 Hello and welcome to Burlington Progressive TV. My name is Carter Newbezer. I'm an at-large member of the Burlington Progressive Party Steering Committee and a community organizer here in Burlington. The Progressive Coalition was originally formed to help elect Bernie Sanders to be mayor of Burlington, and since then has become the most successful third party in the nation without accepting a dime of corporate campaign cash. Burlington Progressive Party TV will help highlight community members, activists, elected officials, and other folks in the community as they fight for economic, social, environmental, and racial justice. If you believe in our collective vision, please consider going to progressiveparty.org, I should say, and donating or getting involved locally to support progressive candidates and issues that we all care so much about. Tonight we're going to be talking with City Councilor Brian Pine from Ward 3, but in the meantime I did want to highlight a few different things that are happening right now. It is the new year, so I did just want to touch upon some of my favorite moments from 2019, some moments that I found particularly frustrating, frankly, and I wanted to start with money in politics. There's been a really huge effort right now in Burlington over the past couple years to really increase the amount of money across the board that folks are spending on local races. So as someone who first got involved in politics and organizing on Senator Sanders' 2016 run as a volunteer organizer in my hometown of New Britain, Connecticut, I was really disappointed to see folks raising just obscene amounts of money recently, a few months ago, kind of in the lead-up to City Council races here. It was really frustrating and I've knocked over, since I've moved to Vermont, I've knocked a couple thousand doors in City Council races for issue-based organizing, and I don't think I've ever once heard at the door that we need to be spending more money, especially more corporate money in our local races. It really should be something that's about values and issues and a debate about how to move our community forward. So it was something that I was really frustrated about. But yeah, I think that was the biggest thing. It was really frustrating to see and I hope, kind of moving forward, we see more from people of every party really focused on issues and not necessarily raising big checks from some of the worst landlords in our community and some folks who maybe don't have the best interests of the entire community at heart. But like I said, we are going to be speaking with Ward 3 City Councilor Brian Pine tonight. He is an incumbent City Councilor, a progressive and someone who's also going to be seeking re-election in March. So Brian, welcome to Burlington Progressives TV. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks Carter. It's good to be here with you. Yeah, absolutely. So I first thought I would kind of preface it. Last episode we talked to three newcomers to, you know, there was the first time running for office and they're newcomers to the progressive party. So I wanted to start the same way, kind of generally how did you first get involved in politics? I know you've been involved for many, many years and done a lot of different things in terms of really fighting for folks who are struggling to make ends meet and really focusing on those issues. So I wonder if you could just give us a little bit of background about yourself and how you first got involved. Sure, sure. Thank you. The opportunity that I had in 1981 was pretty unusual. I arrived a few months after Bernie Sanders was sworn in as our mayor and that was his first term. And it really opened up politics to myself and many of my friends at the university. I think we were attracted to Bernie's message and he was speaking to the issues that were front and center for us, which at the time were primarily global and international issues. We were really still in the arms race and so we were very focused on nuclear disarmament. The U.S. government was committing atrocities in Central America and many of us were organizing around that issue, raise awareness and try to stop what was a horrible foreign policy. And we found in Bernie we found a mayor who not only took care of the basics of balancing the budget and repairing the streets and plowing the streets and providing public safety, but also a mayor who would speak on those issues which really resonated with students and myself included. So that was my first introduction to politics really. Before that I grew up in a fairly apolitical family. So it was a great awakening for myself and many others and we were following closely what was happening in City Hall, which for students I don't think had happened ever before or maybe small numbers, but not in the numbers. So you would go to City Council meetings and previously meetings were held literally in an office, not in Contoys. So council meetings were never held. It was called the Board of Aldermen and it was predominantly men, one or two women, very conservative Republicans and Democrats and they teamed up to prevent Bernie from carrying out his agenda and his mandate. The first term and they really prevented him from hiring his own staff. They stood in the way of a lot of the things that he was attempting to do and that galvanized the public and it really galvanized the students. I got involved registering students, turning out students for elections and that was really my introduction to local politics and so it went from there to more of a local focus as time went on. I found that at the local level there was so much you could do to tilt the scales in favor of those who were often left out and that was what attracted me to the progressives and it was a coalition. It started out as the independent coalition. There was citizens party, there was progressive coalition for the longest period and then it morphed into a party later. Awesome, awesome. Yeah, I think especially young folks like myself don't always know the history. I know I've spent the last couple of years learning it and it's like as a political nerd myself it's extremely, extremely interesting and definitely topical given kind of what's going on right now with Iran and kind of more international issues. So kind of turning a little more to the past couple of years I think you first got on two years ago or not the first time but got on to the council. Yeah, I came back to the council once again. So I guess what have kind of been your priority so far over the past two years and you are running for reelection so kind of what are you looking towards in the future provided you win? Yeah, I've had three really different experiences. My first term on the council was 91 to 93 and we had the mayor's office because we had Peter Clavelle as mayor and so we were really helping to advance the administration's agenda and trying to build coalitions with other members on the council and that was largely pretty successful. And then he was defeated in 1993 and I served for two years under Republican mayor and I really like Peter Brownell, he's a good person. I didn't agree with him on very many issues and we really went to battle on the issues and you know we won some, we lost some but I think it was a good opportunity to learn to be part of governing while you were the opposition and so that was an important lesson. We learned I think that if you turn out dozens and dozens of people to a hearing or an event it's going to have an impact and so that was really, that was a bit emboldened us a bit to turn people out so that's what we did and we continued to do that and that was always Bernie's matches by the way as well. I was active in the tenants rights movement in the 80s and Bernie would say, listen I fully support what you're doing but unless you can turn out 20 or 30 people you won't be getting what you're looking for here. So learned hard the way that to strengthen numbers and turning people out and collective action is what really results in meaningful change. So the last two years on the council it's been you know a totally different experience after maturing and going through part of most of my career not all of my career but working for the city for over 18 years seeing it from a different perspective and then leaving the city and then coming back in 2018 it's you know it continues to be somebody asked me the other day, do you really enjoy it and it's an interesting, I don't know how to answer that question because you don't necessarily do it to enjoy it you do it to have an impact and to hopefully make change that you're seeking to make or not some people don't want to make change but my goal is to be part of you know being an agent of change and so it sometimes is humbling how hard it is to actually move forward on an issue in a very meaningful way in a way that you can actually talk to regular people and find out is it affecting you what we're doing is that impacting you just going to meetings and having debates and taking votes and you're really not seeing a whole lot of change so I think that's one of the most challenging parts about being a local elected official is the change happens actually pretty slowly Yeah it's definitely something that I've noticed as well and like I think it's especially for young folks and organizers and just like activists in general I think something I'm learning more and more the more I'm involved is just the amount of time things take even when you have people in the same room who agree on a certain value set and kind of you know not just being not just campaigning but once you get into office actually just the amount of research and time and thinking about different ways of talking about an issue and making sure that the process in which you're like developing policy is really inclusive so I think that's a really good point so I did want to talk about kind of moving forward there's been I think for as long as I've been involved and it sounds like for as long as you've been involved a really robust discussion around affordability and I think even more so there's tends to be at least in kind of the recent decade in these last couple of years of it there's been a real focus on climate so I guess from your perspective what can we kind of be doing that's tangible, that's doable, that we think you know we'll have the votes to pass given the fact that we do have a mayor you know we are the party in opposition so to speak in government right now we don't have kind of a working majority on the council so what can we be doing on those issues and where have you seen success and where have you seen you know we just need to pick up more seats we need to pick up the mayor's office I think the issues where we can find common ground on are the ones largely around sort of the local climate agenda that we agreed as a council if there's a climate emergency I think it was unanimous I'm pretty sure it was unanimous it might have been 11 to 1 but it was close to unanimous that we have a climate emergency and it's a crisis and that we need to seek out local solutions local innovative ways to impact that I'm really focused on and I believe most of the councillors would agree that you know we need to find that just transition so that when we do make policy decisions we're thinking about the impacts and maybe even unintended consequences on vulnerable members of this community so that we don't you know I want the burdens and the benefits of action on climate change to be shared equally that's my focus and if we basically stick it to somebody while they're already kind of down and make it hard for them I think that's something we have to be really cautious about and find creative ways to mitigate that if we need to come up with something that will make people's lives a little more difficult we need to find a way to I think offset that and mitigate that so we might have a call here yeah that makes a lot of sense I think we might have a call and just as a reminder to folks wherever the camera is our number is just 802-862-3966 and I will do my best to work the phones properly and it looks like we do have one call and just as a reminder everybody and I gave this disclaimer last time you know when we bring candidates on and we want to talk about issues that's exactly what we want to do we want to talk about issues and we want to make sure that we're having a respectful dialogue and I think that's something regardless if we're on public access or in person or at a city council debate that we're focused on but let's attempt the work of the phones properly and hello you're on the air yes I was just wondering I don't know if Bernie was there but the progressive party was around when he was the first mayor because in the 70's part of the 70's a good part of it he was the Liberty Union was Peter Diamonds don't and when he first ran what he went in 1980 by 10 volts or something but they might have come in the later part of his terms way back and Clavelle was but I don't think in the beginning there was a progressive party that was the late 80's at the earliest I'm quite sure I like to see pictures anyways but I really seriously doubt it but more importantly than that when Clavelle got in how much money did he lose at the city retirement thing and then with the city market getting and I'll say that was about Shaw's against city market who won the first time Shaw's said they were going to build the store so they got the progressive got together and had a thing where there'd be too much traffic so they had to do it over of course the city market one that time and then Clavelle had a thing going on where he had an extra tax and he didn't call it an extra tax but who caught him was Candace Page of the Burlington Free Prison in a big meeting and he finally had to come out and admit it so that was deception there then on the third time the Burlington telecom that went on for I don't know how many years was Bob Kiss and I'll tell you what when you people when you're a mayor and you have closed meetings what you're doing what you're doing is you're denying stuff to those people that voted for you that campaigned for you and supported you and even volunteered for you I thought that was the worst thing somebody could do like a bunch of lie-blind sheep and Bob Kiss was that much of a mayor anyway that's why I had the name keep it stupid stupid you know I just think there's so much to progress about one part of it they don't admit the whole truth of the whole picture this is part of the other side but it's only part of it I'm not going to go on but I'm sure you can understand my side of it too thank you very much absolutely and what was your name oh I think we lost but there was a lot there to cover quite a bit I think he raised I'll start in the beginning he's exactly right there was no progressive party when Bernie was mayor as a matter of fact the coalition formed probably in the mid-80s because I was actually one of the first people that was hired very part-time just out of college in 85 to do some work for what was becoming the progressive coalition so he is very he's correct about that the party formed actually quite a bit later in the late 90s even I think it was only formed as a party properly and I however I ran in 91 after both Terry Brecius and Tom Smith were elected to go to Montpelier as progressives as that was the label designation at that time so we used the designation progressive but we did call the coalition and that continued and Peter Clavel ran as independent in 89 was elected in 89 as independent ran in 91 when I ran as a progressive ran in 93 as a progressive was defeated then but came back to win again in 95 as a progressive so there's a little bit of that history there I think is worth touching on that alternative to the property tax that the caller mentioned is actually a really important point and I would beg to differ that Peter denied it because we had many many public meetings where the franchise fee was discussed and explained and just to summarize the franchise fee is an attempt to get away from the property tax which to fund city services continually continues to be a really regressive way to fund city services it hurts lower income fixed income people much harder and it hits them harder than it does others so Peter and Bernie always push for alternatives to the property tax to summarize the franchise fee it gets down to details but I'll just try and do it a dollar raised through the property tax was at the time roughly half from the homeowner and half from the business community roughly 50 50 a dollar raised from the franchise from the business community 25 cents from the homeowner and 25 cents from the big institutions like the university and the hospital that pays zero in property taxes so I would argue that it was an incredibly innovative way to balance our budget without cutting services and without putting it on the homeowner and the business community to bring in the hospital and the university and federal government and state government they all pay the franchise fee so that's why the franchise fee is a more fair way to raise revenue so that's the secret what happened with Shaw's honestly was that Shaw's as a multinational corporation came into Burlington and they picked their site on Pine Street and they wanted to rezone the land but they knew they couldn't get it re-zoned just south of the Maltex building and they wanted to build a massive 50,000 square foot store there and they knew they couldn't get it but they were basically doing a bait and switch and saying oh no no we'll put it up on South Winooski and so they won they could not build a store less than 55,000 square feet their formula was we build 55,000 square foot boxes and we know exactly how to lay them out we have circulation exactly the same we're not going to build a 17,000 square foot store so that's the that's the truth there really Shaw's pulled one over on people and it was unfortunate in the end Shaw's has improved to be a particularly great corporate citizen really so I wouldn't I wouldn't be looking to Shaw's as a great example and in fact that market serves a lot of people think it's an elite market but in fact the generic and everyday products are actually priced very competitively so I think that's something really important to point out and large percentage of people almost 20% of the sales go to people who are using food stamps so it tells you who's actually using the store it's a myth that it's just elite crunchy granola yuppies that's just not that's not true yeah well and this highlights something that question highlights something I think is really important to you specifically but also a number of different folks involved in progressive politics both directly with city council issues but also statewide and also within the party itself is that and something that I really attribute to you is really having a kind of depth of knowledge of the history but in addition really having a depth of knowledge of the issues really really in depth and really understanding how there's the political side and actually passing policy once you get it passed how is it implemented how are you working with government agencies especially if the mayor isn't a progressive or isn't necessarily like minded on a lot of issues how do you parse that dynamic and I think you more so than I you know most people on the council frankly in the progressive caucus I think bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to that position so it's something I definitely appreciate and I think that that just highlighted a local government nerd I guess you could say it's definitely in my blood and it's something I get a lot of satisfaction out of because I see it as a way to again tilt the scales a little bit in favor of people who are who government sometimes forgets often forgets and if we leave it to the market to solve our problems I think many people are left behind and I believe that government has a role to play and I've just been incredibly lucky to be part of something where people believe in the idea of you know government as a force for good and as a force for change and to hear so on some of the issues I think one idea that around the moving basically moving more towards electricity as a form of energy and away from natural gas is going to require essentially a lot of getting homeowners and rental property owners to convert buildings from space heat provided or heat provided by natural gas to heat provided by air source heat pumps and there's a cost to that and that's the challenge but I there are models out there for how a municipal utility can finance those improvements for the property owner in a way that is essentially cost neutral so because you save so much each month you do have a new payment to pay off the equipment you've installed but that payment is actually less than the amount you've saved so if you save 50 bucks but you're paying 45 to cover the financing 45 bucks in your pocket not a lot you can get a couple cups of coffee but still it's something so that's the idea maybe one in some places right exactly but that's called tariff don bill financing it's it's still kind of it's not a new concept at all it's a concept that hasn't taken off all over the country but it has taken off in some places and if we offer tariff based financing in Burlington I think it would be a huge shot in the arm for moving more towards renewables you know theoretically we're 100% renewable on the electricity side so every time someone converts from natural gas to electricity they're moving to a renewable energy source so I think that's incredibly important the other thing is 50% of our emissions comes from transportation and that's not just true in the city that's true statewide huge challenge huge huge challenge with a largely disperse sort of population where people are little pockets here little pockets there Burlington has the advantage but we are a fairly small city so 43,000 people we're fairly densely packed together transit works really well here it works really well in Manuski and it starts to be less cost effective once you get outside of the urban core but we really need to we need to grapple with public transit because making it more convenient you know the price of the transit is important but even convenience for people if it's more frequent so if you can catch a bus every 10 minutes you're going to use the bus and if we make it really more difficult to have a car downtown people are going to use buses yeah so it's really important that we look at that and I think we'll find common ground I really do I don't think that's going to be a partisan issue I really don't well that's good to hear because I think the effects of climate change certainly aren't partisan exactly who they're affecting so that is good to hear quickly I did want to touch upon you know there's been a lot of a lot of media circus around kind of what's going on with the mayor's office and the police department and the resignation resignation of our police chief I guess you know there's dozens and dozens of articles and if folks haven't already heard about it I encourage them to check it out but I wonder kind of moving forward seeing some of you know what the mayor's even described as like cultural problems and you know potentially cultural problems and leadership but also there's been a lot of uproar just about transparency and communicating things to the public I think kind of with an eye towards reform and kind of how we move forward as a community you know what have you been and I know it's still kind of developing and there's a lot there's always stuff coming out it seems but kind of moving forward how do you think we kind of ameliorate these things so they don't happen in the future one idea that I'm open to I'm not convinced yet that it's the right idea but I believe it deserves full discussion in the community is the idea of electing police commissioners we have seven commissioners now we would need to have eight and then it gets odd because then you have a tie sometimes but we can figure that out if you've been critically elected every ward gets a commissioner maybe you add a ninth commissioner who gets elected city wide that's just one idea I just sort of threw that out there but that would really change that would change the level of accountability it could I mean it doesn't always right so I think that's been out there that's being discussed that's one idea we absolutely need a clear social media policy in all city departments and that has been taking too long so I'll take some responsibility for that we should have done it long ago well I appreciate that and yeah I think there's a ton of other issues we could unpack and it's definitely even that one as well we could dive in really deep on the whole show on that we could easily do an hour and a half on that but yeah we are running out of time though so I did want to thank you for coming in and speaking with us and talking about some issues that you're focused on but I want to thank all of you at home on TV this was our fourth episode and we as always are airing new episodes the first Friday of every month live at 5.25 here on Channel 17 and I want to thank as always Channel 17 for having us once again though the progressive party is the most successful third party in the nation and are electing folks up and down the ballot throughout this state without a dime of corporate campaign money so if these are issues that we've talked about tonight that you agree with that we've talked about in the past rather please consider going to progressiveparty.org donating becoming a monthly donor that's what allows us to fund our movement because we do reject any corporate money or big money of any kind so thank you again for tuning in and thanks again to Channel 17 hope everybody has a good night bye now