 My name is Lewis Porter. I'm a Calis resident and glad to be here moderating one of these, one of the debate today. I appreciate all of you coming out. It's funny, 10 years in state government and 10 years as a reporter. And I've never done one of these, so bear with me. I'm looking forward to it and I hope you are as well. I'm going to hand out a couple of pads here in case people want to suggest questions from the audience. And please ask or give us questions that can be answered by both candidates, if you would. And I'll ask some of those questions from the audience as well as some from the list that I have prepared here. We're going to give both of our two candidates here five minutes each to introduce themselves, explain a little bit about why they're running, tell their backgrounds. And then we'll go to questions, as I say, from a mix from the audience, questions and from a list that I have ahead of me. And the goal, of course, of one of these is to distinguish between two people who are coming forward to volunteer to represent the community and Montpelier. And so please bear in mind that there are folks who are looking to serve you and looking to serve their community. And that we can have differences of opinions without having differences of divide the community. So I appreciate all of you coming here. Bram Tobin has served as a Plainfield Select Board member and road commissioner, Plainfield representative for the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission, on the board of Central Vermont Television Public Access, and has been on the Plainfield Planning Commission and the Hazardous Mitigation Committee. Bram, thanks for being here today. And Mark Mahaley, Calis Select Board Vice Chair, Chair of the East Calis Community Trust, working on rehabilitation of the East Calis Store, former dean of the Vermont Law School, is also working with the town and a committee of the Curtiss Pond Association to renovate Curtiss Pond Dam and keep the pond. So thanks for being here. Both are running in the primary for stake rep in our district. And I will now give Mark five minutes to introduce himself and explain why he's running. And then we'll do the same for Bram. Mark. Welcome, everybody. And thanks, Lewis and Bram. Thank you for sharing the table with me. And I'm going to use some of my precious time just to note that two candidates from our Senate, Jared DuVall, is here and Andy Perchlich is here. Jared actually lives as a foreigner, but he's going to be our senator, maybe. Jared. OK, so thanks for coming. I am Mark Mahaley, and I live in East Calis with my wife, Chris. Chris is right here. And Chris is a writer of children's books. We have three children grown and a growing number of grandchildren, the latest of whom I think she will emerge in November. 20 years ago, Chris and I decided to move to Vermont. And we came and visited. In fact, actually, the very first place we stayed was the home of two people who happened to be here in the audience, opened their home to us. And we spent the night in Calis, in East Calis. And lay in bed that night and just said, this is it. This is where we want to be. And it materialized. And we love this place. We love this landscape, which is totally unique. And we love the people. We feel incredibly fortunate to be here. In the last years, since I retired from Vermont law, I've become more and more involved in the local community. As Lewis said, I've been elected twice to the select board, but I really had a really educational, for me, a real education and an interesting time working on reopening the Calis store, renovating it. It's such a great group of local people that formed this nonprofit. But working, we raised something like $300,000 or $400,000 locally. But then we've raised over $2 million in state and federal funds. And that was really interesting to me. And the same, I think, is going to happen with the Curtis Pond. There's this wonderful effort by local people. And it's really going to, I think, leverage federal and state funding. And it got me thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have real kind of generative action at the local level, then turn into this leverage at the state level and the federal level as well. You can really make great things happen. And that's, frankly, what got me thinking about running for this seat. Now, I've spent the last weeks knocking on doors, talking to residents. And I can tell you, we all know the problems we face, but it's one thing to know them. It's another thing to hear them directly from voters. And housing, for example, is just getting out of reach for most people. And I think a lot of it is because of immigration. I talked to a young couple and asked them. They told me they'd moved here from California recently. I asked why. And the husband and wife both said at the same time the same words, the fires. And I just think we're going to see more and more of that. More demand for housing, and that's going to increase the price. And oil, need I say, oil is a terrible problem. I had a woman on Social Security, an elderly woman tell me, I'm going to cry. And then she did cry, as she told me. I don't think I can heat my house this winter. So it's just becoming more and more difficult to live here. Well, these are problems. These big problems are problems that we at the local level cannot solve alone. We can generate pressure, but we need to work with the state and with the federal government, our federal government. And that's why we need effective representation in Montpelier that is precisely why we need it. It isn't a local versus state thing. It's that the local pressure has to be successful in creating results in Montpelier that benefit us and our programs. And I'd like to bring my experience with the legislative process and my lifelong work, Building Coalitions, because that's how you'd get things done in Montpelier, Building Coalitions to provide Calis, Plainfield, and Marshfield strong, consistent, thoughtful, and informed vote in Montpelier. Thanks. Graham. Thanks for the 30 seconds. You didn't give me credit for introducing our. I had another 10 seconds. I'm Bram Tobin. I live in Plainfield. And my wife and I have a flower farm. We moved up here from New York City many years ago. I'm very bad, 15, 20 years ago. So now you'll notice in the back of us there's some beautiful peony, which are Vermont grown on our farm. And after the debate, please take some of them home, if you'd like. Why am I running? To me, the key to Vermont is the small towns, the small towns like Calis, Marshfield, and Plainfield. And what's sometimes lost in the shuffle is that Montpelier wants to do good things. But when they pass laws, the local interest is ignored. Here's an example. Act 46. Oh boy, I know. This is a way of, if you read the legislation, the idea was that we want to make a more efficient way of taxing schools and so forth. And it talks about a national study that showed that a school of a certain size, and I can't remember the exact number, is the ideal school size. And we should try to shape our funding and everything to approach that goal. Then comes, don't worry, we're not interested in getting rid of small schools, which I mean, I think, let's be honest, I think the idea is consolidation to get rid of small schools. But forgetting that issue, forgetting the logistics of Act 46, here's something that I think everybody in this room should know. If you live in Calis, you pay a higher property tax rate than non-residents. Now, to me, that is an abomination. If you live in a town and you dedicate your life to a town, you need to pay the lower rate. Now, just forgetting, I think we could argue about Act 46 all night long. And there are some very good things. I think, for example, if you look at the ratio of administrators to students at U32, it's halved since Act 46 went through. So in that respect, maybe there are some good things about Act 46. But what I want to draw your attention to is the fact that a non-resident paying a lower rate than a resident is not something anybody on the local level would have ever thought is a good idea. And the strangest thing is if you look at the taxation part of that bill, it goes on for page after page after page after page. And what I see as a local representative, I see this again and again and again. Let's take, for example, Act 64. The state wants to clean up Lake Champlain. Well, who doesn't want to do that? I mean, that's a great idea. But if you look closely at the way that language in the bill reads, smaller towns like Calis, Plainfield and Marshfield, have to do more remediation than the guys who were right next to the lake. And I don't need to be a scientist to know what's going on there. Obviously, they had better representation in Chittenden County on that particular issue. Even more egregious, in my view, is the state in this Act 64 thing. In order to clean up Lake Champlain, they mandated a general road permit for the town. So basically, what you had is Montpelier oversees and tells you which parts of the road you have to fix, and there's a timetable on this and that. And I complained bitterly about this. I said, guys, what is this about? Suddenly, we have to take care of class four roads. Suddenly, we have to do this. Oh, no, no, no, Brandt, don't worry about it. This is another thing. 30 seconds, Brandt. 30 seconds. Okay, I said, what about, who's going to pay for all this? And they said, don't worry, there's funding available. I said, you don't know what a small town office is like. Because if you need to get the funding, you have to, that means what, I have to spend four more hours a week writing grant proposals and not getting them. I'm probably over time, am I? Not yet. Oh, no, okay, five seconds. Five seconds. When we have a goal, let's keep the local interest in mind. And they said five minutes was going to be too long. I knew you guys could do it. So, shoot. We're just going to have a series of questions now. To each, for both candidates to answer, I'm going to give each candidate two minutes to answer. And the candidate who goes first has the opportunity for a 30 second response after the second answer if they choose. But if you choose not, that's fine also. I'll start with some, I'll start with some easier ones. And by the way, these are excellent questions from the audience. So this is really going to be fun. If you were elected to the house, what would your top three priorities be? And Mark, do you want to start us? If they always want numbers, my top three, my top one. Actually, it's easy. Rural economic revitalization, rural economic revitalization, rural economic revitalization. That's, I mean, it's all about money. It's just getting too expensive, too difficult to live here in a lot of ways. And I think the way we have to approach that is one, because we have to find ways to deal with the housing problem. So we have to make it easier to build housing, but we want the housing focused in the village centers. We don't want to grow subdivisions on our farmland. And that's, I've watched that happen. It can happen. We don't want to do that. So we have to find ways to concentrate housing in our village centers. And to get young people into them. The legislature approved about $4 million to help first time homebuyers, and I just think that's a drop in the bucket. So we have to address the housing. The other is we have to, we have this special landscape, which is totally unique. It doesn't look like this anywhere else. And it's wonderful. I know from talking to people how much they love it. And that is farms. So we have to get young people on farms. And I know we can do that because I was chair of the Vermont Land Trust. And we did it. We can do it. We can get young people onto farms. So, and then we have to revitalize our village, which is of course why we're all, a whole bunch of us are working on the store. Is cause, you know, there has to be a there there in the village. Graham, same question. Well, I am completely in agreement regarding the housing issue. And I want to direct everybody's attention to an article that was published this week in Business Insider. And it profiles a nice Connecticut couple who have an Airbnb empire and they gross $100,000 a month. Not to begrudge them. But here's the thing. My spouse works in social services and people are not aware of how bad it is. She regularly speaks to Vermonters who live in cars who have jobs. I mean, I get emotional because the things that she comes home with are so shocking. The motel system presently is completely booked up. And starting July 1st, new rules will apply and a lot of those people will be evicted. So I, you know, my opponent is completely correct. Housing is number one. I think my emphasis would also be to make sure the local voice is heard. Because over and over again, I mean, I could sit here all night long and talk about things that I would like to change. Am I doing okay? I'll give you a 30 second warning right now. Okay. What I would focus on, and which is why I would be interested in government operations, is to make sure that when large scale things are passed that the town clerk gives feedback, that the local residents give feedback. It's critical. You cannot have this job and not know what the local people, how it really impacts them. So I have a question for the audience and for the candidates. Should we switch to one minute answers? Or stay at two? Switch to one? Two is good? Okay. Two is good. Okay. We have a lot of good questions. I wanna make sure we get somebody. Do I get a rebuttal? Yeah. Really a rebuttal. Okay, I'll be quick. I agree completely. Social services need more money in the state. It's just tragic. And a real good example is childcare is weird. Parents are paying too much. Childcare providers don't earn enough. No one in their right mind would go into the field. It needs the application of a lot of money and the estimates right now are like $300 million. We can't just raise the tax rates. We gotta figure out where that comes from. That's gonna be difficult. And that's your 30 seconds. Thank you. Can I speak to that issue? Or should we move on? But let's move on because we actually have a question from the audience on that topic. And I think it's a good one. So let's go there next. The question is, Bram, for you to start, the question is, I know I have it here. What steps would you take to ensure improved childcare? Okay, once again, it goes back to my central theme, which is people not listening. There is a woman who had a childcare service in our community, 30 years. People were dying to get their kids in that program. And guess what? She doesn't do it anymore. And part of the reasons she doesn't do it anymore is the state decided that she needed to be certified in a special way. And she had to take courses from the college-educated people with all this knowledge about how to treat kids, which she had to pay for. Now, I'm all for accreditation and certification. But when you scorn people who have a track record, it doesn't work. And you could improve childcare immediately if you had respect for the people who've been doing it. And now we have this childcare crisis. Now, I applaud Let's Grow Kids in terms of raising a standard. I think that that's a wonderful idea. But when you raise the standard to a point where you disenfranchise seasoned people who have a track record, I think it's deplorable. So the first thing I would do is have a real conversation about opening it up to people with the track records and bringing them in to help the situation. Mark, concrete steps on to improving childcare. Yeah, it's not like a broken record. It has to do with money. I think right now the state pays about a quarter of the bill for childcare. And that's just not gonna work. The problem is childcare is worse in some ways than medicine because we all know there's a lot of problems with medicine and its delivery, but there's a lot of money floating around in the system. With childcare, there just isn't enough money. It's, the parents are paying too much, much greater percentage of their income than they should be. It's like marginal, whether you go to work or not. That's bad for our economy. And on the other hand, the childcare providers can't earn a living. Particularly, I agree with Graham, there will be a difference between us somewhere. I, you need premium economy when you fly and I don't. That's the reason. But I think that it's really, it's problem that we've gotta find a way to funnel more money into the system so that childcare providers can earn a good living. We'd have to make sure that childcare providers that are larger pay people, a good amount. And that's key. So I think that it's real. This is the problem the legislature is gonna face this year. It's gonna come up. We are going to have to figure out how to finance this. Everybody knows the system is broken. 30 second warning. I'm done. Good, okay. Graham, any response or good on that question? No, I think that there certainly is the money issue and we definitely need to pay people a livable wage to do this incredibly difficult work that is not really acknowledged. Oh yeah, absolutely. What's the, this is Mark to start. What's the right balance between local and state authority? And are we out of balance here in this district and in this state one direction or the other? I think that everything starts with local. It has to start with local. We know what our problems are. No one knows what our problems are like we do. And frankly, I have to say, I think on some level no one cares about our problems like we do unless they're general problems. So what, when a group like you guys elect people like us to represent you, our job is to apply those local needs in a way that generates results for us that work. And when we fail, you get situations like Graham was talking about. You get over bureaucratization and stuff like that. That can be addressed. It can be addressed by legislators, but it takes work. So for me, the key is that the representative on the local level works on the state level to get results for the locals. Now, it also takes someone who knows, I think to be a legislator, you gotta listen. That's probably the most important thing you gotta do. You can't pontificate to people who are also elected and they don't have to listen to you. You have to build coalitions and you have to figure out ways to put together something that really works. At the same time, how long have I got? 30 seconds, right? At perfect. At the same time, you have to be independent of party when you're in the legislature. I mean, I'm a Democrat, that's fine, but I don't agree with everything that Democrats will always ask for. And if I feel like, and I'm in the legislature, if I feel like the Democratic party is saying X and I believe my constituents need Y, I have to be able to say no. Bram, balance between local and state authority and are we out of balance? We're completely out of balance. The state authority has taken Dylan's rule, which is this legal concept of the state knows all and can destroy the town if it chooses to, to the nth degree as far as I'm concerned. Let me give you an example. The organization that's supposed to help and support town affairs is the League of Cities and Towns. They're very nice people and they've done some good things, but in terms of advocating for the town, it's been a disaster. I'll give you an example. As road foreman, I was called by the League of Cities and Towns and they said, you have to go to a training because you supervise people who, you know, drive the trucks and this and that. So I go with, sorry, I was road commissioner. I went with my road foreman. We drove two hours or whatever, someplace to the northeast kingdom where a person from the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, we met with all the other road foremen and the course was one hour of how to tell if somebody's drunk and one hour to see how, if somebody's on something other than alcohol. I'm not making this up. This is a group of middle-aged men and we're sitting there having a discussion about how do you tell if someone's drunk? Well, I guess if they're sleeping in the corner of the garage you can, you know, I mean, the whole thing sticks. So at the end of this, I got my Vermont League of Cities and Town reasonable suspicion trading test certificate. I'm an expert. Mark's completely drunk. No. I wish. This to me, the League needs to be helpful to the town and not put us all through this. And I understand this is in a modern world, you know, we all have to go through this kabuki dance of nonsense. But I mean, do we have to make a show of it? Mark, are you responsible at all? I think that if I were in the legislature I'd join the rural caucus, which I think is a place where we can address some of these issues. I don't wanna sound like a Pollyanna. I agree that there's just a lot of ways we can improve it, but a good example where things work is broadband. I mean, this came up from us. We created CV Fiber. You know, we did all of this and look what happened. We just got $31 million. We couldn't have done it ourselves, but we started it. I'll ask a couple now that I think are pretty easy, yes and no questions, but good ones. And I think we probably won't need the full two minutes all time just in case, but starting with you, Bram, have you read the town plans for each of the towns in the district? I have not read Calis. I actually helped write the town plan for Plainfield. And I remember when I was doing that, I went through the Marshfield one. But, sorry, should you want me to stand on that? No, that's great. Great, yeah. Same, I've read the Calis plan. I've used the Calis plan because we had to use it to get money. And no, I haven't yet read the other two towns plans. And if elected, not only would I learn the plans, but I'd meet with there with the select boards. You gotta remember, this is, it's funny, we're so small, but it's three towns. It's like they're foreign countries. And that's silly. And as a legislator, we've gotta really get to know. We really have to get to know each other. And I would look forward to being educated. I don't know. There's lots I don't know. Another quick one, starting with Mark. And, Bram, you probably don't need a rejoinder on the town plan question, I would expect, but you're welcome to do it if you'd like. Actually, just one second. For all those who don't know about the town plan, it's very, very, very important because if you want legal standing to protest something, it has to be in the town plan. So I encourage you, not only to read it, but next time they're writing it, have something to say, because if you have a complaint about some issue, that's the document that is the legal standard of the direction of the town's going. I think Bram started that question. So Mark, do you support ranked choice voting for Vermont? And why or why not? Yes. Why? I think it's more accurate. I think it produces better results. I just think it's better. Yeah, it's a little complicated, but I think it's a good idea. I think it's better. I definitely support it. Great. How about that? You've got more time. That is perfect. Thank you. Bram? Yeah, I would agree with Mark that I think that, I think that the idea behind ranked choice voting is that if a majority of the people agree on one of the pool of candidates, that candidate should win rather than the person. And I think that that's a fine concept. I think we need a little bit of education because I think I had an argument with somebody about this who thought that I was upending democracy and all this. And I said, well, I mean, I think we have to kind of go through the steps, you know? So yeah, I support it. No rejoining. Great. Mark, starting with you. Ultimately, the state budget is a single most consequential piece of policy enacted by the legislature. What's the single area which is underfunded in recent approved budgets and how would you pay for additional funding for it through specific taxes or cuts elsewhere? Well, there isn't a single area. There's massive areas. And I could talk about them, but you know, I've been talking about them. I mean, I think, so I'm gonna go to the second half of the question. I think we're a pretty high tax state. I don't, I think we have to live within our means. I mean, does this make me a fiscal conservative? You know, I don't know. There's all these labels that are really silly. I just think we have to live within our means. I don't, we're a pretty high tax state. There are other states that are higher, but they're bigger generally. And I don't think we can just like raise taxes. That said, I think there are some things we could do. We could tax, for example, I think we could say capital gains are tax like income. But there are areas where I wouldn't tax. I don't think we ought to tax military pensions, for example. Maybe we shouldn't tax pensions. But I don't, I have to confess that that's as far as I wanna go because that's as far as I know at this point. But I'd like to be educated. Bram, same question. Places in the state budget that are underfunded and how would you increase their funding? Well, I think my answer might surprise and that I think that housing is underfunded but let me just step back. And I think this is, when you talk about the state budget and when you talk about spending money in a lot of ways, I think it's important to have more nuance. Here's an example. Governor Scott got a lot of headlines and rightly so for this $40 million project, housing project in Randolph, which is absolutely wonderful and I'm very supportive of it. But at the same time, the state has spent, in excess of I think $100 million, temporarily housing people in motels. This is insane. And you wanna talk about money out the window and guess what? Starting July 1st, that's all gonna change and in fact a lot of the social service agencies have notified the police because they're nervous about this sort of unrest. So if there's an area that we need to spend more but spend it wisely, it would be housing. And we're gonna get a lot more influx of people coming here. I mean, there was a PBS show where they asked everybody, what is the county in the United States? What is the single most county that would be the most resilient to climate change? It turned out to be LaMoyle County, weirdly enough. 30 seconds. So what I'd say is that we have to, when looking at the budget, we have to really think carefully about how the money is spent with the notion that a lot of what makes callus callus, Marshfield, Marshfield and Plainfield, Plainfield, is under threat in a sense because of a broad Chitenden County approach to solving problems. I do have a rejoinder there. I guess this is a point of difference. I think the temporary motel thing was great. And I think it was a stay up and it was a move in the right direction. I can't comment on whether it's gonna end or not and how it's gonna end because I just don't know but those people who would be people on the streets, I think it was an interim situation and we did a great thing. So I'm an incrementalist. I think you take things one step at a time and I think that that was a good thing. Could I respond to that? Not by the rules, but you'll have a chance at the end. You know, if he's gonna respond then I'm gonna ask Gus Selig to respond to it. Exactly, I don't want to change the rules if you're... Is it okay or not? No. No, okay, so go ahead. Just ask another question, I'll work with you. You can work it in. You can work it in or you can work it in at the end. Yes. Starting, who started that one? I guess Mark, you started that one. So, Bram, for you first, what will you do to help implement Vermont's Climate Action Plan and help achieve the goals of Vermont's Global Worming Solutions Act? So for all those who are not familiar, the idea is to switch away from fossil fuels and I think it's 90 by 2050. Then in other words, by the year 2050, we should have 90% renewables, as I think that the sort of shorthand gist of the law. I think that the main challenge, if you look at greenhouse gas emissions is in transportation. So, in order to address this, I think we have to focus building around transportation corridors. And I think that that opens up a very big discussion between the state and the towns in terms of how to manage that solution. So I think that that would be a critical, if we could get people to use commute less. The other key thing is that I think that possibly the government should get involved with whether or not you commute at all. So, it'd be interesting to know if telecommuting became something of, oh, I don't know, if there was some way of evaluating whether or not, because a lot of times I see a lot of people who could easily work from home, but their boss is like, you gotta make that commute here. Well, possibly that could be an issue to discuss. 30 seconds, man. So, in other words, if you have a business, maybe the more people who telecommute, you get some sort of benefit or something like that. So, but I think the focus is on transportation and of course heating is another issue. Mark? Again, I think this is something that's gonna take some really serious negotiation in the legislature. It's not like we don't know what to do. We know what to do. It's just the governor vetoes it when we try it. And so we're gonna have to override the veto we almost did with the clean heat standard, but whatever we do and however it emerges, we're gonna have to at least next year overcome a veto, I think. So, we have to reduce dependence on oil. You know that we export a billion dollars a year to, you know, for that we pay for oil that leaves the state. It goes to Saudi Arabia and Texas. It's not generating jobs here. It isn't doing any good for us here. So we have to get off of oil and that means weatherization, heat pumps, clean heat, et cetera. It's not like people don't wanna do that. They do, but they don't have the money to do it. So we need programs that have the state and federal money to do all that in a way that's reliable over time because we're not gonna get the workforce to weatherize because we have a lot of money one year from the feds and then the next year it all dries up. It's not gonna work. So we have to find ways to do that. On transportation, although I agree that corridors are nice in an urban area, I think we're all doomed to drive for a long time here. 30 seconds. And so I'm afraid the solution is electrification of our fleet. And again, right now electric cars and I own one, they're too expensive. They're not available, but they will come down. And I think they will sell themselves and I think that will help. So that's, I think that we know what to do, we've known what to do for years. We just haven't been able to do it. And it's in the legislature. We can do it. Great, thanks. Bram, a response? Well, yeah, I mean, I think, I agree. I think that one of the important aspects of climate policy in general is to really be sensitive to people who cannot afford things. And you pointed this out very clearly that obviously we know what to do. That's 30 seconds. Oh my gosh. Goes my past, right? Just gonna play. That's amazing. Thanks. I think this one's for Mark first. You're both running as Democrats. Why run as a Democrat? I'm sorry, I just have no place in my existence for the modern American Republican Party. You know, my grandfather was a Republican and he'd roll over in his grave at what we're seeing. Now, you know, there's a lot of moderate Democrats. I used to represent in my environmental law practice. I used to represent moderate Republicans and I don't know what the hell they're doing now. But, and I know we have good moderate Democrats and I guess, and Republicans, and I guess in some ways, I'm a, am I a fiscal conservative? I guess in some ways I am. But when I look at the governor, for example, I think the governor, there's a lot of, there's some good things he's done. You know, COVID, he listened to science. I mean, okay. He did a good job. He did, took a stand on guns. That was good. But otherwise, it's the status quo. All the problems we're talking about, they're not gonna change. You don't change anything if you just say, oh my God, we can't raise taxes and I have no other ideas. And I think that's where the Republican Party is right now. So no, I would not feel comfortable as a Republican. Yeah, I think I feel that the Democratic Party is more in line with the things that I believe in. And I think I agree with what Mark said earlier that not everything that the Democratic Party does would I immediately jump on board about. So yeah, I think I don't see, I think Vermont has a Republican Party that certainly doesn't represent what's going on nationally, which is positive. But I just feel more comfortable running as a Democrat. Graham, for you to start, what qualities make a good legislator? Well, I have a little newspaper article here. A guy, and I'm probably gonna mispronounce his last name, Ted Reel. Does anybody know what that is? Ted Reel? Maybe I'm not. Really? Okay, see, I wasn't born in Vermont, but people who've been here a long time know that. But history does not remember, you know, Ted Reel. Let me tell you two things. Ted Reel is responsible for banning billboards and Greenup Day. Pretty good, huh? So that to me is a legislator. Somebody whose legacy is not in his name is in the work that's done. Okay, so the legislature is 150 people who are equal. And I think that the most important thing that a legislator needs to do is to have a reputation there as someone people can talk to. Someone who will really listen to them, not just sort of listen to them, but actually listen and figure out what it is they really think. And if they are people who don't see the world the way you do, which there are plenty of people like that in the legislature, I'm sure that you're patient with them. So listening plus patience. The third quality is then the ability to process it all and come up with a coalition. Is there a place where we overlap enough that we can actually advance our goals? And the phrase I hear most use which resonates me is the enemy of the good is the perfect. You never get all you want, but you try to keep moving in advance part of what you want. So a good legislature knows how to do that. And I've talked about independence. You have to be able to tell a party no. And I'm old, I mean, you know, if the party says to me, G mark, you know, if you go that way, maybe you won't have leadership position. Well, they don't care. So. Bram, any response or are you good? Oh, no, okay. Um, because you brought up leadership, whichever of you wins, presuming you win the general, we'll go into a legislature with a historically high turnover, particularly among chairs. How will you deal with the relative newness of so many of the legislators? And would you anticipate being in it, pursuing either a chair or a leadership position of some kind to mark my, I think it's your turn to start. Yeah, it's going to be chaotic. It really is. Normally what happens is you have to, they ask you, well, what committees do you want to be on? And you rank your committees. And what you do is you go around asking, well, who's the chair and are they any good? You know, and that, but what is the chair? You don't know who the chair is. It's going to be very chaotic. I will not seek a leadership position in my first year of my first term. I, you know, I've never been a legislator. It's a new thing. I've done a lot of new things in my life. Try being a dean for the first time. Oh my God. Anyway, when you do that, you don't know anything. And you just have to spend a lot of time learning and listening. So I think I'd be, I think I'd be a little reluctant to seek, certainly seek a leadership position in my first year of the first term. And we're going to just have to learn from the people who've been there. There are people, I've talked to, three or four legislators. There's people there who have been there and we can talk to them. Oh yeah, I think my strategy would, I'm in agreement with Mark on this. I don't think, I don't feel comfortable that I'd want to step in and try to be a chair or anything like that. I think I have certainly a number of committees that I'd love to serve on. I think my, the decision about what to go to would really actually be more about the people on the committee than the issue. So like, you know, would the current ranking member or would the, if the chair is talking to things, is he somebody who I think I could, you know, get along with, get things done? That would be the deciding factor rather than specifically the committee's actions. But I wouldn't, I would mark on not wanting to try to do the leadership position. Wave. So I have a question, I guess for the audience. We've got a couple of other good questions from the audience and I want to give the candidates a chance to ask each other questions. Would you like to take a break and come back? Would you like to keep going and try to wrap up in about an hour or so? Okay, I mean an hour total, not an hour more. All right, great. Mark, you started that last question, correct? Yeah. Great. Another audience question here. In a time of national disunity, what can you do to help Vermont maintain a sense of unity as our representative? And Brandon, that would be for you first. Well, I think it's very important to communicate with everyone in the community. Now, I have a track record in Plainfield. You know, the anarchists who lived up at the top of Spruce, know me. They didn't like it when I wanted to have the police do speed stuff and all that. They were very much against that, but we had a dialogue. People who are on the other side of the political spectrum had a lot of problems with me, weirdly enough, it was a traffic issue. I wanted to put in some speed bumps, but that didn't go over well. But you really have to be in dialogue with very different people. And I think actually a prerequisite for getting into politics would be being a road commissioner. Because when you're a road commissioner, you have to deal with lots of different people and no one is happy. And it doesn't matter if it's somebody who doesn't have a lot of money or has a lot of big fancy, this is an issue. You have to sort of explain why the ditching had to go this way, you had to do this and that, and you have to remain, you know, keep your temper because people can go crazy. I mean, Erika can attest to some of the voice messages that have come across the machine sometimes. It's a tough gig, so. Mark, same question to you. I agree that the local level is a great school for teaching you how to deal with everybody. I mean, there's just a huge diversity of opinion in our communities and you gotta listen to people. At the legislature, I'm gonna take your question as at the legislature. Well, first of all, again, I hate political labels, but I guess I'll put it as a personality. My approach is I'm a moderate. It's not political. I'm a moderate in that I've just been through too many fights, too many battles to think there's just one side to anything. There's always two, three, four, five sides to every issue. It's people are rarely, I swear, in 35 years of practice, I can count on the fingers of less than one hand the time I met people who truly believed they were evil. Truly believed that they were going to put it over on you. People believe in themselves. They care about their positions. And so I think in the legislature, despite what I said about the National Republican Party, I wanna be a person that Republicans know, eat with, talk to, socialize with, can talk freely about what they care about and listen to what I care about. Any response? No response, okay. Great. Mark, what's the most important single thing you're doing to get to know the people in the district who are not in your own town? Well, I haven't done that much yet. I've been kind of busy. It's funny how running for office takes up your time. But I'm gonna talk to a lot of voters in Plainfield and Marshfield. And that really helps. I find that when I go to voters' houses, sometimes people just say, thanks, take the brochure, I'm cooking, goodbye. But a lot of times, they really appreciate that someone's talking to them and they tell you what they think. And a lot of what I've heard, I didn't know. Or I knew, but I knew in theory, but hearing it from people face to face is not the same as knowing it in theory. I think if I'm elected, first of all, the session Tuesday through Friday, I think on Mondays I'm gonna be here in the district having coffee with people, with our elected officials. I think I'd like to spend some time in meetings, in select board meetings. I'd like to go to the select board. If I were to win, I'd talk to him. He's been all over in his community. I mean, he's well known, he knows the issues there. And that would, that would be a major effort on my part. I'd have to, you have to be taught. Same question, most important thing you're doing to get to know those and not in your town. Well, I have, I know people, because Marshfield and Plainfield share a front porch forum post and because of the school being joined, I do know people in Marshfield as well as Plainfield. I don't know as many people in Calis, and I've reached out to a number of people and I've had some fun encounters and I have, I've really grown to appreciate Calis. Do you know that Calis has its own road standard? Do you know that? All this beautiful, once again, getting back to what I was talking about. This is really, to me, what it's about. The reason why Calis kind of looks as nice as it does is suddenly they didn't adopt a road standard where they had to mow down every tree and make sure that every road is three-rod. So I think it's a wonderful community and I'm just, I don't know, I'm calling up people on this and that and just trying to touch base with everybody. I do have a, you know, I think a really good example of a really great legislator. Anybody know Jane Kitchell here? Man, you know, she's wonderful. I would like to be, I would like to be anywhere near as good as Jane Kitchell because she listens, she's calm, she's quiet, and usually she ends up being right. And I just wanted to say that. I think I really admire her as an example of a great legislator. Great, we haven't gotten all the way through all the questions, certainly not on my list, but not even all of those for the audience, but I think I'd like to switch to having the candidates ask each other questions for a little while if that's all right. And so I guess starting with you, asking the question, Mark, since you answered the last question, just ask you to ask for him a question and then I'll give him two minutes to respond to it and the candidates won't answer their own questions, only the ones posed by the other candidates. So when you're ready, Mark, thanks. I have to admit, I hadn't thought about this. We have something in common. I think we have a lot in common actually. Okay, so what I'm seeing is a difference between us is I'm more kind of, I'm more optimistic about the locals. I think I'm a little more positive about the local state relationship than you. So I guess my question is, am I right? You've listened to me and if you really feel so negative about it, do you want to be in the legislator? Well, here's the thing. I think that there are a lot of wonderful people in the legislature, including the people who are here in this room tonight. So my negativity springs from a feeling of being disenfranchised and also not having people's needs met when they should. So I, my upsetness and so forth really speaks to policy, not to people. I think I can get along with people and get things done. I think it's that people don't realize what the policy brings. So it's not that I don't want to go in there as a bomb thrower and destroy everything or anything. The bottom line is that when you have a policy, like here's an example, once again, a million examples, but as a select board member, you know this, every select board meeting or not every quarter, whatever it is, we go through and we okay something called fleet permits. Now, what is that? Fleet permit is that the trucks that use the town roads, if they're a fleet, they pay $10 a year. And if they're an individual truck, they pay $5 a year and we go through this rigmarole where we okay the fleet permits. And what's that about? Well, I looked up the law and the law says, well, it's about giving money to help the wear and tear on highways. Well, that's absurd, $10, what are you talking about? Well, what it's really about is it gets the towns to certify the insurance status of the trucks because that's what you need when you present the town clerk. That's an example of, to me, we either get real money to fix the roads or we stop the sort of thing of okaying other people's thing, I mean, this is sort of what I'm getting at. So I think that can be effective. Mark, question for Brown? I just did. You just did. Oh, sorry. He's got an event. So I actually, Mark has a very distinguished career in as a lawyer and head of a law school. And what I was interested in is one of the things that seems to be on the national stage is rule of law. That suddenly laws and the Supreme Court and institutions that we're used to are losing ground. And as someone who has dedicated a large part of their life to law stuff, I was wondering if you fear any of that in Vermont or if you could sort of give your perspective if you were in the legislature and what that means to you. Yeah, I have a lot of fear, not so much for Vermont, but I'm afraid. I think when you talk to law students, 20-somethings, that's holds, they come there 22 years old and you talk to them about rule of law. Before Trump, it was like Snoozeville. I wanna do environmental law. I wanna do racial, social justice. I wanna do whatever. Rule of law because they'd never lived in an era which told them what life might be like without it. And then after Trump, people were crying at the school, people were incredibly upset. All of a sudden, everybody's interested in the rule of law. I guess my feeling is we need to teach civics. There's just been a loss. We need to teach civics in the school. Chris's books, she's written on the Supreme Court, she's written on freedom of speech, she's written on freedom of the press for kids, picture books. We need to start there. So it's just something we've lost and I think we've really gotta push it. It's just not sexy. Yeah, it might be so. Until you lose. Exactly, then it's scary. Shall we do one more round of those? Mark, Karen, one more. I don't have enough. You're out. This is it's closing. Yeah, I think people have endured us for as much as they should. So let's have each candidate, starting with Bram, give a 90 second close and we'll call it an evening. Great, I just wanted to get back to the motel question. I'm not throwing people in the street and my criticism of the motel program is not that it's not needed. It's certainly needed. And I wouldn't mind a motel program that had an ending or a starting. It's just that when the state is embracing such difficult and trying questions, the cruelty and cavalierness of what is going on is mind boggling. I mean, we live in a country and I think people in this room would be absolutely shocked by what goes on. And I think it's Dickinsonian or whatever. It's something out of another era. I mean, I, you know, Erica told me a story the other day of a man who was sleeping, you know, in a parking lot and he came in to get some food and the motels are filled, no place to go. This is an elderly man. And he, Erica offered him a tent and he couldn't use it. He couldn't physically put up the tent. I got, you know, Erica was crafty and figured out a way to get that guy housed. But my God, what kind of country do we live in? What, where are we? And I think in terms of the tax questions and the spending, we have to basically shape policy. Sorry. I don't want to cut you off, but that's your 90 seconds. Go ahead, I'm sorry. Thank you. Mark? This is the end. Okay, so I've really learned a lot of doing this and I thank, I just feel privileged and wonderful that to have been talking to people, teaching and I just want to thank everybody for, I'm thrilled that this many of you came out. I mean, hey, you know, you could be at home having dinner and having a drink, a glass of wine or whatever and I or soda water, whatever, and you're doing this. And I'm just really grateful. I'm grateful for the intelligent questions. I've spent my life as a negotiator and as a collaborator and a builder of coalitions and if I'm in the legislature, I'll just keep doing it and listening to you and enjoying it. So thank you. So we're done. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. And thanks all of you.