 Good evening and welcome. I'm Diane Meyerhoff, host for tonight's candidate forum for state representative in Chittenden District 6-4 in Burlington. Tonight's show is being aired live on Channel 17 and streamed live on the Channel 17 website. We welcome your comments and questions. Please join the conversation at 862-3966. Candidates joining me tonight are Selena Colburn and Brian Cina, both incumbents. And I believe you are progressive slash Dems, is that right? Okay, progressive slash Dems. Since the candidates are running unopposed, they are both representing District 6-4. We're going to conduct this more as a forum than as a debate. However, each candidate will make an opening statement and then we'll discuss topics of interest to voters. So, Selena, would you like to start off? Sure. I'm Selena Colburn and I was born and mostly raised in Burlington, actually not not far at all from the neighborhood that I currently represent. Prior to being a legislator, I was a two-term city counselor and also work as a librarian at the University of Vermont and am a parent to kids at Edmunds Middle School. And I have been running and working at the state level, trying to further some of the work that I did at the city level, but really when I have been thinking a lot about what is it that I'm really trying to do here and it's to create a Vermont where more people are welcome and more people are thriving, really where everyone is welcome and everyone is thriving. And I'm excited to talk more about some of the ways I think we can do that tonight. Super. Great. Thank you. I'm looking forward to it. Brian. Yeah, so my name is Brian Sheena. I've lived in Burlington for 20 years. I've lived in the Old North End for 19 of those 20 years in the same house actually. And I've been involved in the community in Burlington throughout my time in many different ways. I used to be a school board member representing the central district, which is the Old North End in downtown. I was the co-chair of Pride Vermont during the time of Civil Unions in Vermont. So that was the year 2000 to 2003. I've been an organizer and activist for many other causes and probably one of the biggest things that I've done that I still do is I co-founded a group called Is Good, Isham Street Gardening and other optimistic doings. And what we do is we do community gardening. We try to change the social environment by making the physical environment more beautiful. And we've had a lot of success in reducing crime rates using this method, even though that wasn't our original intention. So I'm running to be state representative for many reasons. And at the core of my campaign is that I'm a social worker. I've been a social worker in Burlington for the 20 years that I've been here. I have a private practice downtown. I'm a part of the time crisis clinician for the Howard Center. So I see some of the greatest challenges facing society in the work that I do on a daily basis. And I work mostly with individuals and with families. And what I recognize as a social worker is that I can make a huge difference on the individual and family level working with people, but that there are social structures and policy and law that's shaping the conditions that drive the problems that people have. And that I could spend my whole life working with people to try to change things on the ground level, but that we also need to be fighting at the sort of the top of the pyramid. And we need to be changing social structure and social policy. So as a state representative I seek to sort of take what I gain on a daily basis most of the year as a social worker on the ground level and bring that experience to the policy level as well as try to find ways to create more opportunities for people to be engaged in the decisions that affect their lives. Great, thank you both. And I should just ask you, this district, do you consider this, I think you said the Old North End and downtown, is that kind of how this shapes out your district? Our districts in Burlington do not align with the city wards and districts. So I live in the Old North End part of our legislative district, but it also includes the East End, UVM, the hospital. Kind of dips down into Winooski over to Riverside Ave and then sort of cuts into the eastern tip of the Old North End. So it's a pretty diverse walk when you're going door-to-door. It's a beautiful walk and we get to, you know, see a wide range of little micro-neighborhoods that are connected. And you know if you want to just compare it to city wards that it's a little piece of Ward 2, which is the area I live in, then Ward 1, it's most of Ward 1, which is where Selina lives, and then there's like little sliver of Ward 8 and 6. Yeah, okay, it's very very small. All right, so of course if you're, if the folks watching don't know which district and they can always go online and find out, they're all very well delineated on maps on the legislative website, so I'll just say that. But I sort of just said Burlington, just people have a context of where you're at. So we talked a little bit about topics of interest, and both of you mentioned that health care was something that was important to you. And you know, everyone's concerned about health care spending. You know, how do we do, how do we keep that spending down, but still maintain our, one of the healthiest states in the nation, apparently. So that sounds pretty good. Which of you would like to start? I'm gonna let Brian start because he serves on the House Health Care Committee, so it makes sense for him to start there. So I'm in the House Health Care Committee and I was appointed to the House Health Care Committee because I'm a health care provider, so I can bring sort of that experience to the table. And in health care policy right now, one of the biggest things that we've been dealing with is the cost of health care. And there's guidelines coming down from the federal level for Medicare that's shaping health care policy in terms of cost containment. And there's a new model of payment for providers called the all-payer model or accountable care organizations. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time talking about it because I'd rather talk to people one-on-one about it. It's very complicated. And if I have to summarize, what it does is it asks providers to look out for the health of the populations. And then so providers are gonna get paid for taking care of, they're gonna get paid a flat fee for covering all the health care needs of people over time. It's being phased in slowly, but as part of that flat fee, they're supposed to do more than just office visits, more time and energy spent on follow-up. And so the idea is that over time, if providers are investing their energy into the health of entire populations, then people will be healthier and it will cost us less. And I think there's some benefits to that model and some challenges. I will say that when I think about the big picture that I do think we need to invest more in prevention and in follow-up, but I think there's greater, we can go further than the accountable care organizations. And once they start to work and bring costs more into check, and hopefully we can continue to invest in health care by working towards health care as a public good. And one step would be universal primary care. There was a bill that I was the lead sponsor on. Selena was a co-sponsor as well as many others. And that bill did pass out of the Senate into the House and it passed out of the health care committee and didn't make it through appropriations in time. But I think the idea is not dead and really the vision would be to take steps towards a health care system where we are investing in prevention, investing in treatment. And really the more we invest in primary care, the more we save down the road. Because what we have now is a system where people aren't going to the doctor because they're afraid of copayments or deductibles and then they get very sick and they end up in the emergency room and then it's very expensive. And so I could go on, but I would like to give you some time to talk about this as well. Yeah, I mean I think that the things that come to mind to me are very similar to what Brian has talked about. Really making sure that we're investing in preventative care, in holistic care that kind of treats the whole person to avoid some of those really acute crisis health care costs down the road for individuals and for the system at large and all of us who are funding it in one way or another. I also think universal primary care is something I really support and even just expanded access to primary care. And I see that on an issue-by-issue basis. I know we're going to talk maybe about the opioid crisis in a little bit and that's a perfect example of an issue where more access to primary care could really help us turn the corner. And then I also think to me part of more access to primary care looks at some of those real low barrier models to accessing primary care settings so the community health centers in Burlington I think are an amazing example of a system that just really is helping low-income people, is providing a whole range of interconnected services and really meeting people where they are. And so more of that I think is where we need to be. I also will say I think ultimately the answer is for us to be enacting a single-payer health care system. I'm someone who still really believes in that but we have a legislative and governance process that's incremental so things like universal primary care, even expanded primary care access are increments I think on the way to getting us there. And how far are we in terms of, I'll use the word universal, preventive care or primary care, how far are we? Are we a long ways from that right now? I mean you're on the front lines of this so you're seeing this. Do we have a long way to go or are we close? I don't think we have a long way to go. I think if we had the will to do it that we could create, we could improve access to primary care and expand it to provide universal coverage, there would need to be an upfront investment and I think that's the greatest barrier is the upfront investment and how you finance it. And we could talk more about like some possible ways to do that later. I was wondering if I could give an example of just to illustrate this because as a crisis clinician I actually see some of the most challenging situations play out in the emergency room and you know when you we talk about health care sometimes people think of it very narrowly but I actually think health care is more than just going to the doctor and housing is health care. An example I'll give that when I'm working in the crisis service every night there are people who are homeless who end up in the emergency room because of a variety of challenges that are related to being homeless and if we we spend over a thousand dollars a night I think it might even be up to fifteen hundred dollars for that one night in the emergency room so if someone goes to the emergency room three or four times in a month we're talking about up to maybe six grand if not more that has been spent and that's money that our system is just paying because people aren't don't have coverage or if they do and they have Medicaid Medicaid's paying if we provided someone with housing for a month how much would that cost and if we provided services wrapped around that housing how much would it cost it might cost one night in the emergency room for a whole month so if we have if we invested more in a housing first approach to dealing with with homelessness then we would save a tremendous amount of money the system would save a tremendous amount of money and so there's little changes like that that we could make over time that would save money because we're investing we're viewing healthcare as an investment versus a cost I think that's an example of that low barrier approach where we our system is sort of flipped right like there are so many criterias that people need to meet in most cases to access subsidized or low-income housing you have to there's often sobriety requirements there's you need to not have a criminal justice history of criminal justice and system interactions if we flip that model and stabilize people's housing that you know there there's tons of evidence that really good things happen when that's the case so let's talk about the opioid epidemic at the same time since they kind of go together and maybe some of the same solutions make sense for that too I'll say you know are we are we making progress there was something in the paper today that that there's less opioids being prescribed at in Vermont so you know how are we doing I give us a pretty mixed report card I think you know Vermont has enacted some very compassionate measures and a system that's been emulated around the country for some good reasons I also think we continue to have an increase in fatal overdoses each year for the last three years and we somehow have declared victory on that by saying that we've slowed down the rate of increase in overdoses and that that's an example to me of pretty skewed logic I don't think that's acceptable and so where I have seen us falling down in my work this is this is really the issue that made me feel like it made sense to run at the state level after trying to work on this issue as a city counselor here in Burlington is that I think we need to continue expanding access to treatment really on demand and to harm reduction approaches because these are the things that are proven again and again to save lives and so in fact the evidence on controlling prescribing practices and monitoring prescribing practices is somewhat mixed in whether or not it really helps reduce substance use disorder but the evidence on things like syringe exchange programs like interim buprenorphine access which we're starting to see a much bigger push for locally there's some really good work happening here in Burlington around that we need to expand those things and and what I've seen I feel like too often is kind of a box-checking approach where we do a little bit of those things and we say great we're doing syringe exchange it's open four hours a week you know one day a week or we're giving out in our can but you only get one dose and that's it because we don't want you to feel like you should use it again and again which is you know kind of the point of an arc and is that it's there for you when you need it so I think I think with the underlying thing that I see is that we still have a lot of stigma and a lot of misunderstanding to address in our state in our system and that some of that stigma is informing even even some of our best work and approaches where we're making it available but we still have judgments about how much or how quickly people should be able to access it. Brian you've thoughts on it? Yeah so when I think about you know what we're doing I think that like Selena said we're do we're there's some improvements in how policy has changed and some best practices that are being looked at and slowly implemented but I don't think we're doing enough we're not keeping up with it and there's a lot more we can be doing it was frustrating honestly to as a provider of health care to be advocating for what what people need and to be told by members of the administration that they need two years to get a better assessment of what's going on before they're gonna support us in taking legislation off the walls to work on Selena proposed bills I proposed bills other people proposed a variety of bills with different angles not repetitive in my hope was that they would all be merged into some sort of omnibus opiate bill you know and you know there were members of the governor's administration who pulled me aside and said these are good ideas but we're not ready yet and I think we're 20 years behind when I started working in Burlington 20 years ago I was an outreach worker working with youth on Church Street who were addicted to heroin and who were dying and who were getting pulled into sex trafficking and it's 10 20 times worse now and so we're really behind on this in a solution one-eyed specific idea that wouldn't be very hard to implement would be a centralized intake in the state for rapid response for for outpatient treatment so right now if you you can go to your we have this thing called the hub and spoke model where you can go to a primary care office and get medication medication assisted treatment but you don't necessarily get the mental health the psychotherapy and the social work that you need so people can go on a medicine but and that helps tremendously but there's so much driving addiction and driving the problems that isn't getting addressed and so if we had a way that a doctor's office or a person could call a central number either in each county or in the state and say I'm ready for help and have an appointment that day or the next day with a provider it would help tremendously it would fill a gap and that was one of the things I proposed and various professional organizations around the state supported the idea and were willing to reach out to their members and as a psychotherapist I was thinking yeah I could make a slot or two a week for this and many people were willing to do this we had a whole you know army of providers willing to step up and we were told no we need two years to see what's going on before we'll take action so that's just one example of some of the solutions we can create or we can like implement using the resources we already have to respond to this crisis quicker okay let's on let's switch gears talk about the economy according to Forbes magazine Vermont's economy economic outlook is projected to be second worst in the U.S. over the next five years while income growth is expected to lag behind do you agree with this assessment what's your plan of action to strengthen the economy and generate a sustainable economy and would you like to start Selena sure so I tried to look at the Forbes the Forbes study or and there it's pretty short on methodology so I'm a librarian and it's hard for me to know exactly what those projections are based on but I I did spend a little time with a report that our state auditor produced this summer Doug Hoffer really looking at economic development issues in our state and in fact he actually addresses the Forbes study Doug is pretty good at poking holes in some of the notions that Vermont is not a business-friendly climate or or just doesn't have a healthy economy and he found that by a number of measures including just income growth that Vermont actually we're doing you know better than a number of the states in that that made the top ten in the Forbes study so I think you know I got a look at the data that said and so really the basis of Doug's report that I thought was very interesting was looking at peer reviewed studies and just trying to understand the evidence on what really works for economic development you know we're spending 14 million dollars a year in this state on things like marketing and tax incentives and kind of very selective job training kinds of programs and there's not a lot of evidence in in research that that this is necessarily creating new growth new wealth new economic development that's it we we there's some evidence that we may be throwing some money at growth that would have happened either way by contrast there are a number of strategies that have been shown to stimulate economic development and those things do include things like technical assistance and financial help to businesses more broadly distributed workforce development work and and training but also things like affordable housing like childcare like energy efficiency like broadband access so I really recommend that people take a look at this study it's it was really really eye-opening to read I would say you know some of the strategies that I and a number of other legislators supported especially after hearing about this what the governor often calls an affordability crisis were things like trying to raise basic wages in the state which has been shown to be a strong economic development tool a $15 an hour minimum wage ensuring paid family leave so if part of what we're trying to do is keep keep people in the state and bring people in the state I think those things are really important and I think having a strong public education system is really important to you and I'm worried have been worried in my time in the legislature about the kind of continued threats to the public education system so okay good maybe we'll talk about that next do you want to talk about the economy first I want to say I appreciate having Selena as a district mate as a librarian because she's like we both bring a very different angle like I'm like sort of hands-on practitioner and you bring this like knowledge like she's always finding the studies and like the numbers yes it's really helpful and I appreciated that information so I'm gonna give you a different take here I'm gonna talk a little bit about just at the beginning of the last year we had state economists present to us sort of like a state of the economy and what they showed us was throughout the United States history the cycles of booms and busts and how we are in a boom right now and how every boom is followed by a bust and everything that is happening on the federal level is what you shouldn't do going into a bust and so we may be facing one of the biggest financial crashes in our country's history possibly worse than the Great Depression based on those numbers and it was a grim thing to hear and shocking to see that that doesn't get more attention because people tend to like be like sort of in this bubble and in denial so I really think we need to look at how do we prepare Vermont for that future as well as taking into account that as climate change comes upon us we're gonna have to face some of our greatest challenges artificial intelligence is gonna change the nature of the workplace there's a lot of things coming I do have a specific solution and it's to transition Vermont to what we call a zero waste economy so I proposed a bill in the last session that I'm going to bring again in the next one and and what it does is it we will study the state and look at every region and have engagement with different stakeholders like chambers of commerce and representatives of the business community environmental protection groups solid waste districts and assess what are the strengths in every region and what are the weight what's the waste and where the holes and how can we recruit businesses to come in or be built to fill those holes and use the local waste as source material and if we could do this properly and strategically we could create circular manufacturing around the state so we would create more economic vitality while eliminating the waste and this would include things like carbon emissions water pollution as well as plastic any kind of waste that's being produced so I'm I'm gonna propose this idea again hoping we can look at it because if we think about the 30 to 50 year range if Vermont can set the example for the country that the answer is to like sort of eliminate waste and change sort of the exploitive extractive nature of economic system that we may create a more sustainable future I would love for you to give me an example of that that's a little little hard for me to grasp so can you can you can you tell me something that might be something that is a waste I'll try to make it real simple yeah that would be helpful so like imagine that there's a small town and that they have a like a lumber industry so you may maybe what's there now is up is people logging and maybe it goes to a mill well you know maybe you try to have furniture being built in that town where the mill is instead of having it shipped across the state not that you wouldn't but you could divert some there and then maybe in the place where they're making the furniture the wood that they don't use goes next door to a wood burning plant or maybe before that there's another manufacturing business a place that could use the scraps for something so the idea is that you site in within a region area a series of businesses that are using the waste products of one for the the source of the next and so at the end you no longer have the waste and it can you can build on that so another thing is like packaging or building things like we could say that nothing is allowed to be built in Vermont that you can throw out has to be reused in some way so maybe businesses take stuff back and fix it or take stuff back and reuse it so that's just like I tried to make it really simple but if you look up circular manufacturing online there's a lot of information about this look up biomimicry look at which is you creating industrial processes that mimic nature because they create less waste there's a lot of evidence out there around and there are some examples of cities and countries around the world who have begun to look at this it sounds almost like an old-fashioned notion I mean the idea that we had things all created in a town or an area right me before we sort of pulled everything apart right yeah I mean in some ways it sounds sort of old-fashioned it's actually in alignment I would say with that sort of that old-fashioned Vermont or they you know old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity the idea of like you don't waste anything you use every and my grandparents were like that they didn't they used every part of an animal they never didn't waste anything my grandmother had like five washing machines going back to the 20s in her basement because they lived through the depression and they saw and I think you know we should learn from that before it's too late but the reality is we're headed I think we're heading towards a rough time we need to like sort of prepare ourselves well that's really sobering thank you for that but I guess you know you're right I mean booms and busts that's that's the way it is right I mean we don't just keep going up and up and up at some point so I'm I guess I'm glad that the two of you are out there you know addressing this for us because it is it is pretty pretty sobering we have just a couple of minutes are there any other topics you would just like to you know make a sort of a closing statement if you like or just tell us about something you're thinking about for the for the next biennium startup or we sort of covered we've covered the big ones I don't think where we go from there but I mean there's a lot I think I think looking at issues of equity in state are really important that was I really appreciated that that was one of the potential things we were gonna talk about we and equity looks like a lot of things but we we I think we have some real work to do in the state around racial justice and even just acknowledging the the depth of the racism in the state and the the challenges that people of color are facing here on a daily basis and and you know we we both worked with Kaya Morris she is my colleague on the judiciary committee and it was just really heartbreaking to see just the hate that was directed her and that's stress that it put on her family and an even more heartbreaking to see the amount of doubt and questioning about whether that's possible here so that's been a really I think grim reminder of just how much work we have to do but I think Kaya actually leaves a legacy of some really important work that she started on that issue along with many others including the idea of in ethnic studies curriculum in our schools that will start to really address issues of cultural competency in Romaners from a very young age looking at bias in our criminal justice system I see that a lot in my work as member of the judiciary committee it's a very very real and significant issue and we we've done a lot of work to advance a fair and impartial policing policy in the state and we have a lot of work to to really have those policies be truly enacted so there's there's just at all level work to do there and I think it's really really important for us as Romaners to be recognizing that today Brian do want to add anything well what I would just say is that you know when you're when you serve in the in the government you encounter a lot of people and you get a really wider view of society and even though we represent Burlington we're meeting people from all over the state and hearing from people all over the state and you know we are our nation is at a crossroads where we could really heal from the the conflict that we're going through as a society could drive us to a better place or it could all fall apart and what what I think is really important right now is that we do our best to try to listen to each other to talk with each other and to be open to each other and not to like push each other away and not to shut each other down and some of the most transformative interactions I've had is when I someone attacks me in some way and I reach out to them and try to like work through that with them but that being said we we can only tolerate so much and when our colleague is being physically threatened or when people are being threatened for physical harm I think there's a limit and so I don't know what the solution is to this but I'm very concerned about where our society is heading if we continue to have sort of intolerance grow and if if we it's kind of a paradox if we tolerate you know we want to be tolerant but are we going to tolerate people being abused are we going to tolerate the system sort of continuing oppression and continuing trauma you know continuing to traumatize people and oppress people so I still think we have a long way to go with this work and there's a lot of policy decisions we can make that would that affect that but in the end I think what it really comes down to is the day-to-day interactions and like how are we treating each other on a day-to-day basis how are we managing our conflicts right food for thought and thank you both for being the legislature and doing this really really important work we all appreciate it and we're we know that you'll both be back in in January and thanks so much for coming out tonight we really appreciate it we hope you'll come in the future as well and let us know how how these efforts are going and I want to tell everyone don't forget to vote right now at City Hall vote early or vote on Election Day Tuesday November 6th and of course stay tuned to channel 17 for more election coverage over the next few weeks thank you and good night