 Good evening and welcome to ongoing coverage of election season general election season. We're doing primary forums for the primary election that will happen on August 9. I believe you can go now to your town clerk and get a ballot or request an absentee ballot. It's important to know that if you are going to vote in the August primary, which we hope you do, you will not see a ballot mail to you. For this, you will see a ballot mailed in the general election, but you will not see a ballot mail to you for the primary election. With us tonight is Peter Duvall who's running against Phil Scott. And I should know the name of the other candidate and I do not have fellows. Thank you. In the Republican primary. So again, these folks are running to receive the Republican nomination to sit on the ballot for the general election. So Peter welcome. Thank you for joining us. And if the opening statement is just to let us know your name your party affiliations who's supporting you and why you're running. I'm Peter Duvall. I grew up in Essex, and I've lived in Vermont almost all my life. Short trips abroad. Time abroad. I got my name on the Republican ballot so that I could have, you know, early debates with Phil Scott, but he's not interested in campaigning or debating. So my, my fusion campaign, which is a political science term is really to get votes from all all corners. Not just seeking votes from the Republican primary ballot but from any on any ballot that anyone decides to use is right in my name on the primary ballot for progressive party or Democratic Party. And I would love to have. I'd love to be nominated by all three parties. That would be awesome. Of course, that's not going to happen. It's something that can happen in Vermont. There are other other candidates who do do get fusion nominations, particularly between the Democratic and progressive parties now. But Republican Democratic candidates have also done fusion candidacies. Jim Douglas is the last one. So I have a question, you know, sort of following up on that and I know we have a series of questions to get through, but we can also have a more relaxed conversations since you don't have an opponent here. Do you plan to run in the general election regardless of how if you get elected in the primary. So the, the principle reason for for running is the effect of debate, change the words and way of thinking about political questions that are before us. I went for I went for the race that seemed to have the opportunity to do that. And, you know, nobody else is showing up for the, for the campaign. So it looks like I will have to run as an independent in general election in order to get get some time debating and in media. I'm heading to these questions. State pension and there was a state pension reform bill that was passed. I'm wondering thought about this at all. Maybe one way to approach it is, if you were governor would you have supported that state pension reform bill, would you have vetoed it the way the governor did. What's your opinion, what's your, what's your approach to approaching what's, what's your position on approaching state pension shortfalls and the budget crunch. I was kind of surprised that he would try to veto something that was veto proof, but you know that there's, there's a serious problem. And I'm still confused about how it developed, because there are a lot of interested parties, and to allow us the shortfall to develop over decades, you know really means that a lot of people were either not aware. There was a problem, or they were aware and didn't want to tell anybody. It would seem to me that if I were in the, in the union, I'd be, I'd be pretty upset with the union for not keeping track of this. So, I want to know more about this, I want to know how it developed and why the shortfalls accumulated over time. The, to me, I always want to look at all of the issues with an eye to the environmental aspects of it. You know, is this, is it, what is what is the earth oriented perspective say about having pensions you know and and retiring even. And what is that what is the intergenerational effect. And, you know, for the pensions to accumulate such a debt over time, and then, you know, turn on suddenly a correction seems like real inequity between generations. And that seems to be happening in so many ways I mean any kind of pollution is is an intergenerational inequity, any kind of resource. Depletion is an intergenerational inequity, and how much of this can be pushed off onto a younger generations I mean, we have such a short horizon for those decisions. You know, election cycle, or even the news cycle, and I'd really like to change that so that we have longer horizons, and we can see that a wait a second maybe. Maybe we need to have a haircut across the entire age range here. I know that's necessary, but it certainly seems like there should be, there should be some analysis of the intergenerational impact of fixing pensions, or any of the other issues that are before the state. Yeah. Thank you. We're going to move on to the next question, which is about prop two and prop five, two prepositions that are on the ballot. So what's your position on these propositions they're both passed by the House and Senate we expect that we'll see them on the ballot in November. They should both pass. They're widely supported. Say that I'm glad that prop two was revised with Dick McCormick's effort I think he was mostly responsible for for making a little bit of a slowdown in the process. I think we could we've seen from the, you know, recent Supreme Court action that would be really good to have some backstop in the state constitutions for things like slavery or abortion that that the original text was just to eliminate all reference to the slavery which I think, you know, as Dick McCormick pointed out is, you know, like a racing history, but it also created the, you know, the possibility that slavery would be possible and from I thought that was a pretty, pretty good move to fix that on on prop five. They're, you know, it's, it's good that a reproductive rights are in the Constitution but at the same time, this proposal grants state interest in reproduction that is is not specified in the current law. But to me, that's an opening for who knows what, you know, it could be any anything doesn't even have to be related to abortion because there's the proposal is broader than just just abortion so it should pass. I think we'll look maybe at the second part of the prop five, after it's passed and see if that's actually a good thing to have in the Constitution. This question the next question on citizen legislature. Maybe approaches a little bit about what you're talking about horizons, you know how decisions are made, how we grapple with issues in the state of Vermont. There's been a lot of conversations and opinions going on about should we have a citizen legislature, should we have a professional legislature, nothing that's imminent. What's your thought on how the Vermont citizen legislature works and just generally how you would address civic engagement across the state. I hadn't heard about professionalizing the legislature but given how well Congress works I would say maybe that's not a great idea. The one thing I do really like it's a two year terms for everybody, including the governor. I think that's very important. It's way better to have a scheduled two year election and to have four year terms for people and then try to have and then have recall elections that start right up, you know, as soon as somebody's elected that's, that's anti democratic really. And I just asked how does that jive with the idea of needing to have sort of wider horizons to meet issues like climate change or talking about the pension. I'm just curious about that two year versus the four year, giving people a longer runway to get work done and really dig into issues. I think if, I think if you don't know what you're, you're planning to do, by the time you're elected, it's not, you know, something's not quite right. You should be able to hit the ground running and get something done within a year or two and have a, you know, go up plan for the next two years there's there's no evidence that politicians ever might have a short life span. I mean they have their wants to get on the escalator, they're on escalator, whether it's going slow or fast, and we don't we don't throw out politicians very often. So that's so I don't buy, I don't buy the whole business about needing four years to get something done I think that's just convenience is the best thing I can think of or entrenchment. Who knows. Well, I mean on that I'm going to jump down to the impact question. If you hit the ground running, you know, if you were elected governor come November, what's going to be different for the people of your district or the state as a whole because you're elected. Well, I think, I think a war in Ukraine puts all new whole new urgency on anything related to climate and environment. And where I was, I would have said this a year ago two years ago, we need to have conservation right now, and not mess around with complicated solutions to someday 1020 years from now, have somewhat better infrastructure or buildings or vehicles or whatever, whatever it is. It's important to look to the farthest and goal, which is zero impact, we're going to have to do way more than just get to zero. There's no emissions, and they're, they're, there's methane to worry about there's, there are all kinds of other chemicals that contribute to global warming, and there's ocean acidification there's biodiversity loss. And insect apocalypse happening right now. All these things are right now, it's not 2050 that we've got to worry about it's 2023. And so, we need to address the way we live. So that then, once we've fixed that, because it's high consuming what we're doing right now, any person in Vermont is a high consuming human. So that's that. And then we'll be able to figure out what kind of technology we need to go with that, because it might not be a Tesla, which the moment it rolls off the assembly line has already emitted, I think at least four times greenhouse gases equivalent to carbon dioxide so Let's stay on this question a little longer than climate change. And what do you think, you know, specifically the state is in that process of mitigating climate change where where is it working well and how would you approach it as the governor. Well, I've been in the energy field for a long time, energy and transportation so I've been able to see over time, the same ideas recycled repackaged represented as new stuff often, but everything, everything's old. You know, they're economists in the 70s understood the basic problems here. Atmospheric scientists understood the basic problems 100 years ago 150 even 200 years ago for a speculated about greenhouse gases and climate change so while things are getting more refined, I guess, and there's higher precision, it may not be higher accuracy that the numbers are just, you know, they're just converging. And then we've got these, these tipping points and specials that have already been crossed and IPCC isn't even thinking about that, which means that that the people in in in all of the jurisdictions, whether it's national or state are not aware as they process the needs or the requirements of responding to the climate crisis. We're gonna have to, we have to leapfrog some of that and say, whoops. We need those polar ice caps, they can't, they can't melt, they have to stay frozen how we're going to how is that going to happen. And whoops, we need, we need to allow the oceans to recover and they can't be acidified and they, they can't be overfished, how we're going to do that is these are. These are beyond the incremental things that have been happening so far. Plus, in Vermont, we've, we've been in a state of self deception for quite some time, even back into the 90s when Vermont joint owners hydro Quebec contract was being considered and that was a $6 billion power sales agreement between utilities in Vermont and hydro Quebec. The bankrupted GMP citizens utilities and CVPS. The, but the, the, the state and the legislature made a, like a deliberate decision to ignore all environmental impacts associated with that power purchase agreement. And so, any other, any other source of electricity was, was being assessed for its environmental impact against something that was assumed to not have any impact and that's, that's clearly not the case for mega hydro. So, biomas, biomass is the same thing. Vermont assumes that biomass is has no greenhouse gas emissions and that's clearly not the case. So, obviously, the climate is seems like it's the biggest issue for you. We have about a minute left, and we didn't touch on health care equity, local control. And, you know, I recognize this format is a little, it's a little different in that way but so I just wonder if you want to give some closing statements. I would like to address health care equity, local control. In any way, I invite you to do so in your closing comments. Yeah, that's a lot to cover. So I'll just, I'll just say in general. I look at an overflowing bathtub as a problem as a problem with a valve that needs to be turned off rather than a problem that needs more people bailing with more spoons or cups and health care is a good example. So the state's interest should be that to try to keep everybody healthy, not not to call medical care or medical services health care, all the medical services which is what they are, and after helping everybody stay stay healthy to manage the demand for medical services. And we can we can use that lens to look at a lot of things that state does because the state has this tendency to create institutions or industries that fix problems but then all of a sudden they're dependent on the problem existing. The problem must persist in order for these people to keep working. Well, Peter, you have, you certainly have passion and commitment for the community that, and I appreciate you showing up and being here for this Republican primary forum. And it sounds like we might see you as an independent candidate in the general election forum. I'm not not calling any, you know, I'm not calling any predictions here sorry about that. But thank you very much for being here today. Thank you for having me. And thank you all for watching town meeting TVs continued coverage of primary election season 2022. Don't forget to vote on or before August 9.