, the teachers have been pretty good at not going out on strike. And I think that given the fact that school budgets are set on the local level, the decisions are made there about the costs and the benefits. There's usually a lot of unanimity between the local folks and the teachers, for the most part, that allows us to go forward in a way that works for everybody. So strikes are rare, but they're an important part of American democracy, and we shouldn't never take that right away. Could you see moving towards Maine's model of 14 supervisory districts won per county? I think so. I mean, I had to say a little bit, because I'm not super familiar with it, but I know what you mean. And I do think that we have too many supervisory districts. I think that's just a no-brainer in a sense. I mean, we've got to, I forget the number offhand, but we have a lot of supervisory districts that seem to do duplicative work. And I think that one way we could save some money would be to reduce the number of supervisory, superintendents in supervisory districts and allow decisions to be made at the school level and consolidate that way. Supposed to consolidate some of that overhead administration. Now I know you've been involved in the discussion on the macro level. We're talking about micro level of education now. On the macro level, how do you pay for this? Is it the property tax? Is it the income tax? What you're feeling? Oh, I know the answer, but you could give the answer. Right now, believe it or not, most people don't realize this, but right now it's both. But the short answer is if we want, we should have a funding formula for education that is more fair and more simple and generates revenue in a way that makes sense. Right now, because we have income sensitivity, two-thirds of Vermont. Now what is income sensitivity for those who don't know? It means that for some, well, actually this relates to two-thirds of Vermont or so it's a lot. If you have an income that's below $90,000 a year, you can pay for your school tax based either on your property value or a certain percentage of your income, whichever is lower. For people making between $90,000 and $137,50, which gets a little complicated, there's a combination where they pay partly based on their income and partly based on some of their property value, but that's not worth going into, meaning because it's very boring for the average listener or viewer. But say it this way that two-thirds of Vermonters pay through the income sensitivity program, which means they pay based on their property or their income, whichever is lower, percentage of their income, which usually turns out to be, last couple of years it's been, in round numbers, it's been a little below 3% of their income, like 2.9, 2.7, it varies. But the problem is that low and moderate income people pay based on their income and they're paying about, let's say 3% of their income, but if you're a wealthier person who doesn't qualify for income sensitivity, if you're making $200,000. Now we're talking about the wealthy person making $200,000, whose first home is in Vermont? Yeah, we're talking about Homestead owners, house in two acres that they live in, primary residence. If you're making $90,000, well, let's say $90,000 a year, you're paying about 3% of your income, but if you're making $900,000 a year, you're paying about 1.5% of your income, because that's the way the income sensitivity program works, if you're a higher income person, you pay just on your property and your property value is a smaller percentage of your income. So I think it's not fair that somebody making $50,000 a year pays almost 3% of their income to fund schools, but somebody making $500,000 a year pays only 1% of their income to fund schools. If we think it's fair for a moderate income person to pay 3% of their income, why isn't it fair for a wealthy person to pay 3% of their income? So I think the way we do it now is not fair. So we need to move away from this convoluted property tax based system and move towards one that's based more on income and have everybody pay their fair share. If we did that, again, I don't want to bore you, but... No, no. You're not boring me. You're boring the people who are watching. The way to think about it is that there's two ways to think about it to illustrate it. One is that if you make a $90,000 or less, you pay based on your income, your property, whichever is lower. If you're making above that, you pay based on your property, your income, whichever is higher. So if you're a millionaire living in a half a million dollar house, you're gonna pay a certain percentage of your income based on the million dollars, because that's your income and it's more higher than your property value. If the next year your income dropped down to 100,000, but you're still living in a half a million dollar house, you'd pay based on the property value of half a million dollars. Now if we did that and put a cap on how much the wealthier person would pay, which is a benefit to them, we would actually raise about an additional $35 to $40 million in revenue that we could put towards schools or put towards some other use. What happens to the person whose secondary home is in Vermont? Are they kicking in at all? Yeah, they're paying the non-residential property tax, which is the same everywhere around the state. So they would continue to do that. This would just affect the house in two acres. So if you have 25 acres, what I just described would relate to your house in two acres, and then you'd still pay your non-residential property tax on the rest of your land. So it does get kind of convoluted. I don't wanna say it's boring, but it's important. How do you change that? How do you gain the consensus? And why has there never been a consensus on changing it? Well, to tell you the truth, well, I think there's, why hasn't there been a consensus as in part because people are resistant to change, is one reason. It's just hard, and this is a major change. But when the scale has 90% of us up here and 10% of us down here, wouldn't it seem obvious that the 90% would ultimately ask the same questions that you're asking? And they're beginning to do that. I think there's a growing interest in moving away from the system as we have it now, moving towards something else. Who is that, and who are the advocates for that, besides you? Well, actually, there's a number of legislators, but there's also people involved in education more than anything else who are more aware of what we're talking about. There's a lot of non-profits also recently who are supportive of equity and education who are beginning to say, how can we get away from this constant arguing about how we fund schools and the property tax burden as we call it. We talk about the cost of health care, the price of food, but we're talking about property taxes. Taxes, it's a burden. Tell you the truth, health care is more of a pain. For health care, it's more of a burden than taxes are to tell you the truth. But we always refer to it as a burden. That's a tangent, but it's... When you speak of paying for health care, would you favor skinny plans in Vermont as a number of states are moving towards the old health care plans that had very low monthly payments, high deductibles, they don't cover mental health, they don't cover maternity care, they don't cover a number of items that Vermont requires covered, and now they're coming to be legal. Would you allow that to make health care more affordable for people? No, it's a step in the wrong direction, because it's not more affordable if it's not covering which things that you need, mental health, things of that sort, ongoing chronic conditions, those are all things that need to be covered. And if we're fooling ourselves, do we think that's giving everybody a cheap health care policy that has minor coverage or leaves out coverage for a lot of different conditions and needs is gonna somehow save money? It's really not, it's gonna push the money. How can we make health care more affordable in Vermont? You've been working on that issue for years. I know, we're making progress, I don't know. We're making some progress, but it's a slow... It's a federal issue that you're working on. Right, well, that is part of it. It's a slog that we're moving. It's like mired and mud and difficulty, but... Well, you made progress on it during the last legislative session in terms of importing drugs from Canada if we get the federal permission. Right, and that's part of the problem with some of the changes you wanna make around health care and prescription drug prices, you need federal permission to do it. And right now, I don't think we're gonna be very likely to get that federal permission, but we did pass a bill that would allow the state to essentially become a drug wholesaler and import drugs from Canada and to then sell them across the state through distributors. We also had a large long debate about whether or not we could move towards universal primary care. What is that? It means the things that... Primary care covers a lot of things from prevention down towards wellness and the kind of things you would normally just go to your primary physician for. That there could be a taxpayer funded, a tax funded system, which would put into a pool of money and allow all of us to go to our primary care doctors. I don't wanna say for free, obviously if you're paying for it through your tax dollars, but all that stuff would be covered and that would take care of a lot of the basic health care needs that we have. Is that now in the traditional Vermont study stage? I was just gonna say. A task force stage. How many task force do we have? We got many of them and it's funny because every year we sit in the state house, we don't sit in the state, every committee has given a list of studies that are coming forward and you check off which ones you don't think you ever wanna see again, you know, that we've seen enough of this and enough of that. Have we seen enough studies in the lake? Of the lake? Yes. No, we're gonna see more of those actually because the reason why we're seeing those as you could imagine is that because an excuse for not doing anything about it, right? We're just gonna keep studying. What was that bill that passed last time without funding? I'm dealing with cleaning the lake? Well, it wasn't much in the end, so it went through various stages and there were times during the session when it actually included like funding mechanisms to help clean up the water and whatnot. When does the treasurer become involved in that? Well, what she does is she's been involved and she put out a report. See, there's that word again, but it's different, but she put out a report that... A report is different than a study. Right, right. Well, you hope it has action steps in it anyway. But anyway, she basically went through a series of potential funding sources and analyzed them and said, this would raise this amount of money, this would raise this amount of money, this would be a burden or not a burden, meaning to administer. And she basically put it forward to sort of a menu, which has been helpful in trying to wade through the different options. But the problem is none of them, none of the options really fully fund the amount of money we need to come up with over the course of a year. What's it, 60 million? Well, it's $25 million on top of everything that we're already doing a year, it's what we're gonna have to do. And we've talked about a couple of options, primarily one is to bond, which is borrowing money, which is not ideal, because you're just putting the costs off to your children. The other is a per parcel fee, so everybody would pay basically like a property tax, which, you know, who wants to do that? And also you'd want to make sure that certain surfaces and pervious surfaces like parking lots pay a higher fee than you did on your front lawn at home. And then the third option that's been looked at a lot is a occupancy fee, a fee on hotel rooms that would be paid largely by out-of-staters when they visit Vermont. None of those are ideal, none of them raise enough money to really reach the level that we need to reach in terms of the $25 million a year. But those are probably the three things that are gonna be debated the most and looked at the most. They've already been looked at a lot, but everybody gets nervous about implementing any of them. But the problem is, the longer we put it off, I mean, nobody wants to be the bad guy who says, here's how we're gonna raise the money. On the other hand, if you don't raise a dollar today, you're gonna raise a dollar 50 tomorrow and $2 a day after that, because the problem's not gonna go away on its own. So the bill that passed basically set up a committee to think more about it. That's right. Yeah, basically, yes. I forget whether it's a study or a task force. One or the other. And all it did other than that was it put into place some mechanisms to help lay karma up in the Northwestern part of the state, which is in really, really bad shape. But the thing is about the water quality. It's not just bad environmentally, but as you could imagine, if you particularly see this up around St. Albans, St. Albans Bay, where it's really been a bad problem, their property values are going down. Nobody, you know, there's homes for sale on the lake, you know, a home on the lake. I mean, who wouldn't want a home on the lake? Well, if you got a home on the lake, but your dog is gonna die if they go in and like, lap up some water, you don't really wanna live there on the lake. So it's really been a pro, it's an economic problem as well as an environmental problem. And there's been studies that have been done that have made it clear that the health of the lake is directly affects the health of the economy and the lake shed around the Lake Champlain. So there's a tourism and whatnot. So it's a really important issue that needs to be done. And no one's assuming federal funding for that. Well, I guess we get some federal funding, but we're not planning on getting much more, let's put it that way. So we have to eventually bite the bullet and come up with a funding source of our own. And it's not gonna be fun and it's not gonna be easy, but it's gonna have to happen. Family leave, paid family leave. Is that another study? No, actually, we just get vetoed. That's one of the things that got vetoed, at least once, maybe twice, I forget, but an interesting thing about that, as you might listeners would probably know, that allows you to take time off to care for a family member who might be ill or going through some kind of crisis. The interesting- Paid time off. It's pay others. You get a certain percentage of your pay for a certain amount of time. But the interesting thing about that, the veto of that by Governor Scott was that, that was funded by the workers themselves. It was not a tax on employers or on anybody else. It was to be funded only by workers. Was that a mandatory participation by workers? If you and I worked alongside, would I have to do that as well? I'm pretty sure you would have to. Everybody has to chip in to do it. It's a start towards treating, making Vermont more family friendly in the workplaces. Well, we talked before about young families wanting to come to Vermont and stay in Vermont. We want to encourage entrepreneurs and whatnot and make more people want to stay here and raise their families here. One of the ways in which we do that is by having family-friendly policies, having good public schools, having paid family leave, having a good minimum wage. Those are the kinds of things that a young couple is going to look for when they decide where they're going to live. They're not really worried about the tax base particularly. They're basically worried about the things that are going to affect them most directly, which is quality of life things and quality of the workplace. When we have as many family-owned businesses as we have in Vermont, small family-owned businesses, what is the balancing act between the $15 minimum wage and the small family-owned business? Yeah, no, I would admit it's not an easy one to weigh, but we have to keep in mind that two things I would say, the minimum wage bill that passed the ones we know would have implemented the higher minimum wage over a period of time, six or seven years. Now, I assume that you were advocating for that. I was realizing that there's a challenge involved, but the timing of it, allowing it be implemented over time, would cushion the blow and allow businesses to adjust as need be. And also, when you think about it, a $15 minimum wage in 2024. The economy might even catch up to a point. There's no telling what a livable wage would be by then. The other thing, though, from a business point of view, and this, well, this is something I do believe and people argue on the other side of it, but I think that the best thing we can do for small businesses in Vermont is not give them tax cuts or tax credits or other kinds of development breaks. But what businesses really need in Vermont, the small business needs and mainstream business needs, is customers who can lend their store the money to spend. And by living, by raising wages, we're gonna put more money into the local economy so that people can actually go out and buy pizza, go to the movies, go to various stores, buy what they need, take care of their families, pay their bills. So it generates money in the local economy. Most of the money, people who are not making minimum wage now and would make a higher minimum wage after, if we implemented the minimum wage bill, are mostly local people who are gonna spend that money locally, they're not gonna use it to go to the Caribbean, they're not gonna use it to buy a yacht, they're gonna use it to buy a pair of blue jeans or a pair of boots, or take their family out to dinner. So I think that money would be spent locally as well. And keep in mind that when we're talking about minimum wage increases or who gets the minimum wage, it's not just high school kids and home for summer vacation. It's a lot of adults who are raising families who are trying to get by at minimum wage. So it's a tough one, but I think we're gonna revisit that debate. There's been a need, not a need, but a call for more analysis, not unless they study your task force, as to what impacts it might have on tip workers and restaurants and whatnot. So I think there'll be some revisiting some of those issues as well. Speaking, staying on small businesses, the internet being taxed now for purchases coming out of the States, where would you take that money and use it? I think it's 30 million, is it? Yeah, I don't know if, I mean, it's hard to say. On the one hand, when you have something like that, you wanna say, well, it should be invested in the development of local businesses, because they're the ones who suffer when they lose business to online businesses. So you'd wanna pump it back into the economy in a way that supports economic development. But what form that takes, I'm honestly not sure, that money would probably just end up going into the general fund. And I don't know if we wanna do that or whether we want to earmark it for something particular. The state auditor, auditor offer, issued a report on economic development on the Department of Commerce and economic development. Do you believe that our economic development plans are really effective? No, I'm not, I don't believe that. Well, I don't believe that they, I'm sure that they don't appear to be effective. Some of them may be here and there, but generally the problem is, and I'm glad that auditor Huffer did this report. He and I have talked about this for years before either of us was elected to office, quite honestly. And the fact is that you give these development incentives, tax credits, whatnot, to businesses, sort of in the promise that they're gonna create jobs, but then there's very little follow up to see if they did that or not. And also, business comes in and says, you know, I need a million dollars. And if you give me a million dollars, I'll enlarge my business in higher 10 people. The question is, would you do it without getting a million dollars? So it's called- Well, this is a discussion that's going on all across every state. Right, because businesses play states against each other too. They say, you give me a million dollars. Well, New York's gonna give me 10 million dollars. Well, Ohio's gonna give me 15 million dollars. Well, Vermont can only afford to give you one million. That's all we got, you know, that kind of thing. So the businesses play states off against each other. And basically what that means is that we're giving a million dollars to a business that's coming out of the pockets of other Vermonters who don't have those tax dollars used for something else, because they're not being generated. And you wanna make sure that money is really being used. Number one, that it was necessary that the business would not have created the jobs but for getting the money from the state. And number two, they have to prove up front that they actually created the jobs in order before they can collect the credits or the money. Do you believe there's enough legislative oversight over the agencies? Not, no, well, no. I mean, I wanna... Or a legislator oversight, I should say. Well, or a Vermonter oversight. See, that's, and sometimes people say, oh, the legislature's in session too long. We should be only one month or whatever. The less time the legislature's around, the more time the decisions are being made by the bureaucrats and state government. And nobody's looking over their shoulder. So when you look at the economic development policies, I think they need to be looked at more closely. When you look at the agriculture department policies, I think they need to be looked at more closely. I think that there's a number of ways or places where we could use more evaluation of what state agencies are doing. Do you feel that the legislature has enough staff? Well, no, we don't have hardly any staff. I mean, what we have is a group of lawyers who work for us and they're spread very, they're great for what they really wanna make that clear that they're really good at what they do. But they work for both sides of an issue. It puts them in a funny, like so I might go to somebody to one of the legislative lawyers and say, please draft me a bill that increases minimum wages. And then somebody else might go to the same guy or same woman and say, please draft me a bill that lowers minimum wages. You know, they have to work both sides, which means they have to be fair to both sides. But it also means that their time is really crunched all the time. So that's all the, people call me something and say, I'd like to meet with you and your staff to talk about an issue in your office. I'm like, well, first of all, I don't have any staff, I don't have an office, third of all, I can meet you at the coffee shop, but that's about it. So I think that, and the thing is, people will say, legislature costs a lot of money, but if we had a better legislature, we could probably be saving money by having better oversight of state government. What is legislative budget office in their role then? The Joint Fiscal Office, or the Joint Fiscal Office, I'm sorry. Well, they do the same kind of thing, but there's a legislative council, which basically drafts bills and helps with certain analysis of bills, but more the workings of the bill. The Joint Fiscal Office then comes in and talks about the cost or the benefit of the economic benefit or cost of the particular bill. So if you're looking at changing from property towards income to fund schools, I work with one of the lawyers to develop the plan to do it. And then I work with the Joint Fiscal Office to say, how would this plan work economically? Would it work or not? And they're stretched very thin also. We don't know much of a staff and they're really good people, but they really are overworked. Now, if you have children in the room, put your hands over their ears. So policy-wise, you're depending on lobbyists to provide information on the issues or the state agencies themselves? Yes, you're right. Basically, you don't have any personal staff. There's nobody that works for you personally. So a lot of legislators will rely on whether they like it or not, lobbyists be they good or bad or white hats or black hats, whatever you want to call them to provide information that then legislators use to develop their positions and make decisions, which is- Does that sound healthy to you? Doesn't sound too healthy to me, too. And I also find that I'm pretty clear on where I stand on a lot of issues. And so I don't get lobbied as much as some people do. I think that's part of the benefit of being clear of where you stand on issues is people, the lobbyists rarely think they're gonna convince me other than otherwise, if I've made up my decision or I have a position on the bill, but it's not healthy because basically the lobbyists are the ones providing the information and they all have a vested interest in what they're telling you, obviously. You can have the children come back in the room again. Mayor Juana, legislation. Where were you on that? Well, I supported it. The Senate actually passed a tax and regulate system, I think like, honestly, I think we passed it about five times in the last year and a half. Then it would go to the house and it would get not watered down but changed down into just a different legislation. I think people have an interest in that. What was the Senate's version of tax-regulate? The Senate's version briefly would allow a certain number of stores to open. It would license those stores, it would license a certain amount of growers, it would license a certain amount of distributors and it would generate a set of tax level per ounce or whatever, however they decided to do it. And so basically it would regulate, it was kind of like, it's different but what you would imagine the Vermont liquor stores are like, there's only a certain number of them, the liquors provided in a certain way, the prices are kind of set for the most part. Was this modeled after another state? Well, not really. I mean, we looked at other states, we looked at the states that, at the time when we first started coming up with the proposal, I think the other states had just started meaning Washington, Colorado. They had just started, so there wasn't a lot to learn from them yet. And so the debate was really between tax and regulate, which I kind of just described briefly, or just making it legal. So right now in Vermont, marijuana for recreational use is legal, but you just can't buy it or sell it. So how could something be, they'd be saying like, liquor is legal but you can't buy it, so you're gonna buy it off the black market still. So it's kind of silly when you think about it, to say something's legal but there's no way to get it or to distribute it amongst your friends or to sell it. So I think, and plus there's no way to raise money off it. Now we've got Canada today, in fact, is legalizing recreational use of marijuana in Quebec. And then we have- And you've got Maine and Massachusetts next to us. Right, so we're being surrounded and they're gonna tax and regulate in Massachusetts. And so they're gonna generate revenue that probably have courage for monitors to go to Massachusetts to purchase their marijuana there and bring it back. And I don't know if there'll be rules against that. I don't see how they'd be enforced. So tax and regulate at least gives you the ability to control what's going on, make the whole system legal and generate some revenue, which the revenue then would go into education and- Somewhat law enforcement, I imagine. Yeah, that's where I was looking for enforcement education. And then maybe there'd be some extra money left over that we could put towards our state colleges or something like that. Is there a question? As in the question of solar panel installers and like a large solar panel installers coming into the state from other states. Wouldn't there a question in terms of homegrown marijuana from Vermont versus large marijuana concerns that are dominating other states? Yeah, no, that's a good question. And that's a real concern. That's why the argument that went out in the house was it should just be a Vermont scale thing. We should just be able to use it or for ourselves, that kind of a thing, which, I mean, I kind of understand that, but that puts you in a position of you can have something, but you can't buy it or sell it. Plus it means we're going to lose revenue that other states are going to gain. So I think that one of the things we were concerned about was limiting the number of stores and the number of distributors to a set number so there wouldn't be that viable for a large corporation to come in and try to do it. You could actually say that they had to be Vermont residents, what have you. So there's certain safeguards you could put into the system to discourage out-of-state corporations. But those would also make it easier to ascertain quality. And that sort of thing, right? Sure, sure. Yeah, no, you'd have to definitely maintain quality. We also didn't allow for the use of edibles or things that might encourage young kids to see something that looks like a lollipop or whatever and end up getting stoned on marijuana. While we're on the question of drugs, what about prescription drugs and opioids and that sort of thing? What's your take on the opioid situation in Vermont and how the state is reacting to it? Well, I think it's a serious problem but I think we're reacting fairly well to the problem itself, meaning we have treatment centers and whatnot that are being relatively effective and whatnot. The problem is we're not doing enough in actual prevention of the problem. How would you do more? What is the problem? I'm not really sure, quite honestly. Would you crack down on pharmacists and doctors? Well, we've done that though, that's the problem. Not that the problem. That's the solution to some degree. To some degree, but it doesn't really has not solved the problem. We were talking and taking testimony just the other day by some folks who work on this stuff all the time and one of them said very clearly, we have prevention programs and we have a good one here in Washington County, for example, but we don't have a prevention system the way we should, meaning a statewide, systematic way of coordinating all our prevention efforts. Do we have a task force on it? We probably have a couple of tasks where we do actually, the governor has, the governor has a task force studying a number of things about it. But you know, the other thing that came up in talking with some of the legal folks the other day and something that I feel strongly about is that the root problem of the opioid crisis or the drug problem, because it's not just opioids, but it is the way it's referred to and now heroin is cheaper than oxycodone and things of that sort, but the real problem has to do with why people move in that direction in the first place. Why do they feel hopeless? Why aren't they working? Why aren't they- I think it's obvious that these are pain killers. Right. These people are feeling psychological pain. Right, they're feeling pain and the pain comes from living in poverty, having no way out of a low-income, low-paid job, having family crisis going on all the time, maybe having mental health problems, but I really do think a lot of it is centered on the fact that our culture has been one where people work harder and harder, but they have a harder time paying their bills. You know, this last year, median family income in Vermont fell again, and today, median family income in Vermont is about where it was in 2007. Clearly- Inflation adjusted. Yeah, no, no, just the real dollars, it's about 60,000. Oh, okay, so it's worse when you adjust it for inflation. Yeah. You know, the cost of healthcare has gone up, the cost of college, I mean, everything goes up, but income is basically where it was, you know, long to seven to 10 years. But that's a national issue. It is a national issue, but we have to find ways to address it because that's one reason why people get frustrated enough to feel hopeless enough to decide, or not to decide, but to end up, you know, fighting with their lifelong addiction problems. So it's a problem of greed, I think. You know, we have enough money in this state to take care of these problems, whether it's the cost of education or the opioid crisis. You know, I always ask people kind of like, where did the money go? How is it that our parents and grandparents were able to build the interstate highways and the roads and bridges and the dams and they sent the generation to college? And we have trouble fixing the potholes around central Vermont. I'm aware, is there any less money in Vermont now than there was 50 or 60 or 70 years ago? No, there's more money than ever before. It's just that the money's being taken off by those at the top and those at the bottom, most working Vermonters are not seeing their paychecks go up. So we become a more greedy culture and I think that's one of the reasons why more people are falling in with drugs and other forms of bad behavior. I want to walk through one state house issue last year where you must have really been stretched as a Washington County Senator. You're all the way up in middle sex. You go all the way down through Barry and Northfield guns. There is no consensus in this county on guns, is there? Well, I think if you, it depends on how you look at a consensus. If you look at polls, you know, which is one of the ways you measure where people are not saying they're always... Which we don't do. Right? But the polls will tell you that the majority of Vermonters support the bills that were passed. But there are still a lot of people who feel strongly otherwise and it does vary when I go in around the county. Just the other night, we went down to visit with the gun owners of Vermont and a bunch of candidates went down and we actually had a good conversation. A little bit of it was about guns, but a lot of it was around the other issues that you and I have just talked about around wages and income and what we're doing for the rural economy, things of that sort. So their issue was not just tied narrowly to guns, but I think that what we're seeing is that we took steps to try to make Vermonters safer, which is both a practical and a psychological or emotional kind of safety that people were yearning for. And we passed bills that aren't really gonna change the way people relate to firearms. I mean, you have to be a little older to buy a gun on your own, but it's not gonna, nobody's having the guns. We have to go through a background check. Right, which is a pretty... That is a change. It is a change, it's a pretty painless process from what I understand. And it's not... The bomb stocks, very few people owned bomb stocks. Very few people wanted to own bomb stocks. I imagine the magazines, for those people who are enamored of large magazines, they can still keep them. Right, and they're going to. The very few have been confiscated or anything of that sort. So, and nobody's gonna be stopped from owning a firearm or maintaining a firearm, unless they're a dangerous person, because part of the law we passed said they could be taken away from people who are... Domestic abuse. Domestic abusers, that kind of thing. So, I actually think that, and I don't want to speak for anybody else, but my feeling is that, for monitors you're gonna find that the laws that we passed are fairly reasonable in the sense that they're not gonna affect anybody's ability to own a firearm and use them responsibly. And once that settles in, people will see that it was... Whether it was... I think it was the right thing to do. Some people may say it was the wrong thing to do, but it's not gonna have any negative impacts on Vermont families who want to be responsible. I think if you talk to those people which you were listening to those people, they were in the hallways all over the place. I think where they're concerned might have been is that it took two years for death with dignity to pass. It took two years for civil unions to pass. It took two years in a veto for gay marriage to pass. These social issues normally work their way slowly through. This one was a very tight window. And I think you're absolutely right. And I understand that frustration because I think people felt it at the same time when you mentioned like with civil unions and gay marriage, those kinds of magic quality, those things. And I think the irony is we act quickly on those kinds of issues, but we didn't do anything to like raise the minimum wage again. We didn't do anything for paid family leave. We didn't do anything to lower the price of prescription drugs. We didn't do anything to lower the cost of healthcare. Well, we did in a sense by saying that we're going to Canada. Well, we set out a path. We haven't done anything yet. Exactly, but still if that is... But I can understand why somebody who's, you know, a regular working class person who enjoys their guns and is a responsible gun owner feels like they went and passed these bills to like control gun owners right away, but they didn't do anything to like make sure my paycheck went up or to make my family any better off. So I understand that frustration. I really do. On that, we're going to leave. We're going to close. Thank you so very much for being here this evening. Thanks for having me. I think this is a good thing you're doing. Thank you. And thank you for watching. I hope that you'll watch all of the shows in the series because all of them are well worth watching and the candidates are great this time through. And the issues that Bill is discussing are important. And, but one more, more important thing and that's to get out and vote on election day and to urge your family and your neighbors to get out and vote because that is really a fundamental for democracy. We're not going to tell you how to vote. You've seen everyone. I'm not going to make any suggestions, but I do suggest that it is your civic duty as well as your civic right to vote. Exercise it. Thank you.