 Welcome to Montpelier Civic Forum. It's another of our shows leading up until the election in November. All of these shows are covering the Washington County Senate race, the Montpelier Statehouse race, as well as Bill Fraser covering the parking garage bond, as well as the water bond. Now today I'm honored to have one of our candidates for the house. Mary Hooper. Hi, Richard. Mary, a lot of people know you. How long have you been in the Statehouse? I have served there for ten years, so five terms, and so I'm up for my election for the sixth term. And before that, what was your career? And during that, I served for eight years as the mayor of Montpelier, so four terms as mayor, and that overlapped a little bit. I was elected mayor in 2004. And then elected to the Statehouse in 2008. Prior to that, I had, actually I'd taken a couple of years off from working. I had been the commissioner of what was then the Department of Labor and Industry, and a job that I loved, really fascinating work, good work on behalf of working people in the state of Vermont. But I found myself all over the state, and not dedicated in working in my community. And I wanted to take a few years to just be in Montpelier and to really focus on community matters. And so I thought I'd take, you know, maybe two years off from... I've always worked. I've worked since I was 14 or 15, and we've always held a job. And so I thought, just take a little break. Did some volunteer work. I was on a committee that thought about how we do downtown redevelopment, what it takes to make our downtown a vital functioning place. What year would that have been? 1999. And you were looking at a parking garage. We'll come back to that, perhaps. But it was an interesting project. There were 20 or so of us on this committee that was appointed by the City Council. They really did a deep dive into what makes a functioning, effective downtown. What are the elements of it? And so we followed a model that's called the Main Street Model and thought about economic development and the appearance, so the vibe, how it feels when you're in the community, how you promote the community and how you have an organization that supports that work. That became what is now known as Montpelier Alive. So I was the first executive director of that organization. I worked on this committee and then I said, I've got to get a job, folks. Time to get back in the workforce. And they said, well, you know, will you be our first executive director? So I did that for a couple of years. And then I was elected mayor. Now in the state house, the Montpelier Alives are all over the state, actually. Those economic development functions and promoting downtown. Do you ever see issues in the state house that relate to the downtowns and to how the communities develop themselves economically? Absolutely. Can you give a couple of examples? Well, interestingly, the whole notion of how you do community development, and I would say it's community development. It's not just economic development. What is the distinction between community development and community economic development? So if you're just focused on making sure that the retailers are doing well, incredibly important work, and of course we need to be focused on that, you need to also think about how you invite the community into the downtown and how you engage them so that they want to support the initiatives that you need to be making to support those downtown retailers. You know how we love our downtown in Montpelier. But if we didn't feel that way, folks would be doing more online buying than they're doing now and you could substitute Montpelier for Middlebury, for Brattleboro, for any of them. I think there's a deeper passion for Montpelier. We've got something pretty special going on here. But you have to nurture that. It doesn't happen accidentally. That actually was one of the tags that we had for what was then called the Montpelier Downtown Community Association. We picked that cumbersome name very intentionally because we wanted it to be about not just economic development, but about community and how you invite the community in and ask the community to support that. How does that play in the state house, in the house? Okay, so in a variety of ways, where I started to go, when we passed legislation, it was probably in the mid-90s and I was fortunate to work on that when I worked in the executive branch that put a number of incentives and provisions in state law that said, essentially, we value our downtown and we want to figure out ways to make investments in our downtowns. And so, in statute, our provisions that say, if you become a designated downtown, there are certain opportunities that flow to you. Some of them are tax credits. I worked on bringing lots of tax credits into the downtown, a couple million dollars worth of tax credits to private individuals. Back in those days, we had grants and brought some sprinkler grants in because I was worried about buildings burning. A huge threat to our downtowns is buildings burning one at a time and losing that fabric of the community. Nowadays, we have tax increment finance districts. What is a tax increment finance district? I won't give a very good answer. You should have people... Well, if it's not a good answer, at least make it short. Yeah, yeah. It's a mechanism that allows a community that has gone through a number of steps to recapture the education portion of the property tax and retain it to pay for the cost of bonds for infrastructure, for making civic improvements. So it's a way of trying to focus growth into our developed communities, which is important. You want people on our water and sewer and using our roads rather than out developing cornfields. When we talk about a town, we not only talk about the businesses, we not only talk about the downtown, but we talk about the schools. And every legislative session, school finance is upfront and then ends up at the very, very end of the session. It starts the session and then it ends up in a crunch at the end of the session. Why? It's hugely complex and it's deeply personal. I've always said I would never serve on a school board because it's the most difficult civic position you can take because you're talking about it. So you're saying that John Holler is a masochist but not only having served on the school board but been mayor. Yeah. You are making decisions that affect children's lives and that is huge. But they're also civic lives. The schools determine the civic life of the city or the town. Absolutely. Personally, I think that is one of the more troubling things about what is now Act 46, which has been the school consolidation. School consolidation. Done under the rubric of we're going to save tax money. Big important question of how do you control expenses. We could have a long conversation about whether or not that was accomplished. Do you think it was accomplished in a short conversation? No. Why not? Logically, you would think it would do that. So I think that there were going to be some savings that some communities were already going to do the consolidation. And we saw that happen with the first bunch of communities that ran in and took advantage of what was it. They were incentives. They were huge incentives. There was a 10% deduction or reduction in your property tax on the education side that the rest of us paid for. So it wasn't... I mean, theoretically, you are saving money because you're consolidating. But I think when you do that analysis that you're not seeing that you're getting rid of that many school administrators or that you're seeing those sort of changes. What you're seeing is a change in spending patterns rather than a reduction in spending. But what you've lost, which is where you began, which is what does that do to the community? In some places it may strengthen the community but particularly in rural communities where the school is what you do. It is where you see your neighbors. It's grandparents going to watch basketball games but it's also just... it's where stuff happens. Unlike Montpelier where we have other excuses to get together. We've got the farmers market and different festivals. So we have a way of drawing ourselves together. But these small communities, their school is the heart and soul of their community. And I fear for them that they're going to lose their heart and soul as schools are closed. Do you feel that perhaps it's worth visiting what Maine has, which is each county is a separate supervisory district. So in Vermont we would have 14 supervisory districts. I think there may be fair discussions about should we have different governance structures. People have pointed to Maine and the fact is that after Maine instituted that consolidation approach, they said, whoops, that was a mistake and they have been backing off of that. Well, they had a vote that verified it initially. Yeah, yeah. But they have rethought that and are trying to figure out how to... if that was the right sort of thing to do. What about in the last legislative session, the unified teacher health contract? Let's stay on schools for a while. What were your thoughts on that? How did you vote on that? I voted... so the first half of the biennium, the proposal to do that and we turned that back and I voted to turn it back to say no. I tried as hard as I could to get the provision that essentially creates a unified statewide teacher's health care contract. They put it in the budget at the end of the day and it was a very last minute move. Now we're talking about the beginning and the end. Yeah. Well, there's a reason these things happen but I would like to say I voted against it but I could not vote against the budget and so I voted for the budget which had a provision. I actually shouldn't have put a frame to that way. I should have said, do you support that? Do you think that notion ultimately will help in cost containment and will hurt... Yes, it's cost containment too. It takes away some local bargaining power or bargaining control. So what disturbs me about that is that I think it's an intrusion upon bargaining and into the basic construct of labor management agreements. Once you take health care out of it, health care and wages are integrally related. There's no distinction and people will frequently bargain for lower wages in exchange for a decent... And so separating the two is just logically inconsistent to me. I think the net result is that in fact... Let me come back. There were different units around the state who particularly not teachers as much but the other people who participate. So folks janitors, cafeteria workers, folks like that have in many parts of the state bargained for really nice health care benefits in exchange for pretty lousy wages and suddenly... The ground shifts. Yeah, the ground shifts and I'm really worried about that group of people. I've always been ashamed that we're not willing to pay the workers who keep our systems moving and going, not just the professionals but the people who are cleaning rooms and feeding our kids aren't pay livable wages. Why is that? If it's a local decision, town by town, why is that? So that's the interesting thing of... So we weigh that against tax rates and I've sat there as mayor in supported budgets that I would have liked to have paid better wages. Actually I think the city's done pretty well on that side so I'm proud of that. But you make those choices. You know what people are willing to tolerate in terms of property tax payments and I think schools are making those decisions, making those choices. And some folks don't have very strong voices in that process which makes me a big union supporter because it gives unions and able people who individually do not have strong voices to amplify their voice. Do you believe when people say that the unified health contract is the beginning step to a unified teachers contract, to a statewide teachers contract? I think we're moving in that direction and interestingly... Would Vermont support that? Well, it's hard to imagine so the notions of having county-based systems are interesting. I come back to the value not only of our schools as centers of our communities but towns are also the centers of our communities. How many school boards do we have? I know. It's a huge number and it's difficult to bring people in. I understand those problems and I think those are fair observations but I would much rather go down to the end of the street, the other end of State Street and talk to my school board member at a school board meeting then get in the car and now the way the good folks in Roxbury are going... Well, we share where our school board meetings are but suddenly you feel a little removed. You wonder if they're going to listen to you or you're going to have as strong of a voice. You don't live next door to those folks necessarily so that they know you and you have a personal relationship. There's a loss there. Do you feel that the legislature's relationship with the Department of Education and with the State School Board is as it always has been? No, that's changed. So, remember the agency of education is separate from the State School, whatever it's called. No, the Board of Education is a separate entity not run by the agency of education. It used to be... So, those are two separate and distinct entities. It used to be that the person who is now the Secretary of Education was independent of the Governor's office and that has changed and I think that is a profound change in the way we look at education. It used to be, arguably, it was a... isolated from politics, from the politics of the executive... of a governorship. Right, right. I mean, Governors should be political. That's what we elect them to do. But we want the administrative functions to be separate, in particularly of education. I would love to see that not part of a political football. In terms of education, we've been talking micro-education on the school level. How do you finance that beast? Yeah, so therein lies the trouble. And I think that we need to be moving more rapidly toward an income-based system of financing which brings all sorts of interesting challenges with it to figure out... What is the problem with the current system of finance, income and part property? Well, because it's been cobbled together so much over the years that there are probably four people in the whole state of Vermont who can accurately describe the way it works. And I'm sure not one of them. So we've tried to make it a fair and equitable system, but we just keep building on it about every once in a while you need to tear it down, step back and go back up from the ground up. The governor, when he first came in two years ago, tried that in terms of his initiative to hold a separate vote that was quickly disposed of because he felt that income sensitivity makes people less aware of what the school budgets were. So just to be clear, he did not try to revamp the education financing system. What he did through his proposal which was to essentially set aside all of the budgets that school boards had already done. It already done all of the work. It came at the very beginning several months before town meeting day. Well, it came so late in the process that you couldn't put a proper budget in front of people. Had he said, I'm going to do this next year. Was there merit in that in your view? So he used the bully pulpit to say that budgets are too high and they need to be reduced. Even though they were massively approved. Well, even though they were massively approved and in fact the rate of increase I wanted to say was virtually zero but it was less than 2%. The school boards, the second year school boards brought in budgets that were lower than what the governor said they should do and then he still said that wasn't good enough. How would you see it fundamentally changed? You said changing it over to income less dependence on property. What would that mean to the average person? What would it mean to the wealthy person? What would it mean to the poor person? Well, they're in like all of the really thorny questions and I'm not sure. It's pretty easy for us all to say tax the rich and that'll take care of our problems and we basically do not have enough rich people to And you'd lose some if you tried that. I'm not sure, that's what people say but it's interesting that in fact we seem to have an in migration of people with wealth. So I'm not sure, I think they're coming here because we're a pretty fabulous place. Process-wise, how do you grab a consensus to change something that fundamental because the next question after this is going to be Act 250, which is another one that how do you change these things that are so structurally fundamental in education? Every year we say we're going to do it, we never do it. Well, we as a society and as Vermonters and certainly in the house we tend to approach these things incrementally rather than... With studies and task forces. But we do a little bit here. I mean a little bit more each year and sometimes that gets us to the right place or sometimes it gets us to an incredibly complex system like our education financing system. And so yes, in fact we do have yet another tax study that is, we had a very good one that I thought was the basis for making some of those fundamental changes where there were thoughtful people who reached close to a consensus on what to do but they didn't tackle the property tax side of things and this study is essentially an addendum so we have a study committee that's I think going to be a couple years long that is tackling that. And so I think we're going to look at it's not just what do you do about property taxes but what do you do about our revenue raising system that we need to be talking about sales and all of the other revenue generators that we have and thinking about whether or not they're equitable. People like to talk about our high property tax rates and those who pay high income tax, those rates but when you look at objective studies that really fairly look at each state and it's complicated because we all have different mechanisms for using revenue and some of those don't show up in those state reports. The fact is Vermont is kind of in the middle of the pack. We may be high on some things and very low on other things but at the end of the day the tax obligation in the state of Vermont is somewhere in the middle of the 50 states. That's an okay place to be. That's land use. It's having what it's 25th anniversary or whatever. And it hasn't been really seriously revisited. Do you think it should? Well we're having a task force, a commission to do this work. It's a really interesting question. I don't know that they're necessarily going to be getting into what are some of the fundamental areas that we didn't take care of. Remember when we put Act 250 in place we said we were also going to have a state land use plan. Exactly. And something else. I think it was three pronged and we just did the one and I'm forgetting what I could be referring to. I think the criticisms of Act 250 are if you had a time limit on this thing saying that it is a process that at its most will take six months or nine months. But sometimes Act 250 just keeps drawing on and on and on. So I haven't gone in depth with 250 related issues in some period of time. But in fact I believe if you look at the statistics the vast majority of permits are issued very quickly. Sometimes just I think the majority of them with an administrative process. And it's only the much larger more complex ones which arguably deserve more scrutiny. The other side and an element of that so is the system too complex? Fair. Good question. We've certainly changed in 25 years. There are other things that we may want to add in. There are things that we may want to pull out. Those are all fair questions. Now their element though of the system is the quality of work that people bring to the table. If you put together just like any permit application you can do it. Now we're hearing a mayor speak. Well I used to work in a regulatory role for the state. You put together if you know how the process works and you do your background work if it's a fair system you get through it pretty quickly. So you've got people who are familiar with the permitting system and they know how to move through it. They know they need to bring this set of blueprints or this set of plans. I've got to remember to get the well permit or the septic or the road cut or the driveway cut. That's why we have lawyers who specialize in 250. That's too bad that it's not just people can do it but if you're doing a very complex project you probably want people with the expertise to help you out. What we forget is and it was interesting to watch during the crash of 2008 spurred by over development of housing. We ought to talk about housing at some point. But in so many other states there was this tremendous overproduction of housing because people could move through the permitting process. People thought that it was an easy money maker and a lot of people really suffered from that. We didn't see that in Vermont and that's not the purpose of our permitting but our permitting process in general does require you to be thoughtful and careful and to ask deep questions before you make those investments. Is the state house working on housing policy that encourages housing in Vermont? What's your view on that? We passed a very good sized bond $35 million to support housing. Burlington has a 1% vacancy rate. We have a 1% vacancy rate down here. That's just untenable. What is a vacancy rate? It's the amount of apartments that are dwelling units that are available to people at any given time. I don't know the time frame that they measure it but it basically is... We're booked. Yeah, we're booked and that means that prices are high. There's not enough competition in the market to help hold those prices and so it gets to one down which gets to the affordability. What do you think of the market then? I know. Would create units because you can flip them quickly? Yeah and we're not seeing that. Generally the market is acting in a weird way, not just with housing but also salaries. Wouldn't you think that if it is so impossible to hire people that we'd be offering higher salaries to attract them and that's not happening with wages in the state of Vermont either. But on housing... I was reflecting and I've been very consistent in the issues that I believe are important to Montpelier and to the people of the state of Vermont and they all revolve around the economy and poverty and people's ability to thrive. I've consistently talked about housing, heating and food as kind of the three pillars of things that we need to pay attention to. And heating, can you really do much? Let's finish the housing conversation. We have 100 people who are homeless in Washington County. We should be able to solve that problem. We should be able to figure out how to put 100 people into some sort of safe place to live. There are 1200 people statewide. Compared to Los Angeles that has what, 35,000 people on a given day. We can solve this problem and this is kind of the thing that I'm going to dig into hard this year. Let's fix that problem because once you have a safe and secure place to live your less likely food stability, kids doing better in schools, hold a job better, your health is better, all of those things that we know throw you into poverty or keep you in poverty begin to be, you can begin to sort them out. Huge issue for our communities now is substance abuse, the opioid issue. Well, again, let's get people housed so that we can tackle substance abuse and those related issues. How about the minimum wage? That's the intersection of the economy and need. Yeah, yeah. I've struggled. I past tense struggled with this when this was an issue. Frankly, it came down to my committee. I served on the House Appropriations Committee and that was the last stop of the minimum wage bill for the house before it came to the floor. I heard very clearly and I understand what our downtown retailers were telling me. Our mom and pops stores that I think are very special. The backbone of... I love being able to walk down the street and not see a chain store. But it's also the small ones you see on the roads as you're in the outers. People just working hard to make a living. But it's not a corporate policy that you're dealing with. It's keeping the books on your kitchen table. And I know for them it's very hard to look at the sort of wage increases that we're talking about. But at the end of the day, I came back to my feelings about the dignity of work and looking at the important policy changes over the past 120 or 30 years that we have made where we said, you know what? It's not okay to work seven days a week or six and a half days a week. How many jobs? Or how many jobs. Or that kids can work in terrible working conditions. Or how about if you get injured while you're working for your employer that you get fired rather than health care, which is what workers' comp is about. Those are all very significant increases, changes that we made that supported the dignity of work. And working for a livable wage is part of that. So you have to weigh those two together. And how did you come down on that story? So I came down after like, what do I do? How do I look at the stores? I've got to support the minimum wage increase over time. People are not making it on our minimum wage now. And we've just got to see the increase. And the Federals are pointing the issue. Yeah, right. I mean, it's not even relevant because no one's working for that wage. We've got to raise up wages. This is Montpelier we're talking about, which means I have to discuss the marijuana legislation. That went through the house last year and no one, it's the baby no one likes. It's partially there, it's not partially there. They're decriminalized and only partially legalized. As we're taping this, Quebec has legalized. Maine has legalized. Massachusetts is legalized. What do you see in the next legislative session for marijuana? So I personally would rather not deal with it. I think we spent a lot of time, our poor judiciary committee. So one of the ways our legislative process works is that bills, proposals get assigned to a committee and our judiciary committee got the marijuana bill and spent a huge amount of time on it. And I think we have other important things to be dealing with. I am fine with where we landed, which was the legalization but not the tax and regulate. I know that people... Which still maintains a black market for marijuana? Yeah, I get it. I understand, but at least we're not putting people in jail for possession and ruining their lives that way. Although we could talk about criminal justice reform too. No, but I want to talk about guns. But hang on. So the problem with the tax and regulate system is that I am concerned. People say, yeah, we can raise a bunch of money and deal with those poverty issues you're talking about, Mary. You know, you could build more housing. You could put food in people's homes. I don't think we'll raise the sort of money because of the need to do education on the use of marijuana. Law enforcement. Law enforcement, setting up another bureaucracy. I just... I don't see that we'll see a lot of extra money coming in and that would be the only... So I'm not looking at the gray market problem. For people who were gun supporters, civil unions took two years to get through the legislature. Death with dignity took two years. Gay marriage took two years in a veto to get through the legislature. This got through very, very quickly. Do you feel that they might have a point that something happened that was extraordinary in a process sense? Well, something happened that was extraordinary. I don't know that the process was subverted. There have, in fact, been many gun regulation bills over the years. There have been multiple attempts to make sure that people are safe in their homes and to make sure that gun violence is reduced. So it has been a long process. We just happened to have kind of the spotlight shown on a particular moment. Marjorie Stone and Douglas? Well, I'm thinking now of the... Up there? Yeah, up here. Here in Vermont. Which was after that? Which was after that, but honestly, why all of the horrific civil shootings? You've been in there for ten years. Why was it bottled for ten years then if they've been introduced over and over and they were, in your mind, common sense? And I'm not saying they all were common sense, but what I was saying is there's always been a conversation about how do we move this forward. It was not out of the blue. There has been a conversation. I think over time people have become... We have reached a consensus, and that is our legislative process. It's very rare that we do kind of this earth-shattering move-the-world sort of legislation. Usually you slowly bring people along, and that's what's been happening. So these horrific shootings around the country, I think we're bringing people along who were looking at their communities and thinking gun violence wasn't an issue. Finally started to see, oh, if that can happen in Castleton or Pultney... Pultney. Oh, my goodness, it can happen here. And then we've seen to our horror here in Montpelier. It's very close to home. So I think people finally saw the light. In that process where you say, it's been brought up and it's going to come again, is there anything in the next legislative agenda that you see that was left from last year, other than yet another discussion on marijuana that you see will come up in this legislative session? We're certainly going to talk about taxes. We're certainly going to talk more about school-related issues. I think the administration's proposal for some of the last consolidation questions, which will affect our surrounding schools. The U-32 district has been told to behave in a certain way. So that's certainly going to be looked at. Will paid leave come back again? So I expect paid family leave will come back. I hope it will. And I expect the minimum wage will come back again. I hope that looking at funding for housing and my issue of what are we going to do about homelessness. Will the like, will financing the cleaning of the lake come back? Absolutely. We have to. So yeah, we've got an expensive agenda in front of us. I'm going to close just on a question, and only someone who's been in the state house as a Democrat for so many years can answer. What is the role of the minority Republicans in the House? It's a very important role. And before I answer that, precisely talk about people see the debate on the House floor and Senate floor, but we actually have debates because there really is a larger minority. And sometimes it seems kind of tankerous and a little clashy and difficult, which is good because that is a voice and it's important to allow, not allow, but that every voice have a place. What I see happen in our committees, which is where the work on bills is done, is this very civil, cordial discussion about how do we support what is important to Vermonters. And that is the question that all 150 members of the body ask themselves, independent, Prague, Democrat or Republican. I really am confident that that's the fundamental question, is how do I serve Vermonters? And that's what we ask ourselves in committee. We have strange alliances, the most conservative guy on the Appropriations Committee, and it becomes a joke because we're voting together on issues, but it's because Bob and I have worked our stuff out and we've moved more toward the center, which is frustrating to people. I mean, Montpelier, if I could vote for Montpelier in the way most Montpelier people think, it would be a very, very different budget that we would pass. You know, the piece of policy would be very different. But I don't just represent Montpelier. I do represent Montpelier, but I represent the state of Vermont and what's best for the state of Vermont. Is there anything more frustrating to you than Berlin Pond? That's just confounding to me. Speaking of a local issue. Speaking of a local issue, and to say, oh, don't worry about that. If there's a problem, we'll just throw money at it later. Really? Why aren't we protecting our resources and making sure that we don't throw money at issues later? So, yeah, that was frustrating on a local level. I'm totally confused by the governor's position on our budget, which he said was a fabulous budget, which spent, came in at a lower growth rate than his budget did. But then he vetoed it because we weren't spending money on ongoing expenses. And to me, that is just one of the worst budgeting practices there is, is to say, oh, I'm not going to worry about where the money's coming from in the future. I've got it today. It's in my wallet, so I'm going to spend it. And what we wanted to do was invest in the pension where we knew we could buy down cost that would be significant over time. And it was like, wait a minute. I'm a liberal Democrat, and I'm having this argument with Republicans. We've just reversed our roles. Were there Republicans on your committee who were in favor of investing in the pension? Oh, absolutely. We voted it out 11-0. Yeah, it's just later it became political. At that point, we're going to leave this. Thank you, Richard. Thank you so very much, Mary, for being here. Thank you for watching this show, and I'll leave with the two things I always leave with. Watch the other shows. Watch all of the candidates. Watch Bill talk about the garage bond. Watch Bill talk about the water bond. But most important, get out and vote on election day. Encourage your family. Encourage your friends to get out and vote as well. It's not only your civic duty, but it's your civic responsibility. Thank you very much.