 Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ Interview Show where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. So this is the beginning of Vermont's political season and we're taking time to talk with those candidates who will be representing us in an official capacity and who are also members of our community. So today we couldn't be more delighted to welcome the candidate for Treasurer. Please welcome to All Things Michael Piecek. Well, thank you very much, Keith. It's my pleasure to be here. I really appreciate the invitation and looking forward to our conversation as well. Okay, but the one thing that's missing is I don't see Jedi in the background. Yeah, Jedi is sleeping on the couch right now upside down. As well, they should be. I had said on one of our shows that Jedi was going to be the star of the campaign so people should get ready. Yeah, we're keeping him in reserve for when we need him, but I think his debut will be not so far down the road. I think he'll make for a very good social media and Facebook post dog. So very cute dog, but he's getting his beauty sleep right now. So now that we've piqued everyone's interest, we'll be sure to put up the campaign's website so they can start going in and looking for the pictures. But let's talk about you. You have a very strong connection and roots here in Vermont. Could you share with people why Vermont is important to you? Yeah, for sure. So I grew up, I was born and raised in Brattaburl. That's sort of my home community and that's where my parents still live and one of my sisters still lives there and my nieces. So a lot of family connections still to the southern part of the state and certainly Vermont generally, but the southern part of the state, I feel real close kinship with having spent so much time there in my youth and it was really an excellent place to grow up. Like so many of the communities across Vermont at that time and today, you know, very safe, you know, real community atmosphere, everybody checked in on each other. You couldn't get into too much trouble because somebody would tell on you pretty quickly. So, you know, it was all very sort of, you know, sort of like you would picture on the Hallmark Channel or something, which, you know, I don't think it was too far off. But, you know, I went away for school out of state and law school out of state and always had an interest in coming back to Vermont. I took a detour for a couple of years before doing that and worked in New York City at a law firm there, which I really appreciated that experience. I knew not just quickly, but I knew going into it that it wasn't something I wanted to pursue as a career or spend a lot of time, you know, doing, but I still really appreciate in value the experience that it gave me because you're really sort of competing at a really high level against other very well-trained lawyers and financial people and it gives you a sense of what you have to do both in terms of the substance and the process in order to get something really complicated and really important, you know, across the finish line and do it in a way that people can understand and, you know, it's clear and easy and successful. So really, you know, appreciated that experience, but was always eager to come back to Vermont. And I did come back to Vermont about eight and a half years ago to join the Department of Financial Regulation as the Deputy Commissioner there in the Securities Division. And I think people most recently will have known you from your tenure as commissioner, a financial regulation, but also as the person who helped to coordinate Vermont's response to COVID. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it was unexpected, right? An unexpected situation for all of us really, right? I mean, you hear about things like pandemics and you think of those as, you know, something that happened right a century ago that there wouldn't be a pandemic. It was something like a famine, like something that, you know, previous generations had to deal with, but in our modern world, in our modern society, we wouldn't have to deal with. And I think we all learned that maybe the inverse is true, at least as it relates to pandemics that, you know, all of us, you know, encroaching more and more on wildlife habitat, on climate change, also encroaching on certain habitats, people and certain animals coexisting in ways we didn't years and years ago. And then the interconnectedness of our world, that something happens in China, and it's in New York in a day, and it's across the country in a week, you know, that it just we're so interconnected that things like that really spread. And it's a good, you know, in many ways, globalization and that global supply chain are good for a lot of the, you know, things that we take for granted every day, but we saw some of the downsides of that during the pandemic. But yeah, so, you know, I was the commissioner for the last six years at DFR. And then, you know, early on in the pandemic in March of 2020, the governor called a few of us up to his cabinet room and said, you know, that they wanted to, he wanted to meet about COVID-19. And the first thing he came into the room, we're sitting there. And the first thing he said, he looked at me and he said, Mike, you might be wondering why I asked you to come here today. You know, and I kind of was wondering, but I, you know, DFR handles health insurance. So I thought it had to do with, you know, how are we going to have health insurance companies pay for testing or for treatment or PPE or something in that, you know, variety. But, you know, the governor went through a list of like five or six things that he was concerned about. And one of them at the top list was the fact that Vermont was an older state. And when you look at China, you look at Northern Italy at the time, people that were older were having more severe health outcomes. So his concern was, what does that mean for Vermont? Are we going to have more people, a disproportionate number of people requiring hospitalization or requiring ventilators? Are we going to have a disproportionate number of people in the ICU? What do we need in terms of PPE and the like? So there's a number of other things on his list as well, but that was one that he sort of tasked me and our department to start thinking about. And, you know, pretty quickly, you know, before getting overwhelmed by that task, we kind of said, okay, well, I need, we need to build a good, we need to build a foundation here. We need to build a team that can handle these kind of, this kind of question, not just for the short term, but, you know, for the long term as well. And we brought in a few people from within our department who had, you know, expertise in actuarial work. So they're good at forecasting, you know, different experiential numbers and maybe some people that were good at forecasting financial numbers. We brought in some outside expertise as well that were really smart on infectious disease. So a professor from Columbia, a professor from Northwestern, and then Oliver Wyman, which was a large international consulting firm that had some pretty sophisticated people working at, including the primary partner with us that had written the CDC's pandemic plan about a decade ago. So all of these people together really formed the core of what we were able to do in terms of the data and the analysis and present to the governor. Initially internally, we were presenting this information internally for about three weeks. And then I remember they kept getting asked to the press conference, you know, are you sure we're going to have enough hospital beds? Are you sure we're going to have enough ventilators? What is, you know, do you know how many cases we're going to have? And finally, they set up a media briefing for myself. And I think my mark, I think, I think it was Mike Smith. And we sort of ran through, you know, our projections and our numbers and our analysis and our trends and our expectation in terms of, you know, if we did this certain mitigation measure, if we did that one, what would happen? And I remember also thinking, okay, well, that was it, you know, we're done with that, like public briefing. And at the end of the briefing, somebody said, when's the next one going to be, you know, when are you going to do this again? And I thought, oh, again, like, you know, that was it. So I then very quickly thereafter, you know, it started, you know, every Friday and then eventually got moved to every Tuesday and but we did it week after week after week for, for two years. And it really was information that was, I hope, important for Vermonters to understand where we were and what they could do to protect themselves. But important information internally for the governor and others to make decisions based on the trajectories that we were seeing both in Vermont, New England, and the world as well. So really, really a highlight of my career in public service, in terms of the both the impact, I mean, just seeing, you know, this task that we had to deal with, but also the way that Vermonters responded just, you know, I mentioned growing up in Brattleboro and how it was a community. I really think we just looked out for each other in a way here in Vermont that maybe wasn't replicated anywhere else in the country, maybe anywhere else in the globe that we know each other, we wanted to protect each other, we understood the information, we're willing to listen to it, and then we were willing to sacrifice and, and execute on it so that we could keep people safe. And it was great. It was just great to witness that and be a part of it. And I think great for all Vermonters to have been a part of it. And, and we thank you for having done that and spending the time to look at actuarial tables and actually understand what they are trying to tell you and then communicate that to the people making decision and then to us. The other high profile issue that as Commissioner of Financial Regulation, that you were involved in over the last two years, and for which probably most people don't realize the level of your involvement was about the current debate about what to do with the pension funds. Could you talk a little bit about that process and what it was that was ultimately recommended? Yeah, and I'd be happy to. So, you know, if you remember back two years ago, the current Treasurer, Beth Pierce, presented information that showed that our expected return of seven and a half percent, I think it was at the time, was sort of too high vis-a-vis the expectation of the market so that it needed to go down to seven percent. And because our expected rate of return was going down by a half a percent, it actually had a pretty significant impact on the unfunded liability because we were expecting over the next 15 years to get greater returns on our investments than what really could be expected. So, you know, the unfunded liability grew because our investment rate went down, our expected investment rate went down, and it grew about $600 million. So, it wasn't insignificant. And that sort of kicked off a whole discussion two years ago in the legislature about reforming the pension system. And there was a lot of focus on the benefit side, what benefits could be reduced, what contributions should be increased. And it was an extraordinarily hard moment for everybody involved, right? But for teachers and for state employees who were in the middle of the pandemic, I mean, they're in the middle of doing work that they've never been asked to do before. They were being stretched thin. They were having, you know, physical exhaustion, emotional exhaustion. And then to say, you know, many people, you know, we're thinking, oh gosh, like what is my horizon for retirement, right? Like you're going through this horrible experience. It's a human, natural human response. And then part of the plan was, well, you're going to have to work another six years or seven years or five years. So, I think that of all of the things that were being discussed really upset people viscerally. And I understand completely why. So that proposal, you know, didn't end up going through, but the legislature did as a result of that form a pension task force. And it was kind of a similar, you know, situation where I remember a policy director coming in and saying, hey, they have the commissioner of the department of financial regulation on the task force that they're creating after this whole, you know, political tsunami that had happened. And I said, well, they must mean the commissioner of finance. Like I must be a typo. And she went back and said, not a typo, they want you specifically. And, you know, I said, okay, I mean, I won't, I'm not going to lobby against it. I'm not going to lobby for it. But you know, if it ends up that this goes through in that shape, then happy to do it. And it did go through in that way. There were legislators, representatives from the NEA, from the Vermont State Employees, from the Troopers Association, all on this task force. And we were tasked with coming up with something that would reduce the unfunded liability, reduce some of the pressure on the budget, and then something that everybody would live with as well, something that was sort of universally able to be agreed to by all the stakeholders. So a really, really labor laborious process where we met every week, this is from July through January, once a week for a full day, heard testimony from a lot of internal to state government experts, a lot of external to state government experts telling us, you know, what's the history of the pension systems? What's the history of the funding of the pension systems? Where are we relative to where we want to be? What is the, you know, what are other states doing that have tried to tackle this problem? How are they faring relative to Vermont? And, you know, we took that all in and then started having conversations with ourselves about, you know, what are the categories, you know, nobody's committing to anything, but what are the categories that we want to see, you know, analyzed by the actuary so we can come back and see the impact. And for me, I thought there were a few areas where, you know, we could get agreement, one around contribution amounts, like, you know, people paying a little bit more to get pretty much the same benefit that they were expected to have, but also doing that on a progressive scale. So if you're earning more money, you have to pay a little bit more contribution than somebody at the lowest end of the spectrum. So we were able to, in our recommendation, say that people at the bottom 25% and lower in terms of pay, that they would pay the same amount of contribution, they wouldn't see their contribution go up. And I think that was important for the whole task force that we tried to, you know, one of our principles was to protect those that were, you know, in the most disadvantaged place by, you know, by status in terms of, you know, where they are in the hierarchy of state government or salary or whatever. And I think we did accomplish that. And then looking at some of the, you know, some of the benefits around the COLA, you know, the amount that increases every year, once you're in retirement, and whether you could change some of that to change some of the minimum and maximum amounts or when that COLA started to impact. And I think that was an important item that we focused on. But ultimately, looking at the health insurance side, the healthcare side, the OPEB, the other post-employment benefits component. So a whole nother side of the house that is significant, billions of dollars of underfunding there as well. And the recommendation that we were able to get to really shored that up in a really solid way by committing funds to pay it over time, allowing us to take advantage of a higher investment rate and reduce the overall liabilities of the fund by about $1.7 to $2 billion. So significant reduction. So people were paying more. There was a reduction in benefits. And where we were seeing savings and reductions and more payments, they went back into the pension fund to help this healthcare side of it. So it was a sacrifice for everyone that was part of the system, but it made the system stronger. And that was how we got uniform agreement. And the important thing was to protect a defined benefit plan. That was what everyone's goal was, was to have the defined benefit plan be able to survive this generation of state employees, the next generation of state employees, because it's really a critical resource, a critical benefit for recruitment, for retention, and for public servants who spend their whole lives teaching or with the state or with the municipal government as a firefighter or a town administrator, that they're able to retire with dignity because they know that their retirement is not going to run out and they're not going to outlive the money that they have saved. So it's a really critical benefit and an important incentive, I think, for our public servants. Your narrative, I think, is clearly demonstrating to me and hopefully to the people who are watching this, your understanding of all of the nuances that go into making a decision such as this, which I am guessing is going to be critical to anyone who is in the position of being the state of Vermont's treasurer, who my sense has always been that you will do more than merely balance the checkbook. So could you share a little bit about what you see as being the responsibilities and role of the treasurer and what would be your priorities? Yeah, for sure. Happy to. So, you know, think about balancing the checkbook, right? You might think of that as sort of the treasurer's, you know, role or responsibility, making sure our bills are paid on time, that we have cash to be able to pay those bills. And that's all true, but you know, in order to have that cash, we have to be in a strong financial position as a state. And in order to be in a strong financial position as a state, we need to have an economy that is rowing, that is strong, that's working across the board for everybody. So I really think the treasurer has a unique voice in Montpelier to advocate on all of the pressing issues, or at least the most significant pressing issues facing Vermont and our economy. So A number one on those issues is the housing situation, the housing crisis really. And it's at all levels. It's at those that are trying to transition from experiencing homelessness or transitioning out of prison, those that are trying to buy their first home, those from BIPOC community that never owned a home that are trying to buy their first home, people toward later in life that are trying to afford to stay in their home, thinking about what does my retirement or long term care planning look like. So it runs the spectrum in terms of impacting almost everybody. And we have seen that there's fewer and fewer houses available in Vermont. And because there are fewer houses, the pricing of the houses has gone up and it's made it a real challenge for people to afford the property taxes. It's made it a challenge for people to buy into the market. And it's impacting rents as well. It's impacting the availability of rents and the price of rents. So it is really a significant issue. And basically through the pandemic, we just filled up almost every house we had and every apartment we had. People wanted to come back to Vermont. If they grew up here, they wanted to move to Vermont because we were so safe and doing so well. They had a favorable impression of our state. We're a beautiful state. And they were able to break apart that geography linkage between their place where they lived and the place where they worked. They could keep their job in New York or Boston or San Francisco or wherever and move to Vermont and have a significantly higher salary than what the median or average Vermont would earn, which contributes to that rising housing price because they see a house for $700,000 and think, geez, my last little teeny apartment sold for that. And now I have this huge house. I'll pay $800, $900,000 for it. They're coming to Vermont from a different perspective in terms of real estate. And it's good. It brings more to our tax base in terms of their income tax. They're going to contribute to our state and contribute to all of the things that we need to fund. But it's holding back our economy because businesses cannot find people and hire them because they can't find a place to work. There are businesses here in Burlington that would hire hundreds and hundreds of people or they plan to, but where are those hundreds and hundreds of people going to live? And that's really replicated throughout the entire state. You go to a resort town, you go to a town like Manchester or Norwich, same issue. They just, they can't find affordable housing for their staff to be able to live in the town and take jobs that need to be done. So we need more housing. We need to make continued investments in housing. We need to have them, in my opinion, in downtown city, town and village centers, high density to be able to get the number of houses that we need and the number of units that we need and to do it in a way that won't impact the environment negatively that is beneficial to the environment by having more urban dense housing in those types of parts across the state, not in our rural communities, where it will contribute to some of the sprawl and some of the issues surrounding climate that we're seeing, but in our dense downtown areas. So that's, I think, number one. And I think there's a role for the treasurer's office, whether it's from local, you know, the local investing fund that the treasurer has responsibility over or potentially even bonding that, you know, a couple of years ago, there was bonding for a housing bond about $30 million. Seems like peanuts relative to what, you know, dollars are flying around in Montpelier today, but that's a critical investment. And the other one that is holding back people from getting into the workforce is childcare or adult care, you know, caring for an elderly relative or parent. You know, if you can't find a place to affordably take care of your children or your adult parent, then that's going to, burden is going to fall on you or your spouse or someone in your household and going to prevent you from getting back into the workforce or pulling you out of the workforce. So, you know, I think if we can solve those two issues, then, or at least make progress on them, then we're going to really fuel the full potential of the Vermont economy, the businesses that want to hire, they're going to be able to hire, they're going to be able to expand, and it will continue to have this virtuous cycle in terms of the economic benefits the state has. And the ability that we will then have to reinvest in ourselves. So those are the two issues I see as really critical. There's other issues, certainly, but in terms of where can you focus and make a leveraged impact? I think those are two issues that would be very impactful. With our remaining time, I noticed for your community involvement, you are listed as a board member for outright Vermont. What made you choose to go on outright sport? Yeah, so I really felt honored that outright had reached out to me toward the end of my time as commissioner. They didn't know is the end of my time as commissioner, I guess, maybe neither did I at the time. But, you know, we had worked on some gender affirmation care issues relative to health insurance over the years when I was commissioner and specifically relative to youth. And you see this issue really playing out in the last few years and in a very ugly ways across the country. But, you know, what we wanted to make clear in Vermont was that the mandate that we have to have, you know, no disparity in health care treatment applied to those that were under the age of 18, that you couldn't have a bright line age cutoff for when someone would be covered for gender affirmation surgery or gender affirmation care, that it had to be a medical decision by a doctor. So if the doctor, if that individual's doctor said that it was the right course of treatment for them, then it would be covered. It didn't, you know, you could not have these artificial cutoffs. So I think, you know, I think just that was just another reaffirming step for us in Vermont in terms of, in terms of being as progressive as we can be on LGBTQ plus issues and transgender issues specifically. So I was proud to be able to work on that. When I looked out at some organizations that I had a lot of respect for that I thought were doing really good work outright was at the top of that list. I just, you know, it's a community that is very vulnerable, always, but I think very vulnerable right now given the climate in the US, but even some of that that's trickling down into New England and Vermont. So we need to do everything we can to stand up for them to building, you know, inclusive communities throughout the state and outright has that as its mission and is doing really fabulous, fabulous work in terms of bringing that about here in Vermont. And with that I need to say thank you for spending this time with us and I look forward to inviting you back as our newly elected treasurer. That sounds like a plan. As you can tell by the signage over my shoulder, we're going to be talking today with one of the candidates for the Wyndham County Senate seat. Please welcome for a first time to all things L2BTQ, witchy R2. Welcome. Thank you. It's great to be here. And it's really nice to see you again. And I think I want to start with, you know, you sharing your story of how you happened to come to Vermont. And then I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that you've already been doing here, which is how I had met you before. So how did witchy end up in Athens, Vermont? Yeah, so I was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, which is on the southern coast of Puerto Rico. And I grew up with rivers in my backyard. I grew up with needing to go to my neighbor's house when my dad was out of coffee. And that kind of environment where you are so in touch with nature and at the same time so in touch with your community, that kind of community environment, it's something that I longed for for a long time. My two moms ended up moving to Boston due to needing economic opportunity. And Boston was cold, bitter, and there were no trees. So I sort of like had a long and I kept going back and forth between Puerto Rico, even moved to try to make it work. But finding a job was really hard there. So my now husband grew up in Shaftesbury, Vermont, and we had family in Brattleboro. And we tried to get closer, right? Like we were in Massachusetts and tried to live in suburbia, but we had we were part of a queer farming family. And in Massachusetts, most of Massachusetts is owning losses, you can't have an accessory dwelling on the property unless you're related by blood or marriage to the landlords. So us living in our tiny house, we're like, okay, well, we're queer, so blood or marriage doesn't quite work. So we were basically kicked out of Massachusetts. And when we looked Brattleboro, there was a whole section on Brattleboro and how you can live in a tiny house successfully in Brattleboro. So like, okay, that's where we're going. And we were farming in Brattleboro, but we figured Brattleboro was a little too urban for us. We needed a more rural and also we got priced out. Really, that's the real reason. But also, it's nice to come to a small 400 person town, know all of your neighbors, everyone's watching out for each other, and also being able to be part of a beautiful valley. So, and my husband and I had dreams for a very long time of really fostering economic sovereignty for rural queer and BIPOC folks, making it a safe haven for more rural community to get away from the fear that exists in media. And so that's when you and your husband created magnetic fields, which is specifically that type of rural environment that you're hoping that queer BIPOC people will come to. Yeah, I mean, I would argue that magnetic fields started before we were here. We did a lot of stuff in Brattleboro. We also did some stuff in Massachusetts, but the name magnetic fields came from this place where we are here and now. And since you've been in the greater Brattleboro community, you've actually done a fair amount of work organizing and advocacy. And I know that one of the projects that you were involved in was surrounding Brattleboro Memorial Hospital and how they provide healthcare. Could you talk a little bit about that? Sure. So, since 14, I was a grassroots organizer using the performing arts as a tool for health and social change. So for a long time, basically a decade, I spent my time applying for grants and managing grants to be able to bring the arts as a way to build community, to bring criminality down in neighborhoods, to be able to foster culture and community between folks that don't necessarily always intertwine. So I sort of grew up in that world. And unfortunately, not a lot of people want to fund the arts in that kind of way. They more want you to do the Chacha for rich corporate parties. And I was not about that. I cannot live with myself. So I had the privilege to be part of the only busing program in the United States in Boston. And I was shipped two hours away to go to a better school. And through that education, I was actually able to really get into computers. And I built my own website when I was in seventh grade. So I'd always dabble in computers. So it just felt natural. And I'm like, great, I'm going to go to work with computers. But you know, that artist community centered heart really just like never left me. So I tried working at a hedge fund. And I was like, no, no, this is not for me. I ended up going to healthcare. And I really liked working in healthcare because it was like community focused. But there was still that sort of like bureaucracy profit happening. So I kind of weaved my way into what were the ways and we needed to advocate for our community in healthcare. So I wasn't just in a basement with no windows not talking to anyone being a data engineer, but also out in the community also on those tables where decisions happen. So that's how we got involved with the LGBTQ plus leadership council and helped push for pronouns on our electronic medical records and talking through workflow and what happens from registration all the way to follow up with pronouns and helped found the council on racial equity, which was sort of a birthing stone that later became the NAACP health justice committee that put on the BIPOC vaccine clinics in southern Vermont. So it was just sort of a natural urge to just always be part of the community and always uplift community. And I think the beautiful thing about being in Vermont is that if you have an idea, if you want to do a thing, everyone's like, yes, here you go. And also other things that you didn't want to also do, but here you go anyways, which I enjoy. But yeah, it's sort of like place time opportunity and also just being part of the community. And I noticed when I did a sort of Google search that you had been involved in some of the community responses in the in the broader area related to social and racial justice. Can you talk a little bit about some of your involvement with that? I think you already mentioned the NAACP. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely wear a lot of hats in the community. And I try to be mindful to not sort of create conflicts of interest. But I've worked with the Root Social Justice Center. I've worked in collaboration with the community equity collaborative. I've worked with Tracy Schreiber's office. Yeah, I'm working right now with the United Way and the Vermont Public Health Institute. So it's I'm wearing a lot of hats. And for me, what's most important when I wear all these hats is like, as I'm being given all of this power, my job is not to hold on to this power. My job is to create systems and structure to be able to delegate the power to be able to uplift. I see a lot of folks trying to do a lot and they're always doing it for free or especially being asked to do it for free. And I want to change that. We are not in the business of doing free labor. We are not in the business of reinforcing slavery. We need to make sure that our community's time and effort is valued. And we cannot do this kind of work without the community. So in order to be able to create structures where we're power sharing, that means we need to actually share power. That's a phenomenal vision and reinforces the it's not the responsibility of the underrepresented communities to be responsible for educating the majority or the dominant communities. And you should really acknowledge and pay us for the work that we indeed do. And and building off that Vermont has what we lovingly refer to is this citizens legislature where you know we are not professional politicians. We come out of our communities and we go home to our communities. And you've been following the most recent sessions and some of the work and priorities that they had established. What are the things that you as the Wyndham County Senator sees as being the priority to move that work forward? Yeah, I am consistently in conversation with other folks that are running or already a legislator about how to help make this accessible. I think the double-edged sword when we talk about citizen legislature is that you get paid $13,000 a year. You have no benefits, no health insurance. You get paid for like being able to get housed and food there, but the how it works out is like well people know how much you get paid for house and food. So then the prices go up to match those. So it's like you don't really get any money from not. And then the rest of the year you're like you know what full-time job is going to let you be out for four to six months of the year. That's not real. So what's happening is that when we say a citizen legislature what we really mean is people who have the privilege, people who are retired, people who have their own businesses, people like me that have family in the area that they're like here's a cheap housing opportunity you don't need for food. And I'm like great that means I have an opportunity to get into the legislature. But you know thinking about single moms, thinking about people who are homeless, people thinking about people who are food insecure, right? Like these are the folks that we need up there in policy and that's sort of the idea of a citizen legislature. But the idea that paying our citizens a fair wage to be in in politics that being in contrast to that being a citizen legislature I think that's a little bit silly. And I don't think we recognize the amount of barriers and marginalization we create for people who are trying to help to keep them away from making these policies. And as the Vermont legislature and some of the media accounts keeps getting grayer and grayer meaning as you're saying only those people who can afford to are serving we lose the voice and the momentum of those people who are being directly impacted and are moving up. Okay, looking at the work that needs to be done by our legislature. What are your priorities? And how would you like to see the next legislative session focus on issues and what really needs to move forward? Yeah, I appreciate that question. I think so there's sort of like this vision if I could have everything that I wanted. Of course, universal health care, free education basically allow people to have economic mobility right now is just not not possible for a lot of people. In the actuality of what that looks like, you know, next year, I want to approach health as a system. I don't want to approach it as health care, because health care, you know, according to the American Medical Association, health care is about 20% of people's health. What's actually 50 to 60% of people's health is determined is correlated with their zip code, right? Where you live, what schools you have access to, what transportation you have access to are you live in a food desert, right? Thinking about these things as a whole system of how are people can be healthy. And I think we tend to forget that when we talk about we're moving towards a quality-based health system, which is nice, but we're not changing how we pay for our system. We're not changing the social determinants of health. So really, you're going to do this much with this much. So I really want to change that rhetoric. And one of my first steps that I really want to do is change how we're dictating what livable wage is. I've taken a look at the legislature's livable wage, and I understand there's a lot of math involved, a lot of people, a lot of dynamic things. But one of the things that really stands out to me is that health care cost of health care cost in there is $100 a month. This is only health insurance, right? We're not talking about copes, we're not talking about deductibles, we're not talking about anything else other than premium. And that's if your employer offers health insurance. To actually get health insurance last year, and if you don't have an employer that provides health insurance, like if you're a farmer, starting health insurance, if you make above a certain amount, it's actually $700 a month, the minimum. And premiums are increasing 30% this year. That is not real. And even with that $100, we were estimating $18 was the livable wage. So not even at that fictitious number, do we actually have a wage that is real? So I really want to move the needle on thinking about what are people's actual costs on the ground, and not just some theoretical ivory tower kind of thought of like, oh yeah, this is what I think are livable wages. All right. So but you also have a priority, and I think you've referenced it in other places, about housing and climate change and child in elder care. You know, there was a great deal of focus put in this most recent session because of the American recovery plan and monies that had come down. What is it that we missed? What is the work still to be done? Yeah. So there's a lot of topics in there. First, I'll talk about elder care and child care, because I think those are sort of like the easiest to name, and then I'll move on to housing, which is like super complicated. So with child care, I think something that stands out to me is that we definitely don't pay enough, and people have student loans, right? So we're sort of like bombarding people who we need to work with unrealistic debt, and not being able to pay off that debt. So definitely with child care, if we want to grow the workforce, I think we just need to tackle student loans, and we need to tackle wage. And when we want to decrease the harm that's being done to our families, because even if we have more child care, that takes time, right? We have 70% of people in Wyndham County, or children in Wyndham County, don't have access to child care for those who need it. And it's an astounding number, and in all of Vermont it's 60%. It is a ridiculous amount. And what we don't have is paid family leave, right? So thinking about the person who is breastfeeding, it takes two months to develop a bond with your child and to develop a consistent feeding flow. So if you don't have, or production flow, so if you don't have those two months, you're having to work, like, who's going to give you time to go home and breastfeed? Who's going to have your child in child care at your job so you can breastfeed every, you know, every so often when your child needs it. It's just not, we are, we are asking for people to come. We're asking for families to come. And then we're saying, but sorry, you got to fend for yourself now in this sort of like, sharp kind of environment. It's not fair. It's not fair. So I think for child care, we need workforce development and we need to protect our families. I have very similar views about elder care. I don't think we do enough for our elders, and especially with Medicaid being privatized. We need to stop that. We know that private companies are there for the profit and they're not there for the people. And if we are offering a public good, then it needs to be a public good. And for housing, I think this is complicated because we live in a capitalist society where land equals wealth. So there is a, there's sort of a conflict that we have to wrestle within our society of how much can the government control people's wealth and ability to build wealth. For hundreds and hundreds of years, I would say in the like, since maybe 1968 on the Civil Rights Act, until then my grandmother couldn't own a home. There were literally places in our deed that forbid people like my grandmother to buy a home. And what does that mean? When since the 1980s, we've had a crazy amount of growth in the income gap and a crazy amount in the amount our homes value and a crazy increase in rent while wages are stagnating. So we need to right the wrong that we've done. And that starts by making sure that people have access to land in the way they need it, right? It's not just a nice old farmhouse, right? But that farmhouse needs insulation. It's too big for just one family. How can we break it up? And how can we fund that? Right? We're trying to move off oil. Also not to mention people need to be able to age in place. So we need ways to think about making our old farmhouses wheelchair accessible, right? So we got to think about all of this and we haven't even touched farmland. Farmland is in the same market as real estate. You think about buying half a million dollar real estate? No farmer could ever afford that. Small scale farmers, which are important for the local food sovereignty, we are barely getting by. We are just, if you break even that success in the farmer world, that's not how we should support the foundation of life. So there's sort of like all of these other things that are sort of shaping this housing talk. And I haven't even talked about food deserts, transportation, access to hospitals, places where there are no businesses like in my town of like, where do you get your things? So it's just it's a very complicated process. And I think we need to take it little by little. But I really think that we need to address as a society, how do we value land? And how do we value reparations for keeping people out of the one tool that allows you to have economic mobility in the modern economy? So in our last couple of minutes, what's what haven't I asked you? But this is what you need to know about witchy and why witchy should be your senator. Yeah, I think I'd make a good senator because I've been a community organizer since I was 14. I know for a fact, I am not the expert in everything. And I am not even necessarily the person who should be making that policy. The people who should be making that policy are those that are impacted by the policy, by those who need that policy to happen. I am the kind of senator that sets up a round table, say we want to do education curriculum, great, let's set up a round table with curriculum directors, students, teachers, principals, people from the school board, let's get together and let's actually talk about what that can look like. So I support coalitions like the Act 1 Ethics and Social Standards Advisory Board, but I definitely got that name wrong. But really making sure that the policies are coming from the people and not from us in the ivory tower who are sometimes disconnected. And for me, that also means that I need to work in the afternoon. I'm going to go to the Putney diner. You know, Eleni makes wonderful chicken tenders. I will sit there and work and have chicken tenders be like, oh, look, I just saw someone from who also lives in Putney. Let's have a conversation. Great. Being part of the community is 100% the job of a legislator is the job of our government to be in society and uplift society. So that is why I think I'd make a good senator and why I think people would want to vote for me. And with that, thank you for spending this time with us. And I'm looking forward to having coffee with you in the Statehouse cafeteria. Yes, I'm ready for it. Thank you for joining us. And until next time, remember, resist.