 Good evening, everyone. My name is Akola Gwek and I am the moderator for the forum for the State Representative for China N16 tonight. Welcome to Town Meeting TV. Joining us tonight are the three candidates participating in this forum. The candidates are Ryan Aderio. Thank you, Ryan. Jill Krawinski. Thank you, Jill. And Kate Logan. Thank you, Kate. The rules, we have 45 minutes for this conversation and the rule of the forums are I have 11 questions and I will choose as I wish from these questions. But we could cover all of them or some of them depending on the match ground we will cover during the 45-minute conversation. Please respond to the question in 1.5 minutes. And depending on time, you can ask each other a question for 30 seconds and the person being asked the question can respond in 30 seconds. So without further ado, I will just start with the first question and I will go by the order in which you are listed here on this paper. So the first question is about opening a statement. Please tell us why you are running and what experience you bring to this position. What will be different for the people of your district, meaning China N16 or the state as a whole because you have been elected to this position? And what qualifies you to make those changes happen? Right. You have the floor for 1.5 minutes. Great. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad to be here with Jill and Kate. I respect both of them so much and I'm looking forward to a productive discussion. Some of you watching might know me from teaching your kids dance. Some of you might know me from my work in affordable housing in the community or working with survivors of domestic violence. Some of you might just see me in the park with my dog sometimes but I am running because I love the life that I live here in Vermont. And through my work in the community, I've realized how inaccessible that life is for so many people that live on my block in my neighborhood in this community. And I want to work to make it a little bit easier to access all of the things that I love about living in Vermont. I realize I'm in an incredibly privileged position to be able to enjoy the great restaurants and music and resources that we have here. And I want to make it just a little bit easier. I always think when it comes to politics about something that my mom always said growing up which was it doesn't have to be easy but it shouldn't be this hard. And I want to make it a little bit easier and more fair for everyone who lives here. I also just want to say like a lot of Vermonters right now I am grieving and enraged about the decision from the Supreme Court last week. So every moment is a great moment to plug that you need to support Prop 5 this November on the ballot. We need to make sure that we enshrine protections that will enable all Vermonters to access abortion care if they choose it whenever they want in a safe way with dignity. And that is I think something that we all agree on and I don't want to miss any opportunity to say that loudly and clearly. Thank you Ryan. Jill why are you running? Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you for moderating this and for CCTV for hosting. It's great to be here with Ryan and Kate. My name is Jill Proinsky and I've been representing the Old North End in downtown Burlington for about 10 years and I also serve as the Speaker of the House. Other experience in addition to my service as your State Rep has been working as the Executive Director of Emerge Vermont an organization that trains and supports women to run for office. I also spent about eight years working at Planned Parenthood of Northern New England in a variety of roles from communication and advocacy work. You may remember us working with City Council and City Hall years ago on a buffer zone for patients to enter in the health center safely. So I thank those for who were helping in that battle years ago. I love our community and I'm running for reelection because I think we need to continue our work in creating a Vermont that works for all of us and ensuring that our COVID recovery plan leaves no one behind. We did great work. I'm proud to have led this last session expanding excess for affordable housing and childcare investing in workforce development to recruit and retain more workers and to help our small businesses. Our work on climate change and gun violence prevention and like Ryan said what happened with the Supreme Court on Friday overturning Roe v. Wade was unacceptable and we need to work together to pass the Constitutional Amendment in November. Thank you. Thank you Jill. Just to restate I should address you as Representative Krawinsky because you are incumbent. So let me just correct myself on that. You're fine. Either way you're fine. Thank you. Kate you have the floor. Thank you all so much. It's great to be here. Thank you for moderating. It's really proud to be here with Speaker Krawinsky and Ryan. I'm Kate Logan and I serve as the director for the Vermont Coalition for Runaway and Homeless Youth Programs. It would be an honor to represent downtown and the old north end of Burlington firstly because my seatmate would be Speaker Krawinsky and I'd be filling the seat of longtime climate champion Kurt McCormick. More importantly I'm running for office because I believe that people like me with lived experience of marginalization should run for office and become policy makers. I've been a low-income student parent and I know how time consuming it is to navigate social services and I'm a victim of predatory student lending. I also grew up in a majority BIPOC working class community in the Chicago area and I will fight for our collective liberation. Burlington's working families are suffering and deserve a representative who knows how to transform public policy in practical ways that meet our needs and I do. For the last 20 years I've dedicated my time and my career to understanding why and how to take concrete action to create communities where everyone has the freedom to thrive. As a young mother I founded a childcare cooperative for low-income parents in Portland, Oregon. I then completed a master's degree studying human rights, democracy, public policy, and economics. For nearly 15 years I've conducted academic research, served the state government as a policy analyst, and worked as an organizer and then as an advocate in Vermont Statehouse on diverse issues including public health, climate change, employment, racial justice, agriculture, and economic development. I hope that local leaders and residents of Chittenden 16 will come to know me as their partner in addressing the most pressing needs of our community in Montpelier. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much Kate. The next question is on racial equity. Burman passed some racial equity legislation in the past in the past few years. Are you satisfied that that the Burman legislature is doing enough to dismantle systemic and institutional racism in the state? Do you support reparation and apologizing for Burman's role in the celebrity and systemic racism? Let me flip it and let me go straight to Speaker Kronowski. Thank you. That is a really important question and I'm glad that it was on the list for this conversation. I think that the work that we need to do to dismantle racism in our state it cannot be done with just one bill and not just one session. It is an arc of work that needs to happen over time listening carefully to Burmaners and their lived experiences. That's why we passed a resolution apologizing for eugenics in the state in the role that the state played in that and born out of that work and that listening we passed H96 our truth and reconciliation commission bill that will spend years working in the community to hear about what structural racism exists, how people were impacted and what we can do to write that as a state. Those actions of reparation and apologizing yes but so much more. We did some additional work dealing with tackling racism and housing and environmental justice and criminal justice reform. Again, this is an issue that lives in every policy committee that we have in Montpelier from health care to judiciary to economic development and so I'm committed to continuing the great work that we started in ensuring that recruiting space where everyone has a voice at the table and can participate so I hope I can earn your support to continue that work next session. Thank you. So, Speaker, just very briefly, are you here to reparation? To reparations? Yes. Yes, and what the committee comes up with is the commission is going to be telling us what Burmaners are asking for so it could be reparations, it could be other things as well so I just want to be clear that I support the commission and the work that they will do to tell us what to work on and support including reparations. Thank you. Kate, you have the floor. Yeah, I do want to congratulate all of the racial justice advocates in their very hard work often unpaid to advance racial justice in the state of Vermont. There's amazing work has been done by them and our legislature to systemically review and make recommendations for how to address systemic and institutional racism in state government and its related programs. Like many of us who have demanded broad critical reflection on systemic and institutional racism in Vermont and beyond, I support every effort that has been made to learn more about and consider the long-term social and personal harms that have accumulated as a result of many different forms of white supremacist racism and racist policies. And I certainly applaud the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission this year, for example. And just to make a specific request, speaking from the perspective of an aspiring legislator, I'd like the legislature, the legislative council and state agencies to amend their policy development process by addressing racial disparities as part of the legislative drafting process for every bill put before the legislature without those considerations being made in the research and development of a policy proposal. I've personally found in my own work, there's considerably more effort required afterwards to amend bills. And this work is often done by almost entirely unpaid grassroots BIPOC advocates who track legislation, mobilize fellow BIPOC and white allies, and dedicate their time to educating legislators on the racial disparities relevant to hundreds of issues that are taken up in committee hearings and on the floor of the legislature. And I do hope that that is one of the recommendations that the commission makes. That is something that I think would make a huge difference in addressing racial disparities in Vermont. And yes, I support reparations. And yes, I believe that an apology is due. Thank you. Thank you. That would have been my follow-up questions. Yes, I would offend that today's speaker. Right. You have the floor. Thank you. Yes, I support an apology, but only if it's backed up with action. And I do support reparations. I look forward to hearing what the commission has to say. I always, coming from the domestic violence advocacy world, we like to say that people are their own best expert. So I think it's crucial that when we're looking at issues of racial and social justice, we are working with communities of color and listening to communities of color about what their concerns are and incorporating those into every aspect of policymaking. Racial and social justice cannot be siloed to be its own standalone issue. It is a part or should be a part of every decision that's made. Breaking down these inequities that have built up over centuries and generations is going to take time, and it's going to take a lot of work. It's also going to take a lot of reflection. I think we need to break down all of our decision-making through this lens. It's overdue, and I look forward to watching the state of Vermont live up to its values and reinvest in communities of color, particularly new American communities. We have a lot of new neighbors and friends here, and we're only going to have more to welcome in the coming years. And it's important not only to make people feel welcome, but to let them know that they're a part of the community and a part of the decision-making that's going to happen. Thank you. Thank you for being on time. Since one of you already alluded to proposition five, so I would just move to that so that you can address it right away. Proposition five, two constitutional amendments will be in front of the borders in, I mean, this November. Give us your natural summary and why you do or do not support these amendments. Kate, you have the floor. Thank you. Yes, I fully support both proposition two and proposition five. Proposition two is long overdue. It would prohibit the use of slavery or indentured servitude in any case, including for criminal punishment or even with the so-called consent of the enslaved or indentured individual. There are no circumstances where the treatment of an individual should be allowed, and especially given the over-incarceration rate of black indigenous and people of color and low-income whites in the United States, slavery or indenture as a criminal punishment would simply maintain the historic marginalization of these groups, and I know that Vermonters are behind this. Vermont's racial justice advocates have tirelessly worked to bring this before the voters this November, and I urge everyone to vote yes to prop two on November 8th or before when early voting starts. I also support proposition five, which would guarantee reproductive liberty to those within Vermont. I was proud to participate in the legislative process to secure its passage for the first time in Vermont in 2019. Reproductive liberty activists and advocates have long feared, and over the last several years have known, that this conservative churn in the Supreme Court was coming and Vermont was prepared to lead the country in protecting this fundamental human right to reproductive autonomy. I thank Speaker Krawinsky in particular and all of the other legislators and advocates for their tremendous leadership on this issue. I was personally devastated that our nation no longer offers this freedom to all, but I am so grateful that my children and I live in a state where our rights will be protected when Vermont voters show up to pass prop five in November. Thank you, Kid. Brian. Thank you. Yes, I am in full support of the passage of prop two. I think it is a safeguard that is long overdue and should pass in November, but I think like a lot of Vermonters, prop five in particular is at the front of our minds right now. To me, Vermont is an aspirational place. People look to Vermont as a model of what's possible, and we need to pass prop five to show everyone around the country that not only is legislation like this possible, but that it's popular. It needs to pass overwhelmingly, and we need to make sure we are joining in concert with all of our neighboring states and making sure that we are all working together, that we're not cooperating with states that may seek to prosecute anyone who receives an abortion here in Vermont. If they're not from here, we also need to protect our medical providers who live in Vermont. Prop five is a start, but there's more work to do because rights are under assault right now. That was approved last week, and we need to continue the work. We need to be on the offensive because this is the whole ball game. The loss of bodily autonomy for so many people in this country is the whole ball game, and if we can't prevent that, I don't know why we would even be involved in politics. This is everything. Thank you, so my right speaker. Thank you. I am a strong, strong supporter of both prop two and prop five. Prop two is, when you'll see it on the ballot listed as to prohibit slavery and indentured servitude amendment on the ballot, that is prop two. It is long overdue and clarifies where we stand and what our values are as a state. Prop five is the reproductive liberty amendment. In 2019, I was serving as the House majority leader, and when we saw then President Trump have nominees to the Supreme Court, we knew we had to act, and we had to be proactive, and we had to pass a short term and a long term plan to protect reproductive rights in our state. And as Kate mentioned, we worked to pass the reproductive freedom of choice act, which protected access to contraceptives and to abortion care. And then the next step was to pass a constitutional amendment, which takes years to get through the legislative process to ensure that we could have this protection enshrined in our constitution. If we pass this in November, we will be the first state in the country to explicitly do so for reproductive rights. I can't stress enough, given what is happening in our country and in Washington DC, how important it is that we come out and we vote for prop five and prop two in November. And that's why I hope that you will send me back to Montpelier so that we can understand more of what is in this court decision over 200 pages and what we need to do to protect providers for patients to make sure that we have done everything humanly possible to make abortion access available and accessible to everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Very quickly to all of you, you know, proposition are what we private citizens vote on in order to become we vote for them. What is each of you doing to ensure that those two proposition are supported by the citizen in November? Very quickly. Every opportunity that I'm out there talking to voters, I'm reminding them to vote for prop two and for prop five. We were just out at City Hall Park talking about prop five the other day in response to what happened in the Supreme Court. And as I talk with voters, I will be asking them not only for their support to send me back, but support prop two and prop five. Thank you. Okay. And then Ryan. Yeah, I am using my campaign for state rep for the Chittenden 16 district as an opportunity to talk about a range of issues. And fundamental to my platform is reproductive freedom, which includes reproductive liberty as well as issues like paid family and medical leave insurance, childcare, universal healthcare, universal access to high quality education. But yeah, absolutely. I will be speaking with hundreds of voters to gain their support in the Democratic primary. And if I'm successful, then I will continue to do outreach in the community until November and prop five and prop two, because racial justice is another one of my fundamental issues in my platform will both be things that I'll be mentioning, making sure that when I'm canvassing, phone banking, text banking, and so on, and attending community events that I'm mentioning both prop two and prop five as important issues that should motivate people to get out and vote in November. Right. Yeah. I mean, anyone that heard me give my opening statement knows that, especially the issues around prop five are at the front of mind right now for me as I know they are for so many. I'm probably going to continue to open with it as I get out there in the community and talk to voters. Everyone that I know is consumed right now with doing everything we can to protect the right to access a safe abortion in this state. And racial justice is always something that is on the ballot, even if there's not a specific proposition that people are voting on. But I think these two issues are so clearly a litmus test for what our values are. And if we can pass them overwhelmingly, I think it says a lot about who we are as Vermonters. And so I think it's a great way to talk about a lot of other issues because they so encapsulate what we believe about the way people should be able to live their lives. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. We still need to get to budget education and healthcare. I just want to get to those because they are very important. Let's go to the budget. Given possibly and present unprecedented revenue and expense challenges, Vermont faces over the next few years, how will you propose approaching the budget? Is it important to balance the state budget and how would you do this? Right. You have the floor first. Thank you. Yes. We always balance our budget in Vermont and I think that's important. I think that is a statement of our responsibility here. We're working with our collective money and to use it wisely is incredibly important. I also think budgets, again, are a statement of our values. Where we're deciding to allocate funds says everything about what we're prioritizing going forward. So yes, I would look to Speaker Kroinski's leadership. She has done a phenomenal job making sure that we have a budget that is robust and has a lot of action items in it and a lot of inspiring work attached to the numbers. I think it's important to connect budgets with the actual lived experiences of the people who will be impacted by it. So I think keeping the connection between the numbers on the page and the results that that will wind up having in the community is important. So our state budget is really like a blueprint of what our priorities are, right? And the last several years our budget has been completely blown up because of our work with COVID and ensuring that we have a recovery plan that leaves no one behind. The influx of federal dollars that we have gotten has really changed the course of how we can support Vermonters in our state. It really provided a once in a lifetime opportunity to deeply invest in programs that help Vermonters from housing to childcare to workforce development to cleaning up our lakes and streams and waterways and so much more. Huge shout out and thank you to our federal delegation for their support and getting these resources back to us. Right now our state revenues look good but we don't know what it will look like in two months from now or six months from now. So I think it's really important that we approach this budget, next budget just like we always do with getting all the facts of where we are with our revenue, making sure that we're holding town halls to hear from Vermonters about what's important to them and what their needs are and use that as the starting place with how we build a budget that creates a Vermont that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few. Thank you. I am grateful for the recent influx of money from the federal government that has supported so many important investments but yet this is a time when so many Vermonters are still struggling to make ends meet just as they were before the COVID-19 pandemic and we need to make even more significant investments to support workers, their families, and Vermont small businesses. The state budget is a moral statement and Vermont statute requires that the state budget serve to quote address the needs of the people of Vermont in a way that advances human dignity and equity and fiscal policies that seek to promote economic well-being among the people of Vermont and foster a vibrant democracy. Our statute also says that our budget spending and revenue policies will reflect the public policy goals established in state law and recognize every person's need for health, housing, dignified work, education, food, social security, and a healthy environment. And while we're making great progress, we're still not living up to that promise of the budget. I'm committed to working with legislative leadership and my fellow legislators to fight for the most progressive and humane budget possible, especially in a context where our governor has had a tendency to veto some very important public investments such as a truly equitable paid family and medical leave insurance program. For example, we know we also know that the affordable housing need in Vermont is while there has been significant investment recently, it still will not meet the full need and despite those recent investments, we need to do more. Ember Monters will still wait many years and sometimes never receive access to safe and affordable housing in the communities where they live, work, and send their children to school. So if there is the political will in our state and at the national level, frankly, there are some opportunities this year to make some gains in November. I believe it's time to take advantage of the good position that we're in to consider how we can reform the tax system to make it truly progressive, eliminating or reforming regressive taxes such as the income tax and ensuring that all Vermont residents and visitors are paying their fair share to fund a people's budget. Further, and it's just one example of how to increase state revenue with the need for climate change mitigation and a transition to equitable and sustainable local economies, we have the opportunity to stop sending millions of dollars of potential revenue out of our state every year for fossil fuels and to create new livable wage jobs to fill the many positions that are required in that new economy. Along with that income taxes, I'm at time. Okay, great. Thanks. And yes, we should balance the budget when we, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. When I put up, I should have told you when I lift up my hand, you are essentially out of time, but it's okay. Now, I think I will, you have been going essentially two minutes or a little more. So I will revet, maybe reduce in order to cover all the question, maybe we could go down to one minute. So I will make sure that you are actually in answering the question in one minute. And if we have time left, then we can open it up as a free. So let's go to education. The legislature can make impacts on how education is funded statewide. Do you see the need for changes to how we fund education and how would you use your office to move changes forward? This question is being asked in the light of the legislation that has just been passed that support, you know, the reform in the way education finance are raised and distributed across the school. So the question is what it is, do you see the need for changes to how we fund education and how would you use your office to move changes forward is the question. And Kate, you have the floor. One minute. All right. Yeah, progressive. I'm muted. Okay, go ahead now. You can hear me. Yeah, we need a progressive income tax rather than a property tax. Advocates have long argued for this. And as reported last year by Vermont's tax structure commission, funding public education through the property tax is regressive. This means that the lower someone's annual income, the higher the effective tax rate of the property tax, the tax takes a higher percentage of their income than that of someone who earns more on an annual basis. I how much I'd be able to use my office to move changes such as those would be determined a lot by my committee assignment as a new legislator. My assignment would determine what I focus on and substantive policy work in the state house. However, I'd also be pleased to serve as a sponsor or co-sponsor and advocate for funding reform proposal. Thank you. Speaker, you have the floor. Thank you. So I want to just be clear about what I think you were alluding to in the beginning about what we did this last legislative session around changing the weights for how we fund education. And so we have all these different weights that help us come up with what our tax bill is going to be and how we fund our education. And we know that the weights acknowledge that it's more expensive to educate middle and high school students, children that are living in poverty, children in rural areas and children for whom English is not their first language. So we took a huge step this legislative session. I was proud to help advocate for that and get that across the line and get that to the governor for his signature. It'll be really important that we look to see how these weight changes are working and whether we need to further adjust them while we're looking at how that effort is being implemented and supporting our children because that is what this is about, ensuring that our children are getting the best education possible. We are going to this summer study all the other ways that we can have a more progressive taxation system when it comes to education. So moving to income base is one area that's going to be looked at. And so I'm really excited and interested to see the work that this committee does over the summer and fall and get to work on those recommendations and work in January. Thank you. Thank you. Right. Thank you. So as I had mentioned earlier, I teach dance. I teach dance in schools all over the county and a little bit outside the county as well. I'm in and out of schools all the time and COVID has been so hard on young people in particular, but an area that I'm focused on is that zero to five age range. Three out of every five Vermont children from zero to five don't have access to the kind of childcare that they need. And even when families do have access to that kind of childcare, they're often paying up to a third of their income towards it. That is completely unsustainable and it prohibits so many people, mostly women, from participating in the workforce and fully engaging in our communities. So looking at that piece of the very earliest portion of someone's life and making sure that they have access to the education and childcare that they need pre-K. We need to really look into those avenues as not just an investment in education, but that's also an investment in our workforce and in our adults that are living here to provide them with every tool they need to participate fully. Thank you so much, Brian. Let me jump over here. Let's go because time is not with us, but sometimes certain circumstances dictate why I use a certain question. Gun rights. What is your proposition? What is your position on gun control legislation? Do you think there should be further legislation? And I'm thinking about what has just happened in Washington, D.C. So, Brian, you have the floor. One minute. Thanks. As someone who does work in schools, gun safety is something that's on my mind a lot because we have burdened our young people with the fear of gun violence in their schools, in their communities, and they don't know any differently. And that's unacceptable to me. We've done a lot of great work in Vermont in the past, but I think there's more to do. There is safe storage legislation that we can look at pursuing. We also need to be really cognizant of the people who are most in danger. Folks living with someone that is an intimate partner, perpetrator of domestic violence are so much more likely to die by a gun, and we need to make sure that we are protecting the most vulnerable people. A lot of the laws I think that we look at with regard to gun safety are pretty broad. I think we can go ahead in a state like Vermont and specifically tailor those laws to the people who are most at risk. I'm thinking about our veterans. I'm thinking about people who are experiencing domestic violence. These are issues where the advocates for the people who are most vulnerable are telling us exactly what we need to do, and I think we need to listen. Thank you. Thank you. Ted, one minute. Great. Yeah, I believe we need to do everything we can to maintain a culture of responsible gun ownership in Vermont while also addressing the gun violence that does take place here. There's more we can do. We know that gun violence in Vermont, as Ryan was saying, when it's not self-inflicted, is largely targeted at family members and friends, and the majority of gun violence is perpetrated against women by their partners when there is a gun in the house. These are largely preventable injuries and deaths, aside from substantially more access to and the normalization of mental health treatment and family counseling. We need our state government to take leadership on gathering data and proposing best practices for gun violence in our state, including licensing and permitting for gun ownership, gun registration, safe storage laws, more stringent background checks, and prohibition on gun ownership for those who are known perpetrators of domestic violence. Ms. Baker. So I take gun violence prevention very seriously, which is why this past session, we passed legislation to expand the waiting period for background checks, to ban firearms in hospitals, and to allow health care providers to alert law enforcement and seek an emergency protection order for a person that poses a threat to themselves or others. That was really critical for us to get done and get across the finish line, and we have more work to do. So what we need to do in January, if I'm elected back and I really hope I can count on your support to continue our work on gun violence prevention, I was raised right outside of Buffalo, New York, and hearing the stories from family and friends of what's happening back home is heartbreaking, knowing that we have more threats in our schools more than ever is unacceptable. So I am all in, I'm ensuring that we can do everything we can to prevent gun violence in Vermont. Thank you so much. So we only have four minutes, and so what I will do, we have other questions that are, that we cannot cover based on time. So make sure that you address health care in your next event, wherever it is, and also address the fact that, you know, Vermont is such a, I mean, legislature is a part-time job, whether or not you could do all of the things we talked about tonight as part-timers is another question that you might address at other events. So in one word, just summarize your closing statement in two words, because we have no time. Let me begin with Kate in two words. In two words. Okay. Yep. I'll go back to what I said at the beginning. I'll fight for our collective liberation. Thank you. Ryan, let's go. Thanks. Speaker Kronzwiski. I have your back. Thank you. Thank you so much. We have two minutes that we are left with, and I'm happy to give them back to Town Meeting TV. So thank you so much for being part of this conversation tonight, and I hope that your constituents and the Bromantas have listened to your answers and will ask you a question on the trail. I have to say, though, that the forum tonight has been very collegial and positive. I thought that you will raise questions against each other, because when you run for an office, you think that you are better. None of you address each other tonight, which is very unusual for politicians, and that is wonderful of you for being collegial and positive tonight. And I will end it there. And back to you, Scott, in the studio.