 My name is Richard Shear, and this is Montpellier City Forum, where we're going to be speaking about town meeting. We have all of the candidates. We're going to discuss the school board on a separate show. We're going to discuss the city budget on a separate show. Tonight, we're in District 3, and we're in District 3 with Glenn Cobart Hutchison. Glenn, where in District 3 do you live? I live on Prospect Street, up just above the river, above Dunkin' Donuts. That must be a pleasure. It's great, except it takes longer to get there than you'd think. You kind of have to weave your way down. How do city services get up there? Is snow removal good in that area? I would say that snow removal is pretty darn good on Prospect Street. It's a narrow, winding street, and it definitely gets down to where it really is only one lane, and then people park in that lane, but given the amount of snow we get, I think they do a great job. Now, District 3, given our gerrymander, would you tell us where District 3 is? So it's pretty much everything on that side of the river, plus a little key of downtown from Main Street to Hubbard Street, bounded by Liberty Street. So if you walk past the pharmacies up Main Street, pass the library and so on, and then take a right on Liberty, and then take another right on Hubbard. You get down to the other side. Now, I know you've been knocking doors on District 3 and meeting with people and the like. What's District 3's concerns? It's a good question. I think that I need to do a lot more knocking and a lot more talking to figure all that out. And that actually is one of the key things that I'm hoping to bring to the Council is a certain amount of ongoing engagement with people, because as far as I can tell, too many of Montpelier's residents in District 3 and everywhere else don't even know who the City Council is, what District they're in, who their representatives are. It's not everyone, but it's more than you might imagine, I would say. Apart from that, I would say that District 3 has the same basic concerns that Montpelier residents in general have. Affordability, maintaining city services, increasing the quality of the infrastructure in downtown and the rest of town. And I think that this is a repetition of my first theme, but really I think that there is some sense of disconnect between what the government does and what the residents expect or know is happening. City Council and City Government has done a really good job, I think, of improving that communication level. For example, the City Clerk is doing great at keeping everything updated, using front porch forum and so on. It's a lot more information. It's a lot more information. I think it could potentially be more directed. That's a good question. I think, so this I think applies to the website, but the example I'm going to use is from City Council meeting last night. I went to hear about the sprinkler ordinance and the new art project. And what I saw at City Council was a group of really smart people who… On which side of the podium? Oh, on both, of course. On all sides, all around it. What I saw was a certain amount of difficulty in simplifying the language enough that it was clear to everyone what was going on. Both to the viewers in the audience and back at home and also to the City Councilors themselves. They seem to have trouble keeping up with just the process, you know, who's moved what and so on. And that feels unnecessary. For example, when the new sprinkler ordinance or that is the revised sprinkler ordinance basically repeals the sprinkler ordinance except that restaurants, if you change a business to a restaurant, you need a sprinkler now, which is not under the state code. But the fact is that there are an awful lot of pages of text that boil down to more or less state code and if you change a business to a restaurant, then you need to add a sprinkler. And I think that the city could be well served by having a little bit more of that translation for the website and for the city in general. A lot of this stuff can be boiled down and, if not made interesting, understandable. How would you change the annual plan? I think that that's a taller order than I have at the moment. Or the annual report, because that's a voluminous document. Yeah. And I think that what I would strive to do is try to boil it down into one page, not to take away the rest of it, but to say, okay, here's one page that gives you all of the strongest, most important changes, most important things that you really should know and put that right in the front. Bill Fraser, I have to say, already does a very good job of this. But I think that there is space to even pull that in a better direction. And beyond that, to move beyond the text-based systems of information exchange, the gigantic phone book of the city report, the network of different web pages on the city website, and say, we can talk in person about these things. That's one of the key things that I think I can offer is a little bit more of a public presence and talking in person. One of the things that I'd like to implement if I manage to get on City Council is a weekly public hangout. Say, I'm just going to show up at 8.30 every Thursday at one of the downtown cafes, maybe rotate between three different ones every other week or every three weeks. And whoever wants to show up can show up. And I'll tell them what we've been talking about most recently and what I think is important and ask what they think is important and see how to move forward. How do we deal with the question of making the city affordable? You had spoken of affordable. What does affordability mean? Well, so I think the angle I come at that question from, maybe from the lower side up, I make a reasonable amount of money working at the drawing board and my partner Kate Stevenson makes a good amount of money and we're okay. A lot of my friends are young, less well employed, and really have not that many great options. I have a friend who's working two jobs, three jobs, two jobs plus she's an artist, which I think is a job. And living in a really substandard split up apartment that's, I think, in danger of falling into the river and there is no other place where she can afford to live in Montpelier. It's getting a little better. There are openings possibly, but I think that there are a lot of people in town for whom that's what affordability, that's the problem. What can the city do to change that market dynamic? And I think, so I should say, I'm not completely well versed in exactly all the levers that the city can pull. I'm curious about learning more about that. My impression is that the city has been doing a difficult and good job of trying to increase housing at all levels and definitely focusing on affordable housing. And for example, I think that it's a great thing that we're finally getting into the upper stories above Abishan. I was just about to say, that's one of those projects like Taylor Street, like Saban's Pastry, it's one of those projects we've been working on a long or at least talking about. Yeah, and I think that that's a great move and I think that it's a testament to the hard work of everyone that's focused on that for so long. I'm hoping that more like that, finding spaces that are currently unused, clearly there are a lot of them, and making as many as reasonable into housing and as many as reasonable of that into affordable housing. And then personally, I am in favor of building more within the downtown and in the... Where downtown? It's a good question. Let's see. And one that I haven't considered yet, so I'm going to try to fake it up. No, please. Exactly where downtown. Where would we have housing downtown? Yeah. What would you repurpose? Because the downtown is already purposed. It's pretty dense. Yeah. I mean, I think that the clear answer to me is some of the land around Sabin's pasture and in that area. Now you've been following that one for a long time. Yes. What's your feeling on Sabin's pasture development? What do you think realistically we can see? Oh gosh, I'm not good at predicting. I can tell you that I come from an odd angle on this one I think because I grew up in a beautiful leafy suburb of Boston and my parents renovated my grandparents' garage into the house that I grew up in with my siblings and we had acres of beautiful pine forest that was owned by a gravel crushing operation. It hadn't been used in decades. And basically that was where we lived. We just wandered through the woods every day and hit each other with sticks and not too hard most of the time. And when I was 12, that whole parcel got bought up and developed into McMansions. That's brutal. Yeah, it was terrible. And I think it was one of the formative events of my young life. So I am not... It's really hard for me to say I think we should take open land and build houses in it. But at the same time, where I grew up was all suburb. It was just house, house, house, house. There was not that much open land around. It was sprawl already. It was all sprawl. Here I feel like we have a really different set of resources. There is land that we can change to allow people to live on it and use it without harming anyone's ability to walk out the road and find a piece of beautiful forest to walk in. That's something we're amazingly wealthy in and I love it. You can get lost and be completely alone within... Well, we've got 180 years behind the state house. For example, yes. And it's one of the things that I love most about here. You work downtown. You live near downtown. So obviously you must have thought about and visioned what downtown Montpelier could be. Yes. How does your vision vibe with NetZero's vision? The one that won the $10,000 competition. Oh man. That was an awful lot of fun to follow that process. I think that those visions, the visions that were in competition were all... Maybe not quite all, but a lot of them were really exciting to me. Exciting in what way? So I'm a pedestrian. I walk everywhere and I love to be able to walk anywhere that I want comfortably without having to hop snow banks and dodge too much traffic and so on. And that, I think, that ability to travel at will within the city without a car and at a slow pace is something that I value above most of the rest of my daily life. I just love the walks. That's what I like. And I think that the focus of a lot of those projects on human scale transportation within the city and around the city and to nearby locations was really heartening to me. And then also, I have to say, as pie in the sky as some of it sounded, the idea of connecting national life more directly to downtown with some... With a tram? Yes, with a tram. I mean with a ski lift, with something. Put a ski hill down that little hill or something and allow all those thousands of people to just zip down to downtown and allow the people downtown to zip up and get a nice view. I think it would be great. Of course. How do we pay for it? Yes, I don't know. On City Council, I will investigate that question. I don't know how we pay for that kind of thing. But I was fortunate enough, I have been fortunate enough to travel in Italy and Japan and through some of Northern Europe and there are such things and people use them all the time, trams that is, or just simple small scale person size conveyances or small crowd size conveyances. And while they're expensive to build, they're amazingly attractive and it would... I haven't worked out the budget. But I can't imagine there's not a way... As a City Council person, fortunately that's not your role. Your role is to collaborate on that. Yes, and I'm very pleased with the idea of collaborating on things like that. I think I would do that. When we speak of budget, we always come back to something you mentioned at the very beginning, infrastructure. I don't think there's a single person who doesn't complain about the infrastructure of Montpelier. How would you address that? What do you see the issue as? How do you get your arms around infrastructure? I think, again, personally I come at this from the point of view of a pedestrian for the most part. So I think I have a different personal take on what is required, what a priority is. From that point of view, I think that just getting a transit center is already a huge, to my mind, infrastructural advantage because suddenly we have transportation that people can get to without having to walk down the bike path and hop the tracks and go up to the parking ride, which is what I've done for years. Infrastructure more broadly feels to me like just one of those things that you just have to fix and it's going to be expensive and you have to do as much of it as you can do every year. My impression is that we have honestly been doing a really good job of that since I've come here. And that's been how long ago? Again, let's see, I moved here in 2009. What changes have you seen in the town since 2009? It's been interesting to me to see the churn of downtown restaurants for one thing. Is that healthy? Does that reflect a healthy environment or an economically less healthy environment to see that churn? I think that there are a couple of ways to see that. Certainly there's always going to be some in and out. Restaurants especially I think can be ephemeral. At the same time, to me, one of Montpelier's best assets is it's an amazing amount of talent and energy around food and drink and the finer things of life. Three-Penny Taproom, for example, is a destination for people from amazingly far away. The Hunger Mountain Co-op by itself is a destination. And I feel like we've seen a bunch of really interesting small scale initiatives that I wish had been able to maintain themselves longer than they did. So that is the choice of the people who started them. But for example, Salt was a fantastic bow right now and that space is a wonderful thing to have and I hope they stay around. On Barry Street? Yeah, on Barry Street. Not quite my district, but pretty close. Filaminas that recently closed was a really charming place to be. I believe it's a Vietnamese restaurant that's moving into the Philippines. Is it? I don't even know. That's good news. I'm not breaking any news. Only to me. Only to me. I hadn't heard that. So one of my public roles in town is that I was one of the people who started the front gallery down on Barry Street. A couple of summers ago we had a friend of ours, Chris Gleason, start up a little pour-over coffee shop that landed in the gallery for morning hours. I have to ask, what is a pour-over coffee shop? You should invite Chris Gleason on your show to talk about pour-over coffee because he will give you a demonstration. He's a wonderful guy. Right now he works at Kizmet, I think. Yeah, last I heard. Anyway, pour-over coffee is, according to some, the purest, most wonderful way to experience any coffee that you like. And it's also one of the simplest methods of brewing. How do you do that? In a few minutes, how do you do that? You have your cup, you have your funnel, you have your filter, you have your water at a very precise temperature, you have your grounds at a very precise weight given the amount of water, and you pour in turns and let it settle and it just drains right into the cup. And it takes about five minutes or so. Again, you should have Chris to get the details in. It's nothing more complicated than that. But again, if you are really into coffee, that is the way to prepare it any other way has downsides. The city council meets in March. If you get on to council for district fee, you're going to be in a meeting in a retreat. They're going to have a white board and they're going to say, okay, these are our goals and objectives for this year. And council people will come in and say, I would like to see this addressed during the year. And when Rosie was on the show before she got on council, she said, I want to make sure that the sprinkler systems are addressed and it actually came to a vote yesterday or at the meeting. What are two things that you would want on that white board? I think that the first thing really is straight back to community engagement. This is something that I feel strongly about and I want to try to articulate it carefully. We have a wonderfully small community. Is this a city or a town? It's a good question and I think I was prepared for this question. Somebody tip the wink to me. I think that we have a town here and it feels like a town to me. It feels to me like I know most of the people that I run across and that's, I think, my personal unofficial definition. So within that context, I don't think that that problem that I was addressing before, that there are people in town who don't even know what district they're in, who don't know who their councillors are. And I don't think that that's necessary. I think that we can practice a less representative democracy and a more direct democracy. Boy, you've been here nine years and you've watched City Council. Is there a City Council person present or past who had that same kind of vision that you're trying to project? I would say that City Council already tries to do that and I think that they're not doing a bad job at it either. So one in particular who reached out like you would think? You know, I would say the three that I would name would be Anne Watson, Justin Turcott and Rosie Krueger. Well, that's diplomatic. Why those three? I think, and I'll say this, understanding that this is my personal viewpoint but I think that I say that because those are the three who I have been able to speak to most myself. And so I see that they are public figures, they're in the public eye and they are just around circulating and talking to people, which is one of my favorite things too. And I think that that is something that we can encourage and really do more of across the board. So I don't know that it's not that I want to force other counselors to take walks into the neighborhoods and so on and hang out with me at the cafes in the morning. But I think that we can recognize that within the small community town that we have we can connect every individual person to city government almost directly. The city counselors sit on boards, they sit on community agencies that we fund, someone will sit on the Public Safety Commission, someone will sit on the library. Which one would you choose as an external if you had your choice? I think I would choose at least a couple. I would love to be involved with the library. It's one of my favorite places in the world, any public library. And then I believe there's a couple of different committees or groups that deal with bicycles and pedestrians. There's a transportation committee. So that I think again is near and dear to my heart. I want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to get around in town and to enjoy traveling in and through town. If someone said, I'm interested in moving my family to Montpelier possibly, what would you say in the strengths? How would you sell our community to somebody who sits and says, I've heard things about Montpelier but I want to know from somebody who lives here. How would you describe it in just a few sentences? I would say we have a beautiful confluence of rivers, a wonderful density of businesses and friendly people right in downtown, and a wonderful expanse of open land surrounding us in all directions. Those are important things to me. And then I would say that we also have a surprisingly, maybe not surprisingly, but a gratifyingly open community that people are for the most part trying to speak to their neighbors, to solve problems through confronting their neighbors in a friendly way rather than backstabbing in gossip and so on. It feels to me like we have a healthy argumentative sometimes. And I would say it's like a mostly friendly big family. And I like that sense that it is, again, it's small enough that everyone is just about connected to everyone else. Just a few degrees. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You see them downtown, you see their brother downtown, you see their dogs. It's a good size. I want to thank you, Glenn, for not only coming and talking to me, but for running for office. My pleasure. And I want to sit and tell people, please watch all of these. They're all great candidates. And I'm very, very pleased that all three districts have challenged races. Yeah. And watch our presentation on the school budget, watch our presentation on the city budget. But most importantly, also read the bridge. Yes. Because the bridge went out of their way to interview our candidates. But most importantly, get out and vote on Town Meeting Day. Make sure your friends get out and vote. Make sure your family gets out to vote. That's the vitality of our community is the engagement. Sit on a commission. Sit on a planning board. You know, do something for our community. And thank you very much for watching.