 Hi friends, Janae would be procure with some exciting news. Town meeting day elections for mayor, city council, and more will be using ranked choice voting and all polling to voters get to participate. Unfamiliar with ranked choice voting? Keep watching or visit the link below. Ranked choice voting is a simple way to let voters rank candidates in order of preference. First, second, third, and so on. If your vote can't help your first choice win, it counts to your second choice instead. Here's how it works. If one candidate gets over 50% of everyone's first choice votes, they win and the election is over. However, if no candidate reaches a majority, the candidate with the fewest first choice votes is eliminated, and their supporters' votes will count towards their second choice. This process continues until one candidate reaches over 50% of the vote. Ranked choice voting is an easy way to give voters more voice, more choice, and makes for a stronger democracy. Learn more about ranked choice or try it out for yourself at betterballotvermont.org slash BTV 2024. Hello and welcome to Town Meeting Television's coverage of Town Meeting Day 2024. This program is part of a series of forums we are bringing you in advance of Town Meeting Day on Tuesday, March 5th. Town Meeting TV hosts forums with all candidates and covers questions you will see on your ballot, introducing you to community decision makers, and connecting you with issues that shape your local community. You can find all our forums at cctv.org slash 2024 or on our Town Meeting TV YouTube channel where auto-generated captions are available. On tonight's program, we will hear from two candidates who are running for the Burlington City Council from Ward 1, which is a vacant seat. These candidates are Jeff Hand, who is a Democrat, and Carter Newbezer, who is a progressive. We've prepared a list of questions for each of you, and you will have 90 seconds to answer each question. If you're tuning in live, we also welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. If you call in, we'll do our best to prioritize your question, though we will screen calls to ensure questions are not repeated. We ask that you share your name, the town you live in, and that your question be directed to all of the candidates and not a particular candidate. So let's get started with one minute opening statements. We will start with Carter Newbezer. Well, thank you so much for having us, and Jeff, I'm excited to talk about issues tonight. My name is Carter Newbezer. I'm running for City Council here in Ward 1. I'm running because I feel like our city is at a turning point. It has gotten incredibly expensive to live here, and it doesn't seem like over the next few years if we don't change course that that is going to change. This is where I graduated college, where I've started my career, where I got sober, where I've laid down roots, and started my family. So excited to get to have this conversation with you, think through issues with folks, and hopefully meet, if I haven't talked to you at the door, meet you throughout this campaign. Thank you. And an opening statement from Jeff Hand. Great. Thank you, Elaine, and thank you to Town Meeting TV for having us here. It's a great opportunity to talk directly to voters and for folks to get to know Carter and I a little better. My name is Jeff Hand. I lived here in Ward 1 for about 20 years. My wife, Marina, and I live on Henry Street. We have two boys at BHS, a junior and a freshman. I work downtown at a small, mission-driven law firm working on environmental, energy, affordable housing, and non-profit issues, among many other things. I'm running because I love Burlington, and I really appreciate the opportunities it has given my family, and I'm looking forward to giving back to the community. I've been very involved in community organizations here in the neighborhood, both on the NPA Steering Committee for many years, as a board member of the Burlington Boys and Girls Club for about 20 years, and I've worked with a number of youth organizations, including Center City Little League, and Help Start, Burlington Football Club, which provides access to kids who otherwise wouldn't have access in our community to those kinds of experiences. Thank you. We already have callers, so we're going to start with a question from the public. Hello, caller. Please state your name and where you're from. Hi, this is Brian. I am in Ward 1. And what is your question for the candidates, Brian? I have a question about public safety and policing. Could both candidates share whether they think the vote to defund the police department was the wise decision, and what their vision is for rebuilding our police department and re-envisioning public safety generally? Thank you for your question. Let's start with Jeff. Great. Thank you. Thank you for the question, Brian. It's really an important one. I've heard a lot while knocking doors and talking with neighbors. The vote that happened in 2020 is not one that I supported. I think that that decision was not well-planned or thought out at the time. It obviously was a really difficult time, and I think it was very well-intentioned, but one of the challenges I've had with the way that was implemented is that when we're talking about critical public services like policing in our community, we need to make sure we really have a good plan for how we're going to implement those changes. And when you make a change like that, you should take the time to evaluate it. There were several city counselors at the time who were advocating for that, but the majority of the council elected not to. And now we're in a position where we really need to focus on rebuilding. That is important, not just rebuilding our uniformed officers, but also all the community services that need to support that. I do think that vote has made our community less resilient, and now we are really working to bring ourselves out of that challenge. And we've seen the impact around downtown and around our communities. We've seen it in a loss of feeling safe, and people in our community deserve to feel and be safe. And when you call the police department, you deserve to get an answer. You shouldn't be sent to a web form. So I'd like to see us focus on a community policing approach that really rebuilds trust between the community and the police and leads to better outcomes for all of us. Carter, your response. Yeah, great question. A few things. First, I think it's a, looking back, I think it's a fair criticism to say or fair reflection and one I agree with that the implementation in terms of reduction should have been a lot slower and we should have been in a position where we are, we had alternatives already built up before, you know, an expected sort of attrition of officers. That being said, I think public safety generally has been incredibly politicized frankly in our community. And so I also want to be honest with folks and sort of call balls and strikes when we're having conversations about this, looking back, although I'd rather focus moving forward. A couple of good things in that resolution was the establishment of the Elmwood Ave shelter, which has widespread support across political parties, the establishment of CSLs and CSOs, which at the time were considered controversial positions, but are in fact one of the best tools we have right now, given the rise in homelessness and addiction in other issues that our city's facing. The other piece is absolutely we need enough officers for a city our size. We have a rebuilding plan in progress, it has widespread support from across the political spectrum as well as the department and the chief, and so we ought to continue implementing that. And actually the CSLs and CSOs, which were implemented, have been a great recruitment tool for new officers. It's also worth mentioning, and I know I'm running out of time, 700 officers that same year across the state of Vermont left the profession, tens of thousands every year since have. So this isn't just something that is a result of one vote. Appreciate that. Looks like we have another caller. Hello caller, please state your name and where you're from. Molly from Burlington. Thank you, and do you have a question for the candidates? I do, I want to ask about the school budget. Please go ahead. Oh, is it about the school budget? Yeah, sorry, do you mean go ahead and ask the candidate? Correct, ask the question. Ask the question of the candidates. Okay, great. You can go ahead and state your question. Hi, this is Molly calling in, and I'm in Burlington and live at Word One. And I have a question about the school budget. The school district is proposing a more than 13% tax increase. Do you each support this tax increase? Thank you for your question. We will start, I believe, with Carter this time. Yeah, it's a great question, and thank you for raising it, Molly. A few things, we need to fund our schools, absolutely. There's also, this is actually one of two tax increases that's on the ballot this year that folks will be able to weigh into. We need to fundamentally rethink how we are funding our budget. Right now, all of these tax increases that we've seen year over year over year and that are expected year over year in the future are flat, right? On the municipal side, the property tax, for example, does not take into account income whatsoever. And so we need to be asking those at the very top to be paying more. We can't continue to ask middle-class families, working-class families, and folks at the margin, folks who are on a fixed income or tirees to shoulder a burden that they, I mean, no one can reasonably hold. I'll just say, I just bought my first home over on Riverside Ave, and it's just over 1,200 square feet, very small home. We're paying over $7,000 a year in taxes. I mean, that is crazy, frankly. And of course, I want to fully fund our schools. There are other ways that we can increase revenue instead of just sort of a flat tax that's regressive. So that's what I would want to look at to make up those revenue losses. And I also know that we're facing a, you know, depending on who you ask, $7,000 to $12 million deficit that we're having to make up in the budget proposal that just came out. So it's just very tough times. Thank you. Jeff, same question. Great, thank you for the question, Molly. Yeah, I mean, any tax increase is difficult, particularly this particular time. And I know, particularly for folks who are living on fixed incomes or retired, it's especially hard. As you may know, the school budget is set by the school board, not the city council, so we don't have direct control over that. And a lot of the cost questions are really established down in Montpelier. So what we're seeing right now in this school budget is largely driven by the policy set there, not at the city council. But I do think it's very important to support our schools and to support this particular budget. As many people know, our kids have been through a really, really difficult past few years, starting with COVID. And here in Burlington, dealing with all the infrastructure challenges we've had, I have two kids who are at BHS now at Macy's. The school has done a really admirable job with limited resources over those years to make that school a successful place for kids in our community, but it's not a long-term solution. And some of what we're seeing in this school budget is the first year of the bond for a new school, which is a really critical resource for the future of our community, and one that was overwhelmingly supported by members of the community. So I do think supporting schools is important and really realizing that our kids need a safe place to go to school. We should support that budget, and we should also support everything we can on the city side to help kids feel safe around their schools. Thank you. We have another caller. Hello caller, could you please state your name and where you're from? Let me try that again. Hello caller, would you please state your name and where you're from? Yes, hi, this is Valerie, I'm from Burlington, word one, and I have a question about climate action. Can each of you please think about your background in climate action and how you think this background will be an advantage as a city counselor? Thank you. We will start with Jeff. Great, yeah, thank you for the question Val. It's really a critical issue for us right now. We are in a climate crisis. 2023 was the hottest year on record, and we're seeing the impacts of that really directly here in Vermont with the flooding this summer that devastated so many communities and impacted us here in Burlington directly. Many of the farmers in the intervail were really significantly impacted by that flooding. Climate change is something I've worked on professionally for over 20 years. I've litigated cases that establish the right for cities and states to sue the federal government over impacts from climate change, and I've personally worked on permitting renewable projects throughout Vermont, solar, wind, battery storage, projects that really work to reduce our carbon impact here in our community directly. So it's something I care deeply about. Burlington has a net-zero plan that I'm very supportive of. We need to do everything we can to implement the recommendations there, including implementing the carbon fee that was recently passed, and will really help us start to address here in the community in a very specific way the impacts that some of our buildings have on the climate. There are also other things we can be doing. There are things like the Affordable Heat Act that was passed in Montpelier that will really help to reduce the cost of less stable fossil fuel sources for individual homeowners and reduce carbon, and there are other similar programs that we should really, as a city, be working to implement. Thank you. Carter, your answer to the same question. Yeah, I'll say I've been working on climate in a variety of roles for the last 10 years now. My day job, I do development for 350 Vermont were a climate justice nonprofit that's really focused on organizing the political will to make some real progress around reducing carbon emissions. I think a lot of what Jeff just mentioned, I would agree with. I think specifically here in Burlington, I helped write and pass the thermal charter change to allow the city to regulate thermal systems. So essentially the carbon impact fee came out of that. We didn't have the authority to implement solutions like that here in Burlington. Worked very hard for a number of years as council support staff under Councillor Hansen who championed climate for years on the council to get universal rental weatherization passed. The other thing I'll say is that we aren't properly counting our emissions and we really need to be cognizant of that. For example, internet zero plan, our airport is not included in the airport, the emissions from our airport is not included. We're counting biomass, RNG, other sources that one could argue are renewable but not necessarily low carbon as toward our climate goals. We also engage in renewable energy credits, rec trading on the New England market which a number of attorney generals just came out and said essentially is defrauding folks. It's saying, tricking folks into thinking it's having a greater impact on reducing emissions and that's from attorney generals from 11 different states. So really need to take a hard look at that. Thank you, okay. Looks like we don't have any other callers at the moment so I can actually turn to the questions. Let's start with Jeff and this is a question on city finances. So the question is, do you support the proposed tax increase for the city budget? Yes or no? And what experience do you bring to the overall financial management of the city? Go ahead, Jeff. Yeah, well, we've talked about some of the tax impacts already. There are really two significant pressures right now in our community from a tax perspective. The school tax that we just talked about and then the proposed public safety tax which is really designed to address our increasing significantly increasing public safety cost needs. I do support that tax. As I said, I know tax increases are always difficult. One of the things we have to do as a community before we propose any tax increase is really look carefully to make sure we've done everything we can to reduce costs and that we're providing services efficiently to our community members. And I think this proposal is built around some of that cost savings as well. But what we're talking about in that public safety tax is really funding the critical public service systems that we need and staying on track with the responses and the trajectory we've established as a community that we really need to rebuild from the low point we saw after we chose to reduce our police force in 2020. So I think that's a critical step. I think we need to stay on the path to rebuilding those services and the money that's being proposed here will go directly to those services. So I do support it. Okay, thank you. Carter? I haven't decided whether I'm gonna vote for it or not. I'll say I fundamentally support fully funding public services and public safety. Unfortunately, again, this goes back to we have asked folks, working class people to over and over and over pay these property tax increases that folks just can't afford. So while this is the public safety tax, it's ultimately wrapped up in our municipal property tax. And what we ought to be looking at, if we do need to increase revenue, our solutions where we can increase revenue without burdening working class people. So what are those? For example, a second homes tax where we're asking folks who bought vacation homes during COVID on Lake Champlain that oftentimes sit vacant other than a few weeks a year to pay into the pot a little more. Doesn't mean folks are bad people. They're having a negative effect on the housing market. We ought to ask them to pay a little more in. We can look at things like anti-speculation tax. Someone comes in and flips a property. In a short period of time, drives up the housing market. We ought to ask them to pay into the pot a little more. So there's a number of things like that that I think we ought to be looking at. I'll also just say there's been, I think, some frivolous spending over the last 10 years. When we look at projects like City Hall Park, we could have sort of fixed City Hall Park in terms of the structural issues of soil runoff into the lake for a few $100,000. And now we're sort of in a place where we spent much, much more than that. And we're at a sort of very, we have about as much debt as we can take out as a city. So I'll wrap up with that, yeah. Thank you, okay. Onto a very different topic from the budget. The Burlington City Council recently decided against putting two proposed questions on the town meeting day ballot. One on police oversight and another calling for an apartheid-free community. Do you support the council's decisions to prevent these questions from reaching the ballot? And when is direct democracy an appropriate method of decision-making? We'll start with Carter. I'm a stickler for direct democracy. I fundamentally believe that folks in our community ought to have the right to weigh in on both of these questions. The police oversight I think is particularly frustrating because there's obviously, this is a very hard topic, folks across the community land in different places. But there was a commitment across the board to take a look at this and get something on the ballot in front of voters for this election. We ought to be looking at expanding the role of the police commission. I didn't support the last initiative that wanted to create an independent body. I think it makes more sense logistically to expand the powers and resources given to the police commission. And I'll also just say, you know, when we're talking about building community trust with police, that doesn't mean that we can't talk about instances of folks in our community being brutalized, inappropriate use of force. Those things are happening. There was just one, go to the ACLU's Instagram and read about the mother who just had a horrible interaction with her child. There are real, you know, these problems didn't fall out of the sky. They're not some ideological commitment. There are real instances of folks suffering in our community. So we ought to be building trust by making sure our officers are held to a high standard. Thank you. Jeff, same question. Yeah, really important question. On the police oversight one, I think that they took the right step there. The police commission in that case asked for the proposal to come back to them. We're asking our police commission to take an expanded role in police oversight. And I think it's appropriate to send it back to them if they have questions about it to look at it closer. As a community, we wanna make sure we have a voice in the process for how policing occurs and that ensures that people are treated with dignity. And we need to balance that with ensuring that it's a fair process for, you know, that recognizes the very difficult circumstances our police officers act in. And we wanna make sure everyone is treated fairly and receives good services. So on that one, I think they took the right step. There's still enough time for the police commission to weigh in and have that oversight approach approved and then approved by the legislature in the same timeframe as was anticipated. And on the other question of apartheid, I'm not sure Carter had a chance to speak to that. I think that that, again, that was really democracy in action. So there's a process for petitioning and members of our community took advantage of that process and led to a very heated debate. But the ballot item itself was very divisive and I don't think boiling that issue of such divisive community, that had such a divisive community impact was really appropriate to move on to the ballot and their checks and balances in our system that allow our city council to determine whether putting something on the ballot was really in the community good and I think they made the right choice here. Okay, thank you. I think we have time for one more question and then we'll move on to closing statements. Where do you differ from other candidates in your proposed approach to the opioid crisis? What are the most important initiatives the city can undertake to address this crisis? We'll start with Jeff. Great, thank you. Yeah, I think we all know as a community that this is one of our most significant challenges. I work downtown. I walk from my house to downtown every day and I see the people who are suffering. I have a parent who went through addiction and withdrawal and sat in the hospital holding their hand as they went through withdrawal and have seen the success and recovery they've been able to make to live a very successful life and I believe in finding processes to get other people into recovery. That may include looking at overdose prevention sites. I think that's an important thing for us to consider. They're very effective at saving people's lives and we need to consider that as a community, as a first stop to just try to stem the amount of overdoses we're having in this community. But we need to make sure it's done right. We need to make sure there are enough resources around those facilities to really get people into recovery and we need to make sure they're done in the right places in our community both with the support of surrounding communities but I want to be very careful that we're not creating situations that make the situation downtown and around our schools less safe. So we really need to be careful about where we're contemplating putting those and giving some good thought to how we help people succeed. It's not a silver bullet, but we're at a point in the crisis where we need to consider all of our options. Thank you. Carter. Yeah, I'll just say this issue is deeply personal to me. I've been sober coming up on six years now and so a lot of the folks who are working to address this issue, we got sober together or I walked in and they were in my first 12 step meeting. I'll say that completely agree we need overdose prevention sites. The science is clear. It's one of the more effective strategies. I think folks can start to think about solutions to this crisis in sort of a few stages. One is sort of stop the bleeding, so to speak, keep folks alive who are in the throes of serious addiction to various substances and the other is treatment services. How do we actually get folks sober and in recovery? So there's a couple of challenges that I think the city and I know I'm not gonna have enough time to answer all this but you know, for example, one of the challenges is Medicaid only covers two weeks of inpatient rehab. Well, inpatient rehab happens to be the most effective way we can get folks sober. Two weeks is not enough time. All the data is clear on that. You need at least 30 days and 60 or 90 is preferred. When you look at overdose prevention sites did just pass through the house. We had two million in funding tied to it. We gotta see if it passes Governor Scott's veto. A million of that is slated for a site here in Burlington. Certainly wanna be thoughtful about where we put that. And time's up. Time's up. However, it is now time for closing statements. So each of you will have 30 seconds to wrap up. So why don't we go ahead and start with you, Carter. Awesome. Well, I appreciate town meeting TV having us and Jeff, you chatting with me about some of the issues our community faces. Like I said, I'm running because I think Burlington is incredibly unaffordable. As all of our water rates went up in the last two years the Burlington Country Club got a $215,000 break on their water bill. As all of our property taxes go up we raised the business personal property tax exemption from 45,000 to 75,000. So we're giving breaks to folks who don't need it and raising costs on everybody else. I'm glad to have the support of our city workers union Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman, incumbents, Raya Hightower, Selena Colburn who has represented our neighborhood in a variety of capacities and former state Senator Chris Pearson. Thank you. Jeff, your closing statement. Thank you, Elaine and thank you, Carter. Good discussion. I look forward to more. As I said at the beginning, I'm running because I really love Burlington. We've enjoyed raising our family here and being involved in the community. But I'm really concerned about the current state of our community. We have a real public safety and public health crisis, a real crisis around affordable housing which is something we didn't have a chance to talk a lot about here, but is really critical, I think to the future of our community. Burlington can be a shining example of how we tackle these issues well, but we need to work together to do that. And I'm looking forward to bringing my experience and background and involvement in the community to working with you to help solve those issues. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you to both candidates for being here today. And thank you to you for turning in to, tuning in to Town Meeting TV's ongoing coverage of local candidates, local budgets and ballot items. You can find this and many more forums at cctv.org slash 2024 or on our Town Meeting TV YouTube channel. And you can tune in to our live election results show after you cast your ballot on March 5th. Contact your local clerk to find out how to obtain a ballot and to register to vote. In Vermont, you can register to vote on election day. Thank you for watching and sharing Town Meeting Television.