 We should take a few minutes to tell the audience about who you are, who you're here with, and yeah, introduce yourself. Sure. I'm Gene Bergman. I live in the old north end of Burlington where I have lived for most, virtually all of my adult life since about 1972, a long time ago. I'm a city counselor for Ward 2. It's the second time around on the council for me. I served when Bernie was mayor from 1986 to 1992, and I just completed my first year back this last year. So it is a 2022 to 2023 now, and next year I'll be up for re-election. In between, those two terms in city council is not a full-time job, so you have to work unless you're retired. I'm retired now, so that makes life much easier on many regards. But I worked for the Burlington Free Press and the production division. I was a camera operator, and I did that for 10 and a half years, and as a result of a union drive that I helped initiate, I ended up deciding to go to law school at the ripe old age of 38, and one child and another on the way, and became an attorney and ended up after probably six years, five years, becoming an assistant city attorney for the city of Burlington. And I did that for 20 years. And do you think being a senior assistant attorney for so long, do you think that now coming back to being a city counselor, did you take anything from being a senior? Totally, yeah, totally. And sometimes it's actually really difficult to be out of that role. So we have hearings that occur, right? They're quasi-judicial hearings, and I was the advisor to the council where I was the prosecutor on cases. And so I sit there, and I'm on the council now as a decision maker, as a judge, and I see the way that it's being sort of put forward. And sometimes it's just really hard for me not to flip into my lawyer mode. So it's kind of funny, but it has allowed me that, and I was a senior assistant city attorney for nine years, to that whole experience, 20 years experience, really allowed me to understand not only the people, but also the processes. And that is a tremendous benefit right now. Bill, I read on your campaign page that you're pretty involved with the community, and so being from, I imagine being growing up in Burlington, right? I did not grow up in Burlington, but what I do say is, so my mom's from Saranac Lake. I have been in the Saranac Lake, in Saranac Lake since I was like six months old, three months old, something like that. So when I first went, I'm actually from the New York City area, but I tell people, I mean, I grew up watching Channel 3 and Channel 5 news, so I could drop names of old time TV anchors and stuff, but I won't. I grew up in Colchester, so I'm a lifelong Vermonter. So Marsilius Parsons, maybe when you were really little, no, these are really old, I mean, and Marsilius wasn't even that old Mickey Gallagher was before Marsilius on Channel 3. So yes, I grew up watching these guys, you know, like my entire life, so I feel very comfortable being in this area, even though I came here to live when I was 18 to go to UVM. So all my adult life, I've been here for the most part. And was there a specific reason why you wanted to first be a city counselor, or what was the reason you started running for? That's really funny. So I went to UVM in 1971 at the tail end of the height of the anti-war movement. The war sort of winds down, takes another five years to end, and I was very active in the anti-war movement from high school. And I ended up working as a community organizer on North Street doing tenant rights, which is still an issue right now, and welfare rights and food advocacy for a community organization. I did that work throughout the 1970s. So I had been pretty active in community activity. You know, at the same time that Bernie was running as a Liberty Union candidate, and I was involved in the Liberty Union campaigns, and then I left that community organizing job in 1978 and went into the print industry. But I stayed active, and that included being active in the anti-war movement. So Ronald Reagan had this crazy idea that you could win nuclear war, and that required me to get out and protest so that we could survive as E.P. Thompson would say. And so I was active in the anti-war movement, and then when Ronald Reagan decided to wage the wars on Central America, in Salvador, in Nicaragua, all of which are blowing back to us right now in the immigration and drug crises. I was active in those movements. And at a certain point in 1986, as the Progressive Coalition was having a change over in terms of city council positions, somebody asked me to run. And my first reaction has typically been no. I don't really see myself, although I have to admit now that I am a politician, but I've never really seen myself as that, and it hasn't been a driving force. But I said yes. I thought it was a great honor that somebody asked me, and so I ran. And the same thing actually happened this last time. First response was no, you must be crazy. Why would I do that? And so why don't you see yourself as a politician? I guess I would ask. I actually have to admit that I am now, right? I mean, it's got to be honest with myself and with everybody else. But politicians can be, in a lot of ways, are separate from the people. And I've always seen myself as being a part of the people and part of the popular movements that arise from the needs of people to make sure that human rights, that economic justice, that racial justice, that gender equality, and women's justice is front and center. And even now, I do not believe that politicians can make the government do what is necessary all by themselves. So popular movements are absolutely necessary to make that happen. And that's always been what I think in the forefront of my thinking. As a result, I have looked at myself more as an organizer and an activist than as a politician, which has a special status, which I have a hard time getting behind. I think that might make you more of an effective city councilor, though, having that perspective, though. I think. A hope. Yeah. Are there any specific issues that you're currently working on as a city councilor that you're really trying to put a lot of pressure on? Well, I am on the Transportation Energy and Utility Committee. So the two areas that we've been working on for the last year, and I was on that committee last year, and I'm on this committee this year, have to do with emissions, carbon emissions. And in particular, the emissions at the airport. And I was active with people who fought successfully to stop an expansion, a further expansion of the Burlington International Airport into the Chamberlain School neighborhood. It's the neighborhood that has lost all the housing. So if you go to the airport, you see lots of parkland that used to be houses like 200, 200 plus houses are gone. That's a big whack for affordable housing because there's always all housing for working people, very affordable. And the airport was trying to expand further into that neighborhood. And so I worked with folks. And this is exactly what you were talking about, about being active inside and being able to help in that process while also helping folks on the outside do the organizing in the neighborhood. And actually able to defeat the proposal to expand into the neighborhood. It was a rezoning proposal, and the airport backed off of that, which is wonderful. And now we're working on emissions, trying to get an understanding of airline emissions and airport emissions and how to reduce them. And the big complicating factor is the F-35s, which seem to be very active today. And that is a harder nut to crack in terms of trying to eliminate the F-35 program here, which I support eliminating it, but I'm not quite sure how we can get there. But at least we're raising that. So that is one issue that I've been active on, and we will continue to be active on. Another is on transportation. So we're in the CCTV studios on North Winooski Avenue, and there is going to be a removal of about 40 parking spots on the street between Union Street and Riverside Avenue, where the community health center is, and the Kemp Center is on the east side of the street, so that a bike lane can be installed on both sides and it be safer for biking. But this has had a tremendous amount of pushback because part of the issue that we've got with climate change and what we do to change the way that we're impacting our climate is we're doing it in a way that doesn't put all of the burden or the most of the burden on the people who can least afford it, working people, poor people, black people, brown people, right? So I came to that proposal pretty late, but I don't believe that the city put nearly enough resources into what people call the just transition. You might have heard of that concept of a just transition to a climate neutral economy. So I've been putting a lot of effort in pushing the city and other partners to engage with the neighborhood, to implement transportation demand management, to bring more resources into the area, so that the people who are going to be affected by the loss of parking are really not affected or as little as possible, and we can sort of figure out how it is that we can survive in a better way, in a safer way, in a more climate friendly way without those parking spots. So that's an activity that has required me to be engaged with institutional partners like the Chittenden Area Transportation Management Association, CATMA, or Car Share or Go Vermont with those people, as well as local active folks who are saying, the way that this was done, the way this is being done isn't right. So I just got a motion passed of the city council two nights ago to continue the work to evaluate and monitor how this is implemented and to engage with the community and to make plans to try to make a just transition. So that's pretty good. In that regard, I've also been really active in trying to get sustainable transportation funding for mass transit for the bus system, which is pathetic actually here. You can't really get there from here, right? Pretty bad. It's terrible. I can walk most places. I'm going to be 70 in like a month and a half. And I can beat the bus most places, although I cannot beat it. It depends on what I take off, but to a new ski. So there are some routes that are better than others. And we need to do as a state a much better job of being able to help people get here to there in an affordable carbon neutral or zero carbon emission or as little as possible way as possible. It's for our own future. Things are out of whack climate-wise and they're not getting any better anytime soon. And they can going to get a whole lot worse, going to get a lot worse. Even for me, who didn't have all that much longer, you know, I'm going to be 70 soon. So, you know, we're all dying sometime. You, who's young, and I got three-year-old and one-year-old grand babies. And I'm really working on all of these areas. Biomass at McNeill is another issue and the carbon tax is another issue that's wrapped up in the climate. So I'm working on all these things so that me and you and my babies and their babies' babies have a shot at a habitable, you know, planet, you know. And in a way where working people can afford to live, this cannot just be a joint for rich folks, you know. And everybody else is some sort of like slave. Slavery days are gone and while they keep popping themselves back, it's our job to make sure that they're like dead and gone from the human race because it's just a terrible legacy that we've left ourselves as humans. And you better ask questions because I can just start riffing on this stuff. No, that's okay. That's what I want. Just going back to the F-35s and the carbon emissions that come from that, I've always wondered being from Vermont and before the F-35s were a big problem and a lot of people oppose them, what is the benefit? Is there a benefit, would you say, or the people that are like not opposed to having them? Or supporting them. Yeah, supporting them. What's the benefit of the F-35s being in the Burlington Airport? So the argument was that having the Air National Guard is important for the economy. They have a workforce which is well compensated and so that adds money. They have lots of skilled jobs and so that adds to a diverse and skilled workforce. They have ripple effects in terms of the things that they buy, right? So the economy grows in that regard. They bring in resources to the airport that give the airport things like very affordable fire protection services. So the argument was that if the F-35s don't come here, then there will be no mission for the air guard and they'll leave. And if they are here, then we're going to get all this benefit from them and we get expanded. In fact, other places will have to shrink and we'll get their benefit. Environmental impact study that was done and that there was a lawsuit that came out said that the economic impacts were not demonstrated. So I think it was a phony argument. I think it was just put there by folks who didn't think that anybody was going to challenge it. But to be quite honest, I have not thought and I'm not in a position to be part of a planning for what an alternative mission of an air guard would be. I don't know why. We have to have the nuclear capable bombers that just a couple of days ago, they did an exercise on the premise that the airport was a target of the Russians as part of this war. The war games that they were fighting and the whole thing is destroyed. So how do they deal with that? We are a target. When I came here and into the 1980s, we were a target for Russian strategic nuclear weapons because Plattsberg had a B-52 base, the Plattsberg Air Force base. So that was a strategic command base and those B-52s were nuclear capable and I believe armed, although you're never supposed to know where they are. And we also had the, I think it was the only Gatling gun, the General Electric Plant on Lakeside Avenue off of Pine Street made Gatling guns. These big wicked guns that were used in Salvador to kill peasants and revolutionaries. It was like just terrible. I participated in protests there. So we have been a target before. It's sort of ironic that we can't get out of this spot. And pathetic when you think about the human race as one family on a very small planet in a giant solar system and universe and galaxy needed to survive because there isn't anything else out there close enough for us to go to. There is no planet B, right? Right. So then did I read that you were playing a role in the connection between Dorset Street, the bridge that was going to be built over the interstate? I don't know. I don't think so. I might have said something in relationship to the problems that we have with the connectivity of our bike lane and pedestrian system. So I did make public comments at a VTrans session earlier this month about, I believe I included that and the Transportation Committee is also talking about connectivity. Yeah, it was supposed to be like a pedestrian. There is going to be one and that will be a great thing because you can't get to South Burlington easy, right? It just stinks. How's that? I caught my foul mouth. Yeah, it's pretty dangerous walking over there. It's terrible. Were there any highlights you had working as a city councilor when you first started off as a city councilor under Bernie Sanders? Well, let's see. Any memorable moments? Yeah, I was the lead sponsor and the person who pushed through inclusionary zoning. I was not the first person to raise that. The ground had been tilled and well fertilized for many years before me by people like Erhard Monca, who now works for Senator Sanders as his housing expert here in the state. So inclusionary zoning, which says that if you're going to build rich people's housing, you've got to build housing for working people. And I was happy to be part of a group that fought the gutting of that by the current administration. We were able to beat that back. The waterfront park, I was the sponsor of the rezoning that allowed that to happen and set up the land use pattern that we have down there now. If you go to a place like Baltimore that was said to us to be a model, you'll see that you've got sort of a brick promenade and then stores all over the place right up there. So it's like a commercial center. It's like, I don't want and didn't want our lakefront to be about commerce. I want it to be about people having a public access to the water so they can really enjoy that amazing sunset. They can get a boat in there. They can run around and play. Their kids can run around and play. And we were able to do that. So I'm really proud of that. I was on the committee that brought the boat house to the waterfront. I'm really proud of that. We rezoned the intervail to a recreation conservation open space. It had been industrial. And so all of the farms that are down there, and I've been community gardening down there since 1984. It's a long time. I'm still eating the stuff that we grew last year. That's a beautiful spot down there. It is a beautiful spot. We have to be careful not to love things to death, not to overuse it. We have to be good stewards of them. But that was a really important piece to rezone. I was the sponsor of the first recycling that we had. The sponsor of the end of the winter parking ban that was in place from November 15, I think, through April 15. Regardless of how warm, regardless of how little snow there was, you could not park on the streets of Burlington. I never knew that existed. Yeah, winter parking ban. They're all over the state. And for a bureaucratic ease of taking care of the streets, just say everybody get the hell off. You don't park on the street. And then I don't have to worry about getting your car towed and worry about you and going around and have to make all the operations. So that was sort of the impetus. But who are the people that suffered? Suffered in my neighborhoods, the old north end. So we got no places to park. So that was a good one. And this last year, I'm really happy that I was the lead pusher of the expansion of transportation demand management requirements. We have eliminated the requirement that there be a minimum number of parking spaces when housing is developed or redeveloped. So that a developer does not have to put in parking if they don't want to. They can. And they are doing it in, I think, a large part due to the financial requirements of their lenders. But they don't have to. And if they can figure out a way to reduce them as much as possible, we want to encourage that because parking is expensive. And that means more parking, less housing. But it also, because the housing market is a monopoly market, you know. And so people are charging everything. I mean, it's outrageous what people are paying for rent. So it's just a giant subsidy for developers unless they're going to give something back in the form of building an alternative transportation system. Because otherwise you've got a car. You can need cars, you need transportation, you need to get places. But if we're not building that, then that just goes on to the public. So what we do without requiring them to engage in transportation demand management is we privatize profit and we socialize cost. It's like, that's screwed up. So I'm very happy that we're able to get TDM as part of that change, pushed for changes to the proposed short-term rental ordinance. And what we ended up getting, and I ended up voting for it, is a 9% tax on that, on those rentals, because we have lost about 600 beds. Think about if you had 600 more rooms and more places for people to live, how much easier it would be, how much less pressure there would be on rents, how much more negotiating ability you would have to get. I don't know if you're a renter or not. You're lucky. You're lucky. Me neither. I've been very fortunate, but I know how hard it is and I know how difficult it is. And it's a problem now with the university and their increasing enrollment. And it has skewed the market, so now you have basically everybody's in a short-term rental, a one-year market, and rents are going up 5%, 10% every month, because the market can bear it. I was involved in the 70s and 80s in the fight for rent control, and I believe we need rent control now. I think a lot of my classmates at UVM would agree that the housing and rent crisis is out of control and something needs to be done. Well, they cannot rely on politicians to do that for them. That's the message that circles back to what we were talking about early. It requires a movement of people that says, this is outrageous. Housing is a human right, and when there is a crisis, then we as a society have got to take care of that. And if you cannot build enough housing to make the market work and do it in a way which is environmentally smart, good, then we've got to control the cost of housing in other ways, and rent control is one of those ways. Rent stabilization is some modification of that, and those student friends of yours need to participate. They cannot rely on other people to do that work. They can speak about the need. They can be supportive. They don't have to be necessarily at the front doing all of the organizing, but just like the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Movement was Lyndon Johnson in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not happen without a decade. You know that history. So the same thing is true of the war, and every single stinking war, that every imperialist war that we've had, and the vast majority of them have been imperialist wars, only stopped by the acts of the people. I don't know if you would know this, but talking with some of the students at UVM on what our Capstone project would look like with CCTV, where a lot of them were wondering, being from out of state or not familiar with the Burlington area, they come to Burlington and they want to know more about the pit, and I was wondering if you know what the plans are with that, or where's that sort of at, or is there anything going to happen with that? Well, something is happening right now, so there is a local developer who owns the eastern part of the property. The western part of the property is owned still by the original developer, John Sinek's, and I cannot believe that he is going to develop it. This is my understanding. I'm pretty sure I'm right. But they're going to be building, and they are starting to build the foundations for an affordable housing building, and then there will be, I think, two more buildings that will be put up in the next year, so you'll start to see some work. And I think that the market rate, you'll have an affordable housing building, 80, 100 units in that, and then there are going to be market rate, there's going to be market rate housing, and I think they're going to pitch it to students, right? And there's going to be ground level retail or other commercial, I believe. That's the plan, because that makes the most, it does make a lot of sense in a downtown area to be able to have the commercial activity happening. And they're going to connect, reconnect St. Paul Street and Pine Street so that they go straight through what is now the pit, so you'll be able to go from the old north end to the center of the city to the south end without having to go on Battery Street, which is crazy, or to go down on Winooski Avenue, which is a roundabout way, or if you're on a bicycle to go down behind the high school, the Macy's Building, down that little alleyway by the parking garage and then go on up by the Chittenden Bank, or I guess it's MMT Bank, and then try to snake your way over. I mean, I ride my bike around town, I'm trying to keep the carbon in the ground, and it's a pain in the neck to go to the south end to get to Pine Street, so that will be a big change. And I think that that will happen over the next year, year and a half. I think both of those things will happen over the next year and a year and a half. Yeah, I'm definitely glad to hear that you're working on the transportation side of things, because I definitely notice a lot of problems. And if you are biking in Burlington, it's still not easy to do so, and especially in the winter. And another group is working with Old Spokes Home, and they came in and talked about the problems with if you're trying to commute to work, and you want to reduce emissions by riding your bike, but you also, I guess as city council, you're trying to make that actually a possibility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got to do it in a lot of different ways. We should have a lot more car sharing opportunities, because biking in the winter is not for everybody. I fail miserably when I bike in the wintertime. I mean, I just don't end up doing it. It kills my bike, and my bike is already like 30, 40 years old. So walking, bus, car share, those are all ways that we need to work to make it less car-centric. We will not electric car our way out of it. And we won't actually get our way out of it through any one means, but we've got to have real conscious effort to get as many people doing other than a single occupancy vehicle. So yeah, it's the area that I'm doing the most on because of the committee that I'm involved with. I would love to be doing housing stuff. I could be doing some fairly radical housing stuff, but it's really hard to do it so much as one person. And I know on the March 7th town meeting day ballot, you were pushing the police. Police accountability, yeah. We lost that one, but I think that what we did was really raise the issue about the police overseeing themselves and how wrong that system is. And we won in the center part of the city, and my ward, we won significantly, so I'm really pleased with that. We got about 37% of the people in Burlington, and there are those who traditionally could see that as being a landslide victory, landslide defeat of the proposal. You know, maybe if I was on that side, that's what I would be doing too from a political standpoint, but I've cautioned people that 37% is a large percentage. You ignore them and their concerns at your peril. So we are going to in the next month be looking seriously at proposals to reform the system in both ordinance and in charter. Charter is the state enabling legislation that governs much of what the city does, and that that's where it gives the chief, the soul, power to discipline the force and what needs to change. You can work within that system to adjust things, but that needs to change. And so we'll be looking at charter changes as well as some ordinance changes to clarify the processes by which a different system of discipline can be brought in and can clarify the other aspects of oversight which are monitoring and auditing how the department is doing. Discipline is you have rules to follow, you break the rules, you get caught, somebody disciplines you. But the rules themselves, the training, the policies and procedures, all of that stuff is not discipline. So all that has to be dealt with also that is what the National Association for Community Oversight of Law Enforcement, NECOL, calls monitoring and auditing. So that's a huge piece of the work and we need to clarify the role of the community in that. So yeah, that should be fun. The goal of it is to create accountability, right? Yes, community oversight. The effective community oversight that leads to the end of bias and impunity on the part of those who are even trusted to enact state-sponsored violence. I say that, it sounds hyperbolic but ultimately the police are the ones with the sanction, by and large, to use force, to use violence to make sure that the laws of the nation are upheld. So we give them a tremendous amount of authority and really, I mean, sure self-defense is one other aspect of that but it's not sort of proactive. We don't allow vigilante justice in the country. So in order for the police to be accountable, we have to have systems of oversight that make it very clear they're not laws upon themselves. So yeah, and just to say, you know, Clarence Thomas, all the stuff that's happening with Clarence is an example of when people are not accountable to anybody, right? And they get to do what they want with impunity. So do you think, are you going to try and get that on another ballot? There will be something, I'm hoping that we will come up with proposals that can be supported unanimously, whether that can happen or not, we'll see. Our side, the progressives, will be pushed to compromise much more than the mayor's side. They have the majority, right? But I don't know that it's a strong and absolute majority on particular issues. So we'll see, I have hope. All right, I think that's all the questions I have for you. Do you want to add anything or? I mean, the one thing that I didn't mention that folks should also know is, so people live in cities and towns. I mean, everybody's got to live somewhere, right? So this is a really important place to govern correctly. But our tax system, the way we raise money and the authority that we've got to do things is, including raising that money, is not controlled for the most part by local politicians. And probably to a larger extent shouldn't be, right? People travel, they work somewhere, they live another place. They're citizens of a state and of a nation. I get that. But in an era of increasing inequality in wealth and income, we have got to do a better job of funding the fundamental things that people need, like a good transportation system, like housing, in a way that's fair and equitable. So that requires us to change the way that we raise our money locally, making it more progressive, making it based on an ability of people who have the money to pay the money. And that's going to require changes in the authorizing legislation, in the charter, for example, or different ways of doing things on a state level. The state education system is income sensitized. You pay up to a certain point based on your income and then it ceases to go there. And you can get credits for lower income people, can get credits. We need to do that on the municipal side so that the potholes and the cracked sidewalks, so the affordable housing that we put in, the upkeep of our buildings like Memorial Auditorium, of the programs that we've got, our parks and all of the things that go into making a dynamic, exciting city, are paid for in a progressive way, are paid for on the basis of those who have, should pay their fair share. And so that's an area that we are, the progressive counselors are paying attention to and trying to formulate some proposals going forward, and that just needs to be out there because otherwise you have austerity and austerity kills. You look at the health system, say in England, you know, under Tory rule for a really long time and even under the new Labour of Tony Blair, austerity. You look at the way that we funded housing here, the way we fund healthcare here, the childcare system, it's all based on austerity. Austerity kills. We got enough money in this society to take care of ourselves and to create a caring, solidarity economy. We need to have the commitment to do that and I'd like to be able to play a part in that. So thanks for the opportunity to share. Yeah, thank you so much for coming in.