 Good evening. Welcome to Montpelier Civic Forum and we have another of our forums tonight. This one is on the state senate and it joins the other state senate candidates who've been in to speak as well as the candidates for the house in Washington County and in Montpelier in particular. Bill Fraser is on two episodes. One he's speaking about the sewer bonds and one he's speaking about the parking garage bonds. All of those are excellent shows that I recommend that you watch there on Orca Video of course. And tonight we have Ann Cummings who's running for Washington County Senate. Right. Ann, which campaign is this? When did you enter the Washington County Senate? This is 12. This is my 12th campaign. Every two years I have been in the Senate for 22 years. What's your seniority? How many people are beyond 22 years in the in the state senate? There are several. I'm not the longest. This is a major adjustment for me because Senator Doyle was my seatmate for so long and he was senior in every way and all of a sudden the last two years. Oh I'm now the senior senator from Washington County and it's I've never felt like I was there that long because he was always there a lot longer. What was it like serving with Bill? You know my best story about Bill and I think sets the tone is my first campaign and I'm out of chicken pie supper. Bill set that tone in Marshfield and I hadn't met Bill since I'd announced I was running and I went up and I said hi you know I'm in Cummings I'm running against oh hi he says have you met and he introduced me to everybody that came into that chicken pie supper and that kind of set the tone that Washington County was always very collegial we always work together there were Bill was a Republican he is a Republican I've served with Republicans Democrats progressives and Washington County unlike some other delegations and independence have have worked together there's very few issues that you actually deal with where there's a divergence we work for the county and for all the people of the county and I think I credit Bill was setting that tone of civility and collegiality. When you got in what were you doing before 24 years before? I was doing a lot of things I stayed I was able I was one of the last of my generation who was able to stay home and raise four children they all graduated from up Hillier High School and Vermont colleges and while I was doing that I ran a small business which was a knitwear design and manufacturing business I was on the Montpelier City Council I was on the Central Vermont Community Action Council I was on a couple of other nonprofits and just did a lot of civic work that way was eventually elected mayor and served as mayor for six years during the flood so that was that's not the Irene flood for those of you who are wondering which flood would that have been? I didn't have a name it was the Montpelier flood it was an ice jam and we had six to eight feet of water on state and main street it came up and about eight ten hours later it went out just as fast the ice jam broke but it was a major event for the people that were here you know had their businesses pretty much destroyed. When you were first elected decades ago what was an issue that you felt strongly about that was a state issue now you at that point had been on the city council so you realized as a charter city you know that you were subservient to the state in a number of ways. Yes there was I think the issue we had worked on most was the payment in lieu of taxes. Could you explain what that is? Okay 30% of the city of Montpelier's tax exempt most of that is the state complex state doesn't have to pay Montpelier any taxes but if there's a demonstration it's the Montpelier police if somebody gets sick hurt has a heart attack it's Montpelier's fire and ambulance if there's a fire it's the Montpelier fire department that comes and the state was not reimbursing us we had at that point we have a little over 8,000 people that lived here but we had 20,000 people a day in town that we were providing services for and most of them were at the state. Mayor Romano before me had started working with the state and at that point we were receiving I think it was $35,000 a year. Which seems token. It was pretty token even that long ago and so we really were Ryan Cotton was then the city manager he and I were up in the state house every Wednesday morning at eight o'clock Tuesday morning when the legislators started to there to just make contact with our legislators we started a program called co-pilot. There's a lot of towns that have state. Most notably Waterbury. Waterbury but almost every town has a salt shed if you have a state forest you got some payment for that if you have a state building you didn't and it was interesting because it was you know you'd go up and they'd look at you like you know you had two heads this was crazy but we persisted and it has now become just matter of course that the city of Montpelier gets a significant payment in lieu of taxes. But every time that I talked to a mayoral candidate or every time I talked to Bill Frazer about the budget I hear them talking about the pilot program being insufficient out of out of touch yeah I write it versus simply you know I'm not that you would always hear from Montpelier Waterbury and the like and I've heard you're on the other side I have heard it from Waterbury and you know it's not something that's just going to come your way money is very tight at the state house and it's there's more people that don't benefit from payment in lieu of taxes than do so like everything up there it's a give and take and a negotiation and I think the towns are always going to be pushing and the state's always going to be pushing back and you get eventually you get some equilibrium but you you have to push and you have to work at it. Money is tight now was money tight then in 24 years ago oh yes okay so the money has always been tight no I I think there were a couple years when we actually had money we're very much tied to the the economic cycle I went in in the late 90s and we had just done the adjustment down and I can remember saying to the city manager that year before just we're going to go up this year we're going to say hi just remember us we know things are tight so we're not going to ask you for more money this year but remember us when times are good because walking through the halls you could feel the pain money what turned out to be not sustainable one time money had been put into things like universal kindergarten there was something about cutting it's one of those stories that stays in the state house they had proposal was to cut public tv funding and big bird did an ad and I've had people that were there then saying I am never taking on big bird again well I think the house Republicans learned that about four years ago in the on the federal level yes you know you just but it was it was very tight we came back and there was a real discipline there tried very hard on appropriations I think at that point jeb spaulding took over appropriations and tried to say all right this is a sustainable growth level this is jeb spaulding who now is over the colleges that's right it was the state senator at that time um and we tried to just grow at what we thought was a sustainable revenue level and then anything else went into one time spending and this we we went through the last great recession um we haven't we're just starting to come out of that and just starting to come out in what sense revenues are just starting to pick up um Vermont usually lags behind the nation in economic re regrowth and this has just been a long um slow recovery now in terms of uh when this is being taped um Moody's downgraded our bond our bonds are still excellent they are very excellent but it's one step below very excellent to just excellent plus uh and they if I'm correct and help me if I'm wrong they cited three factors one is our aging population one is our sluggish economic growth which you spoke of and the third was our looming pensions okay um let's start with the looming pensions let's okay because that was one that came up in the legislature late last year uh if if I'm right and that was when there was surplus money available and the question is where should that surplus money be spent and we're back to that same question of one time use or investing in chiseling away to some degree our pension obligations right but you say where you stood on that and why okay that I was right in the middle of it um why were you right in the middle of it because I chair the finance committee and I was right in the middle of it um to start with because I've heard the word debt and pensions come up it isn't a problem with the pension system that we have it is a problem with I believe before my time um the theory was that the pension money is invested in the stock market and that you could use the the stock market was booming and so the money was that we were making in the market was used to cover the state's obligation to put money into the fund I've been told that this was a a gray area in the accounting standards and it's my understanding that we were not the only state that did this then times got tough and we didn't have the money to put in everything without making even more painful cuts and this continued this was a bipartisan multi administration multi legislature um we knew it was there we knew we were obligated to fund the pensions that we had to pay out as well as the future as yes right and um but then the feds changed the accounting standards no when would this have been roughly might have been seven eight years ago okay um they changed the standards and what would have been during recession uh-huh and they came up and said uh what was gray is now black you can't do that that is an unfunded liability and you will pay it out and here is the penalty and here's the interest you're going to pay and here is the principle this is what you owe and we have been paying that painfully paying that ever since and so last year when we had one time money which was approximately how much I think it was yeah it was it was like is it 30 million I think it was 32 something in that range um and we weren't sure we were suddenly getting more business taxes and we thought we knew why maybe but we weren't sure and so the governor wanted to use that to buy down the the property taxes to put it into to lowering the tax rate problem with that is last year we were uh supposed to have a nine cent tax increase and five of that was because we had done what the governor wanted the year before and book savings from teachers health care that didn't materialize so if we put one time money in and covered five cents or three cents we're kicking it down the road we're kicking it down the road it's paying you mortgage on your credit card but that cost is still going to be there next year and the one time money isn't and but if we put it in to pay down our debt and take it off the principle we would save millions of dollars over the life of that debt it's like paying down the principle on your mortgage and since we just felt that was a much more prudent way to spend money that we didn't think would be reoccurring how does the story end um we put the money into the one time um funding most of it at the end we may have made we kicked it down no we put it mostly in to paint on the pension okay so basically on the margin we're still faced the following year with those same kinds of painful choices we the appropriations committee has the payment schedule i've been told that this is this was the worst year that it'll start to ramp down so it's not going to get any worse but that payment has been eating up any increase in revenues between that the school payments and Medicaid there hasn't been money to do anything else how do we clean up the like we had a bill that was passed that said you're going to clean up the lake and is the result of that bill yet another task force or yet another report you know there's there's lots of ideas out there about how we can clean up the lake one bill that went through and got vetoed originally called for a task force to you know and then there was a task force set up and they the governor set one up and they came back and said well we aren't going to make any recommendations because the administration has said we're not raising any new money and we're not raising any taxes we're not raising any fees and it's hard to see how you're going to do a 20 million a dollar dollar a year cleanup without raising any money treasure interject yourself into that discussion the original discussion originally when this came up the treasurer was tasked with coming up for a plan and she came up with a plan that said for the first I think it was two years maybe four we could use some of our bonding to do some of the work it's long-term work we you know we do things with banking and roads and we could do that but it was going to take more and she had several suggestions that the legislature should look at to come up with the rest of the money did they no why not because we were told very clearly that if we came up with any new revenue sources it would be vetoed and we have a very limited block of time and you kind of find your you know you lose enthusiasm for really working on something and you know staying till 10 o'clock at night and putting your heart and soul into this thing and then finding out it's just been vetoed when the next legislature starts now everybody I think the governor I think the legislature I think collectively all of you were frustrated at the end dealing with school finance yes at the very end dealing with school finance at the very beginning and then dealing with school finance at the very end every year is there a way that the process could be improved in in your mind so that it starts at the beginning and systematically ends itself before the 11th or 11th hour it's a very I think the system works as well and it has lasted longer than any other system we've had what would other systems we've had be oh there was the miller miller formula and there were there were several you're talking about the school fund the statewide school funding right that were that were put in but they depended on the state coming up with the money and we didn't always come up with the money and it went on the local tax rates and then we had the Brigham decision which what was the Brigham decision Brigham decision there was a lawsuit brought and it said look we've got ski towns for sometimes the equity decision that it can't cost we had towns with $3 tax rates that were able to raise less money than towns with 28 cent tax rates because of the amount of uh grand list and a lot of the grand list in places like second home towns didn't send kids to the school so you had all this property to tax and not too many kids you had other towns that had nothing you're talking about the northeast the northeast kingdom standard was the the poster child i think they had over $3 tax rates and some of my towns had 28 cent tax rates Brigham said that's kids have a right to an equal education it is based and where it isn't necessarily money but money is part of it the disparity is too large and the state has to find a way to equalize that and the result was act 60 so what we're doing is nibbling around the edges of act 60 is what you're saying except for one proposal that would lessen the dependence on property and have more dependence on on income as it is right now it's it's a mixture of both it's a mixture of both the majority of people 65 70 percent pay based on a percentage of their income and that was by design we call income sensitivity um above that they they pay the full freight on their property there is some feeling that we should put more you know if people paid the full the same percentage you know did like a flat rate um then we would we could lower it probably for lower people and and have more money and do all kinds of stuff with more money the thing that concerns me and that i think we could go more you know do more income into it but as you get to higher income levels um income tax tends to be very volatile that's the state is income dependent and that's why you get our feast or famine okay ups and downs states big we can rob peter to pay paul and get through sometimes peter moves out of the state that sometimes um schools aren't schools have one mission and so we have always as a state tried to have stability in school funding i know in the city um the school sets the budget city council has to accept or approve it but if the money doesn't come in if a major building or the half the city burns down the city has to pay the full freight to the the schools and the city has to make has to swallow the loss doesn't it go through the state though it does now it does now so that if the city were to burn down they would still get there absolutely but that's the level that we've gone to make sure that you can't open school and then say oh but we're ex you know we can't we gotta fire three teachers today because the money short so we've tried we you know you you try and find a system that is stable and the higher you go in income the the more unstable it becomes um and so you you want to you want to find which is part of of the legs of the the three legs that mooney was was talking about which is our aging population our decline well not declining but our sluggish economy we haven't picked up as fast as the rest of the country how do you see us picking up what do you see as vermont economies that we can realistically we're not going to get amazon headquarters too no we are not um we seem to do very well with startups we've done ben and jerry's and coffee roasters you know and web web grocers and um we seem to do that i really think there's some interesting models showing up around the the country um right now we do veggie vermont in yeah economic growth incentive where you get uh it's really a rebate on your taxes but you get money back um you go in you apply and you either are expanding or you and you're in basically you have to increase employment and it has to be at a better than the the going wage and it has to have good benefits if you produce good jobs then the state gives you an incentive but that's a one size fits all and there's models like boston where they've done a real assessment of you know what's their strength what there's weaknesses this is the one area where we tend to get bogged down in partisanship you know it's like you can't power on any corn field and build anything in it and no you just have to do away with you know lower taxes and do away with regulation and we don't really seem to talk to business and i think we really as a state need to sit down and have business of all sizes and kinds talk with us and find a way to tailor make things to help what i would see as startups and once they get big enough they seem to need to move out because we're in a transportation cul-de-sac and they can't get their product to market easily how do you keep kids some in vermont i think when i talk about kids i'm speaking of people in their 20s i'm old enough to call them kids yeah they're kids um you know my kids all went away for a while they went away either to school three of them are back the fourth would have his wife could find a job that pays which he gets paid in montreal um i think i think but i think kids today are on the internet they see the world the you know and i think they're gonna want to go out and they're gonna want to see it i think what we really need to do is market that this is a great place to raise the family to you know we don't need a bunch of you know 20-something's partying we need families that are here that are stable and i don't think we do enough to market how good we are you know we had a governor who every time he spoke said vermont's bad for business now you know it's well we're old and retire who'd want to come here um i think we need to change our rhetoric and start talking about what's good about vermont and why would you it's safe the air is clean we don't have tornadoes and hurricanes and i mean we had Irene but the one before that was a 1927 do we have the housing for those people and what can the what can the state legislature do in your mind to increase our housing stock we did come up with the 36 million dollar bond last year um to increase affordable housing but and part of it is just the housing the price of raw materials it is very difficult i'm in a state with lots of lumber yes i am a realtor um that's why i asked for the next few months i'm in the process of retiring or phasing out you know the cost of raw material you you sell your big house and think you're going to downsize and build a little ranch and it ends up costing you what's your big house you sold for because things like copper was up plywood was up um just basic costs are up and the cost of land in new england is very high what about speaking of land what about act 250 it's been in for a while a long while now um would you see the state legislature revisiting to not to get rid of it but to do a substantial rethink of our land use policy our core of land use policy you know i think act 250 went in it was dean davis a good republican governor that did it um because suddenly in the 60s and 70s there were it was the back to the land movement and people moved here we're now writing books about it and there was a real concern that developers would start building houses and all you know and we'd start to look like long island where i lived as a kid and it was it was potato farms that just had wall-to-wall houses put up on it and there was and we we still have towns that have no local zoning uh we had no zoning we had no planning we it hadn't been an issue um i think it did its job and i think it continues to do its job um i think again this is where we need not just as a legislature but as a state to talk about okay we need housing for people we've got some of the oldest housing stock in the country and outside of chitin and county not very much is going up um housing prices are high and so how do we do that we we are building affordable housing um but how do we help government what can government do without putting its own dollars in is there anything the government can do to ease ease the regulation a tad or to i think is trying to find out what the regulations to ease we have done downtowns we have done neighborhoods continuous to downtowns and given them some break from the regulations you know we i think we need to continue to do that i think one of the things we could do and my experience comes with trying to site a water filtration plant in a neighboring town Montpeliers water sources in Berlin and going through state permitting and there seemed you know you were going through the natural resources department and there seemed to be a lot of people who were very focused on the environment and not making any and the city of Montpeliers was very happy with just dumping chlorine in the water as it came down the hill and didn't really want to have to put up this plant um and so trying to you know and then say okay i've got six weeks to give you an answer and i'll see you know and they said and it was five weeks and six and a half days generally before you get the answer and i don't think they understood that when you're a business that time is money well most of deck 250 from what i gather i might be wrong they get through in a fairly timely manner it's just on the outliers there are a few outliers um and i think i think the you know the word is out that it's very difficult and for most it isn't i think we could be a little more understanding of the of the issues that business you know has they i can remember him saying to me with the you know well um if you draw down more water than this you'll have to make remediation well what are you talking about well we won't know till we get there and i said well are we talking 10 000 or 10 million you know i mean that makes a difference to me i mean i'm not a business so what do you do if you're a profit-making business that is being just kind of well let's talk about the profit-making small business yes health care now there's a national move of what on skin so-called skinny health care plans that would strip off maternal the need to offer maternal care the need to offer psychiatric care so any kind of of of care but you'll end up with a policy that has a monthly premium that's a lot less would you um would now a lot of these are required by state law by the way in vermont yes they are would you favor selling skinny policies that are cheaper and more affordable no why not um when we first moved here my husband's health insurance did not cover maternity so when we were told to get a rider it would be cheaper to save up the money and we did um but we were you know we were able to do that um it used to be my son graduated from high school he was going to go backpacking for a year his sabbatical year yeah um he was out of school so he was off our policy a couple hundred dollars he got a a policy yes skinny policy um but and there were many companies that that's what they did they sold skinny policies to healthy people the minute you reached an age where you might need health care the minute you got sick or had pre-existing or had pre-existing conditions you couldn't you could get health care if you could come up with an exorbitant amount of money i mean a large number of people could not afford it and so what vermont did before my time so over 20 years ago they said look this is you you are going to take vermont as a pool and when my son who is 20 he's going to buy insurance and he's going to pay in and he probably won't use anything for 10 or 15 years but then when he is older and gets sick he'll pay less than he would have you know so you need a big pool we do this with all other kinds of insurance you know you've got a big pool life home okay um yeah fire car but most of us never total our cars burn down our houses you know most of us never put in a major claim and when they do they up your rates um or they let you go but most of us will put a claim in and if we live long enough most of us will put a major claim in to your health insurance system it's a very so it costs more paid parental leave came up before the last it's in the same boat i imagine it is could you explain what the thinking was on paid parental leave on both sides i think on one side it was we can't afford it um we can't afford it or we don't want it no i don't think we don't want it i have actually been putting a paid parental leave bill in for 10 years i i had originally funded it out of the unemployment insurance um and backed off a couple now what would the paid parental bill cover i did this because my son and his family live in montreal my daughter-in-law got a years paid leave it was tied to her unemployment insurance um she didn't take the year and it you know it's a reduced amount but it was enough to help pay the mortgage while she was out and able to stay home with my grandson um and i watched that and i watched the bonding at the same time i am watching young lawyers that work for the state watching their what it's getting near noon i gotta go nurse my baby at the daycare or you'd hear the breast pumps in the ladies room you know and i'm thinking how can you bond with the child when you're so stressed and yet that bonding is so important for the rest of that child's life and that family's life and so i knew you know i knew it wasn't gonna go anywhere i put it in and i put it in because i thought it was something we should talk about and it would be a selling point for younger families that's and i the more i think about it i think yes if we want to attract younger families here say this is what you can do in vermont we set it up as a form of self-employment that's modeled on new york where the employees actually pay in it was like a couple dollars a month and it's expanded to family leave so that those of us that have elderly parents that need to go to the doctors or need someone you know to help them can do that now you got a boost in the last session in term it it passed it passed it did and it's fate it got vetoed and it didn't get overrun it no will it be introduced by you again uh or version of it it will get re introduced and i'll be a sponsor yeah that version will i'm sure what do you see in the next legislature being reintroduced obviously pot is coming up oh yeah what what's your view on that on how to deal with montreal now main messachusetts we're getting encircled we uh and we knew that when we did the first bill i supported the senate bill i think it really worked at getting a regulated system so we knew who was growing what and what the quality and what the quality was um and making sure things didn't get laced with things and it was taxed there will be additional costs for law enforcement there will be you know we we're already doing prevention programs um you know i've been looking for sin to tax for years because it's the only thing you can tax are we going to do um gambling uh sports gambling do you see that coming up gambling is much harder in this state i that would be a much harder sell that's a sin yes that's yeah we could tax that couldn't we but i mean that's that's i mean cigarettes are the one thing you can tax and nobody cares of course the more you tax it the less you you bring in the less well and that has started the the cigarette but we the governor vetoed um we had two bills that went through one was attacks on e-cigarettes because they are becoming a major issue in schools with young people i mean what adult buys bubblegum flavored cigarettes uh they are marketed to young people uh that we couldn't get through my committee put an opioid attacks on opioid producers feeling that they made the money off of opioids um and in some cases knowingly and that they we are looking at decades right of costs um the damage to individuals to families we are going to be paying that cleanup costs for a long time and they should help the drug importation from canada yes how many years were you working on that many um when i first started in finance pharmaceutical costs were we had the new started out as new england legislators uh coalition on on pharmacy pricing uh bernie was taking buses to canada pharmaceuticals are much more inexpensive in canada we got major pushback from the pharmaceutical industry we tried to uh set a contract with i forget the name it was a pharmacy in illinois michigan that sourced from canada so now that is law and we've put into the federal government for the necessary paperwork we're waiting for that possible and probable rejection i'm not holding my breath uh i don't know the federal government has any reason to help from on at this point um you know we keep trying um it is very frustrating pharmaceuticals before the opioid epidemic became a cost pharmaceuticals medicare was set up when going to the hospital was your major cost right and you generally went to the hospital you died um now if you go to the hospital at all it's in day you know in one day and you are treated with pharmaceuticals they are your may and they're coming out with new ones every day and they do miraculous things that's something that's macro well beyond oh yeah vermont it's well beyond vermont and thank you for coming tonight so appreciate and i want to say how much i appreciate you're watching this show and becoming informed about the election please watch the other shows the other state senate candidates the house candidates watch bill's show on the parking garage bond and on the sewer bond but more important than that get out and vote get out and vote on november 6th tell your neighbors and your family to vote that is not only a duty but an obligation thank you so very much