 We've known each other for many years and tell us, give us a detail, the accounting of your garden, how's it doing? Well thank you Bill, it's true. I think I first went up to some of your classes maybe 25 years ago now up at Johnson State. I'm with a lot of gourds, you still call them gourds? Gourds and squashes, I used to bring you Delicata squash a lot because it was fall and those are a sweet one. Our squash crop is pretty good, they were on somewhere heavier soils so even though we suffered a drought quite a bit of this season, they're coming in okay along with our butternut and our acorn and our other winter squash, spaghetti are already harvested. Other crops struggled, we had smaller corn than usual because we just don't have enough water in our ponds to irrigate the corn as much as it would need and we rotate our irrigation just to keep things alive actually. But we had sweet potatoes are decent, a little small, broccoli's been pretty bad but our cabbage is coming in pretty good right now and our carrots are looking pretty tasty and you know we grow a lot of different crops and every year's a little different. This year's drought, last year's heavy rains, we're not seeing the normal weather we used to see in Vermont. What's the best crop it's doing for you right now and how do you market what you grow? The very best crop, I don't know that I can name a very best crop, the tomatoes did pretty well in the high tunnels this year, the warmth was good for them and we mostly market our product through our CSA system which now is a credit system where people pre-buy and they get extra credit for their money and they can pick what they want whenever they want at any of our pickup sites so it's a much more flexible CSA than a drop box or a prescribed CSA model. How many pickup sites do you have? We have four scattered about Chittenden County during the week and then we have one at the farmer's market on Saturday so people can go to any of five spots from Hinesburg to South Burlington to Williston to Burlington twice. Can you guess at the kind of revenue you might get from year to year? Yeah, you know it covers the bills, you know the gross is a few hundred thousand dollars but we've got twelve employees full-time through a full summer and then a bit fewer in the fall there's all kinds of mortgage our electric bill is almost six hundred to a thousand dollars a month so gross and that are very different things and so people often see to hear that big number of a few hundred thousand but you know we usually make between ten to thirty thirty five thousand dollars a year. What are you growing recently that you've been producing recently? Well, husk cherries are new to a lot of people we give out samples at the farmer's market they're a little they look like mini tomatillos but they're just a little fruit that's in a little paper wrapper it tastes a lot like a sort of a pineapple-y sweet tomato flavor it's very hard to explain but it just pops in your mouth. My son grows tomatillos. Oh, tomatillos absolutely which is a very different flavor we grow those for and people buy those to make that green salsa you get it at some restaurants that's the main ingredient for those so those are some of the newer things we've got great sweet peppers you know orange and yellow and red sweet peppers which are always fun for a few weeks we had a pretty good watermelon year. Do you have any hot peppers? We used to grow a lot of hot peppers and no one wanted them 15, 18 years ago so we stopped growing them now everybody wants them so sometimes you grow what is in in the fad and sometimes you don't so we're not as much on the hot pepper scene but our meat has been selling a lot more in this new CSA model and we raise organic pigs and we raise organic chickens and folks have really been enjoying the sausages that my wife makes at the Mad River Food Hub where she makes up some of the flavors herself so we have a ginger garlic sorry a ginger sausage and we have a garlic basil sausage that are both really popular. How do you market all these remarkable things that you do? Mostly through our CSA and the farmers market that's about three-quarters of our sales and then we wholesale some product in fact I have some in my car that I'm going to deliver after this show down to wood-bellied pizza right here in Montpelier but we wholesale about twenty-five percent. Sophie's got an incredible garden I can't imagine maybe she'd want to talk a little bit about that but more people that have their own gardens the better. We've had some CSA members say you've turned me on to fresh vegetables and I'm going to start my own garden so I'm not coming back next year and we say that's the best reason we could ever possibly be here. We want more people out there growing their own food if they have the land not everybody does or garden space with the right sun but if you have it it's so wonderful to grow your own food go out and pick it just before you're going to eat it for dinner or lunch and it's really meditative it's actually a great balance for me with the politics to be able to get out there and have a little more quiet time being productive getting work done but really just having the sounds of the wind or the birds or whatever happens to be going on around the farm. So what do you grow this most surprising to you? There must be some that come along better than you thought. There's nothing that's been particularly surprising in this year it's been a little bit more not as good as we would hope than as good just because of that drought but mostly with our own irrigation we're able to keep most crops up to up to par and so nothing's been surprisingly good and bountiful this year but a lot of things have held their own. Bill and I got Brussels sprouts going this year. Oh good we've stopped growing them this year. They are so beautiful. Oh fantastic. It's amazing and then we did a pumpkin patch too which is just it's gone bonkers. Yeah yeah we our pumpkins are ready which is a little early and it's already still warm. Yeah. So we've been harvesting those to make sure there's not too much rot in the stems from powder and mildew and we'll be giving those out to our members the next two weeks as sort of their bonus item but we also work with the school and almost donate we don't quite donate we take 20% just to cover some of the costs or maybe it's 25% my spouse arranges this but we raise by selling those at the school over a thousand dollars a year for the PTO at the local school. Oh that's so fun. We've been doing that for about four or five years. I want to talk about the weight of your largest pumpkin. Well I haven't weighed them this year past years we've had some that are you know 30 40 pounds we don't do the monster pumpkins with the milk and the ivy and all that but just in our own patch we get some that are 25 35 pounds in in good years this year I don't think they're quite that big. You're a lot of pie pumpkins. We do yep we've got five uh 20 bushel bins of pie pumpkins you know those apple bins you see we fill those with our winter squash we have five of those full of pie pumpkins that we sell throughout the fall and winter. Carving pumpkins too? Yeah those are the ones that we give to our members and give to the school to sell or um and that's uh we do I don't know I think we've got 12 or 14 bins full of those yeah. So how many acres do you have? Well we raise about 22 to 23 acres of vegetables and we raise about 30 to 50 hogs to slaughter each year and we raise and slaughter about 750 meat birds every year and we've got another 25 layers so we've got quite a bit going on we've got some cats in the barns to help with critters so we've got about eight or nine cats now. You slaughter them yourself? The chickens we do yeah the pigs we take to different slaughterhouses throughout the state depending on scheduling. All right yeah yeah it's turned into quite a industry I think. Yeah there's a lot of great slaughterhouses it's tricky uh you know we because we're a premium organic products that already cost a lot to raise they're gonna cost a lot to buy the meat um sometimes the cuts don't always come back quite as as presentation like as we would like for some of the customers that are going to pay that kind of money for them so we have had some challenges at some slaughterhouses but there's some that do a really great job. Yeah Sophie and I both have gardens but talk about your garden how many acres you're involved? Oh yeah yeah we do about 22 to 23 acres uh in vegetables we do another 20 to 23 acres in cover crops so we raise crops to feed the soil for the next year's crops so we rotate between where we're growing vegetables and where we're growing cover crops and sometimes we run our chickens over the cover crops over the clover in particular they really like the clover and so they eat the clover and that helps their diet and and makes them into a richer chicken. Then you get the nitrogen. Yeah we get the nitrogen goes back into their roots and so it works out really well. Have you had a good likely crop rotation? Generally yes I'm lucky I have a little more soil so I have a better opportunity to rotate my crops than some other farms but I'm still facing challenges from Swede-Midge which affects the whole coal crop family so broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage, kale, we have to rotate those almost 2,000 feet from each other every year. Oh my gosh and I can't quite do that so we end up with Swede-Midge every year which is a problem now. Can these vegetables do to each other adversely? Not too much. There's some diseases that one crop could get that might affect another crop so we try to rotate at least three years before we grow the same families of crops in the same soil and if I can go four or five years I try to do that so that the the diseases that might be present on the on the detritus on the leftover plant material can be broken down and and the diseases die out. Maybe that's where your chili peppers are going to come back in. Yeah yeah maybe that's right. So for your property I read in the paper the other day about your solar project. Maybe online I posted on Facebook. Oh it might have been online. Yeah yeah it probably was online and is that going to be pig housing is it going to be garden storage? Is it going to be just a tool shed? Well we built a pavilion so it's just posts with a roof last fall and it's right at the base of a hillside so we're hoping to have events there someday. We do our CSA pickup right now once a week under there sometimes we park trucks and other implements under there in the rain but it's a 30 by 50 foot structure so we're pretty excited for farm events pig roasts music maybe someday. It's hard to schedule everything with my spouse having Lyme disease with our having a 12 year old with my engagement in the political arena with running a farm and all the different kinds of animals trying to put on events. Yeah let's have a party but we were very excitedly posted on Facebook a couple days ago that we just put 64 solar panels on the roof that's over 18,000 watts of power which is quite large but it's still less power than our farm uses so we're trying to offset what our farm uses we're trying to invest what we can but that was all that we could afford for now. Well excuse me I'm working hard but our power bill is you know 600 to a thousand dollars a month to keep produce a lot you know chilled down and keep our meat frozen and process food in our wash station and so that's going to offset a lot of that power but we still need to do more. And this is the first alternative energy project that your farmers worked on? Well in a way I mean we've heated our home and our hot water with wood so that's renewable energy because it's not fossil fuel and we harvest the wood typically from our own land and we go through four to six cords a year and we have a high efficiency wood boiler and a water storage thermal tank so I can run it for about five to seven hours every other day in the winter and the stored up heat in our cement floor and in that storage tank makes it so that we don't have to be running heat all the time a furnace all the time and we also could if we ever had the the time could go away for a weekend when our house wouldn't freeze you know a lot of people that are wood heat with a fireplace or stove you know four hours after the fire goes out there's no heat coming off of that stove anymore. Right. And so this is a got a little bit more storage so we do use wood heat and hot water for our home and our hot water for anything we use around the farm. And talk about your taxes? Our taxes. Well the solar project will help because we were able to put that in ourselves we will be able to take the tax credits towards our taxes over the next many years given that our farm as we talked earlier doesn't make that much money it'll take a number of years to use up the tax credits because that's you can offset your tax liability with that. That's so exciting that you're able to do that. Was it part of a grant or was it part of just... Well there are farm grants you can get through the USDA to help with some of the solar projects. We had not succeeded in getting one the last few years. We applied I think four or five years ago. The United States Department of Agriculture has some grants for farms and farms across the state should look into that with the USDA and Rural Development Office. Our farm it's a once they've given out all the grant money you know we were just too late that year. And because I'm lieutenant governor I tend to be a little wary of applying for too many grants even though it's completely legitimate to do so. As a resident right? Well yeah but people will will claim that you know I get grants that I shouldn't be getting and I'm a government official and so forth. And so it's actually one of the things that particularly as a representative I was particularly frustrated by because as a representative you get paid fairly small amount of money. You were a senator for a long time and that's 13,000 a year. Yeah 13,000 a year which you know to then make it so you can't apply for six and ten and 20,000 grants for massive projects on your farms seemed a little wrong to me but one can apply but it's about perception and people will exploit perception negativity for political purposes in campaigns at the drop of a hat which is really unfortunate because as Bill you know we want everybody to be able to serve in public office if they want to and be able to run and contribute to their community but sometimes if the economics don't work it makes it hard on people. What issues have given you the most satisfaction that you've worked on? Well you know the satisfaction actually comes years later when someone has bumped into me at a fair or at some event that I'm at somewhere around the state and they say you know the work you did on medical cannabis has really impacted my life or a family member who now is you know using medical cannabis while they're on chemotherapy and it's helping them have an appetite or maybe has alleviated pains so they don't have to take opiate killer pain killers. There are when people tell me those stories about how the work I've done has impacted their lives that's what really gives me the most satisfaction. Certainly I put a lot of energy into our GMO labeling law and was extremely thrilled when we passed that law only to see it get cut to pieces by the federal government and a hundred million dollars of lobbying by corporate agriculture, corporate agribusiness which has now passed a law in congress that's supposed to be a labeling law but it's very hard to interpret you can't read the signals if your phone doesn't work which in most rural areas they don't and it's really turned labeling into a propaganda effort where now some of the food companies want to see the label that vermont created which simply was a statement of fact versus the federal government's new label which is much more a smiley face and and all these things that really portrays a little tiny writing a pro or a con when really the vermont law just said here's what it is you decide so that's something that was very thrilling and satisfying and then now very frustrating but you know we've passed the minimum wage a few times while I was a legislator we did it again this last year while I was lieutenant governor unfortunately governor vetoed it but that is very satisfying to try to move legislation that improves people's lives and the minimum wage has gone up slower than inflation really since Reaganomics and we're just trying to make it go up a little faster than inflation so that hardworking people who work full-time and are paying their dues to society can actually earn a living that could pay the bills I don't think that's too much to ask in a civilized society what was the major point of the veto well I can't really speak for the governor you know there's different reasons given but most of them don't really relate to the reality of people's lives day to day and you know they'll say well these are entry-level jobs for young people well the majority of people working minimum wage jobs are not entry-level folks it's women it's single women who are helping run their households it's folks in their later 20s and 30s who haven't been able to find another job that are paying their rent aren't living at home it's seniors so the majority of people working minimum wage jobs are not high school students entry-level jobs they're people that's their that's their job and they're having a hard time paying the bills so if they were earning more that money would be paid right back into the community and would actually churn in our economy but you have to spend to hold your office what do you spend the campaign yes well typically a lieutenant governor's race has been in the for the last decade or so has been 150 to 180 thousand dollars my campaign two years ago was quite a bit more because there was both a primary that all candidates were spending close to that and then there was a general election so that race it was about 150 to 180 in each of those two elections in that one year this time around it looks like i'd be spending in the 150 thousand dollar range in all likelihood that's for your house seat that's for the lieutenant governor's seat yeah and i have never taken through all my races any corporate donations and don't intend to this time either and you know that's a different decision than some people make but i've never taken a corporate donation and a lot of people don't do it for the same reason you don't some people i wouldn't say a lot of people don't take corporate donations but but there's there's some who are dedicated that do not certainly bernie does not there's some house candidates that don't there's some senate candidates i know senator ash and senator oh i don't believe senator ash i know senator pierce and do not take corporate donations they're up in chitlin county but i know anthony polina down here in washington county doesn't take corporate donations as senator drain for governor would think you'd have a chance uh he might have a chance but i'd like to see him run for president again and i think he'd have a better shot this time now that he's got the base out there i lost my head i should have asked that question that's right that's fine yeah do you want to talk about some of the projects that you've been working on for community building sure lieutenant governor you know i got elected as lieutenant governor the same night that our president got elected and um in vermont he's the least supported president of anywhere in the country so i think i can safely say that most people in vermont had the same sort of horrible night that night that i did even though i just won statewide office i should have been jubilant but uh but but i i could see what was coming and there were two main issues that concerned me um the stream court and climate change uh and you know my daughter is 12 and i've been thinking a lot about the stream court and especially recently with the next appointee first the one that they stole uh and now this appointee as well and now that's going to shift the courts around her reproductive freedoms uh the issues around corporate control of our communities and our government uh they're gonna probably rule very much towards corporate voices uh they're going to um rule on environmental issues away from our common need of a clean environment uh and so i've thought a lot about those things but but a big piece of what concerned me about his being elected is really our democracy as a whole and people's faith in our democracy and our discourse in our democracy and we're lucky here in vermont we have a very civil discourse for the most part and um really work to bring everybody's views together once the elections end the party labels really should mean less and we really should be bringing everybody in and so i started a movie series sponsored by a range of groups from environmental groups to labor groups to civil rights groups so that we would host movies primarily at the state house during the session once a month in the evening welcome people in the state house from anywhere in the state but primarily central vermont but now we're taking the movie series once a month all across the state to really have discussions on provocative issues from we showed 13th which was about the 13th amendment of the constitution and incarceration rates for people of color we showed a movie called maiden doggen harm which was about women in the 60s who actually organized the ford motor plant in england for better pay in the workplace and both union organizing but also about equal pay for equal work we've had a movie um awake from standing rock that was about the indigenous peoples and fossil fuel and coming together and really valuing long-term investments in our communities and and many native communities that really look at what they what their decisions are and how they impact multiple generations and they look to their ancestors and they look to their future offspring many generations out and think much more long-term than we tend to think in our society we've shown environmental movies around energy and the coal workers both the coal workers in west virginia and the energy issues of west virginia so it's not just about green shoes environmentalism but how has the coal industry affected working people in west virginia so these movies are really all about bringing community members out to talk about the issues of our day and watch a movie that really documents some of the things that are going on i've also put out a newsletter to tens of thousands of vermonters every couple of weeks during the session to talk about what's happening among people in a little deeper context than you sometimes get in the media and i have people signing up for that all over the state all the time at ltegov.vermont.gov and it's a one page two sided equivalent goes out electronically and people can email back in questions they have or contact groups that are involved with that did you bring one with you i didn't bring one because we have very few hard copies we do mail them to those folks that don't get electronic media anybody who wants to sign up can contact the office and give us your mailing address we will mail them to people if they don't have email i have a coffee hour every friday morning during the session it's actually an hour and a half where anybody can come in and and we have a discussion of three to ten people about whatever the group wants to talk about and again welcoming people with different perspectives so that we can hear the different concerns people have people are so tribal now from party tribalness to your for or against an issue well oftentimes there's a gray area to talk about and if we don't bring people together to talk about them we're never going to find that area where we can find common ground so those are some of the things i even also during the session did a weekly facetime on on again social media half an hour i would bring in people we had youth from a local high school talking about raising the black lives matter flag we had folks with Alzheimer's in talking about Alzheimer's and what's out there for support for people as they age and how to access that support and mentoring and community support i've had people in about minimum wage both talking about why it should be increased and i also had a show for the folks who are concerned about raising minimum wage so again people could hear different perspectives on my program to find out a little more depth on an issue so it's not just a two-minute story on the news but a half an hour discussion about why the minimum wage is important to raise or what the challenges it might be for small businesses and how it could maybe be worked out so really try to create opportunities for people to engage in the system because more people need to engage not just the folks that are in the state house all the time and the paid lobbyists in the state house all the time but also everyday citizens and that's really been a big piece of what i've been trying to do as a lieutenant governor you go to conferences for lieutenant governor we do there's a few lieutenant conferences conferences around the country every year for lieutenant governors there's about four of them i try to get to a couple of them there's no real budget in the lieutenant governor budget to go to many of these sorts of things the budget for the office is is pretty slimmed down i basically have one chief of staff who does a lot of my scheduling does a lot of my constituent correspondence helps work with the newsletter and and works with our interns to do that but there's not a lot of money in the budget to travel to conferences so as lieutenant governor as you were as a senator and as a representative folks buy their own business cards the state doesn't pay for those we provide a lieutenant governor's office coffee or tea for folks and sometimes snacks and on friday snacks for people you know that's out of my pocket squash chips yeah i think we maybe pay some of the food for the coffee hour from the lieutenant governor budget but i actually think it might be my own credit card that pays for that so really most of it is um is out of pocket so it's very so to travel somewhere and stay in hotels and spend you know eight hundred a thousand dollars you know i have to make sure that it's worth it for vermont taxpayers to make it worth it to go have you thought about running for governor well you know this year a number of people said they wished i had run for governor and i i'd greatly appreciate the sentiment it was really not in the cards for me right now uh when i first got elected to office i was a member of the progressive party as a as a young elected official from burlington and being with all those different labels young burlington progressive i didn't really have in my mindset the idea of being able to ever run or win statewide office and i don't believe that now do you well i've now one statewide office so it's changed a bit but the but the mentality that i've always brought to the office whether it was representative senator or even now as lieutenant governor is that the people of that district whatever scale it is have given me the responsibility and the privilege to serve for those two years there's no guarantee i'm going to get another two years and so i have always just gone full at it for each two years that i ever have whether it's fighting on the issues of raising wages universal health care uh you know affordable housing uh end-of-life choices gmo labeling cannabis reform sustainable agriculture i am all in during the two years i'm in there renewable energy i mean i've fought like crazy for supporting converting our our energy system to one that's much more sustainable and diversified and uh if that opens doors for opportunities because people are excited about those issues great if it closes the door and says gave you're too far ahead of the curve on these issues then i wasn't where the people were but i basically take each two years as full on as i can with the responsibility and the privilege i've been given and now you know that i've one statewide office do i look at those other offices and go if the door opens which one would i most want to run for i contemplate those ideas but really mostly i'm focused on my job at hand and the most important part of the job from your point of view what do you enjoy the most well i think in many ways it's a very boring aspect of the job to people out there which is that moderating the senate being basically the town meeting moderator of the senate is critically important because i want to make sure the rules are are applied equally and fairly that nobody can at the end of the day say as a as a senator i didn't get a fair shot with my amendment or a fair shot with my voice and that that any legislation that comes out of the senate has had its full and fair process and to me right now as our democracy foundation has got a couple cracks in it and people are really wondering whether this system is going to work i need to make sure that my role is towards making it work and making it work fairly i do think there's some real issues out there with campaign finance and that without public financing or changing away from corporate donations we're going to continue to see the the finance situation run congress and that's not my job as lieutenant governor but it starts to feed into these races of corporate donations the amount of money you have to run and raise to run for governor or lieutenant governor or u.s senator congress it's just not right and it makes it so that ordinary people can't run it makes it so that people serving have to spend time raising money instead of doing the work of serving and um so i see a lot of my job is as making sure democracy works and people are part of the system and that its people's voice is not large money that has the loudest voice in the system from that i think there's tremendous issues to work on in terms of everyday lives for people and their their ability to make a decent living pay their bills and have time for their families that's that's what most people want and the way we pay people with minimum wage i don't think we're there the way we don't have paid family leave we're not there the way we don't have universal health care we're not there folks don't need a lot to be happy but they need time and if you have to work 60 hours a week to pay your bills you don't have time to be with your family and raise your children or visit your grandparents and then i was older as an office older but the most difficult decision you've had to make name it name one name a couple oh that's a curveball that's like a debate question i hadn't really prepared myself for that um the most difficult decision i've ever had to make um i'd say vaccine bills are tough because of individual liberties and my concern about the pharmaceutical industry versus the amazing good that vaccines do to prevent illness across our society and around the world i think we've had tremendous scientific advancements with vaccines i do worry that there's you know two three hundred of them in the pipeline some of which could be the issues could be addressed through better hygiene and better water quality and investments and are making people's lives better and not always through drugs being injected into people that pharmaceutical companies are investing in and ultimately want to make a profit on so that's that's been a really tough arena of discussion for me um but most of the issues i've worked on my views are clear and uh when i run being very clear where i stand on issues that makes it much easier to serve and vote on those issues i have many colleagues who who really hem and haw about an issue that they want to support but they say well during my campaign i wasn't really clear where i didn't talk about that a lot and so i don't know where my district is i've always been really clear on sustainable agriculture and universal healthcare and raise the minimum wage and climate change issues and mitigation and what we need to do about it so when i have to vote on those things it's not that hard uh civil rights issues criminal justice issues it's not that hard we need to make sure we put fewer people in prison and really address these issues earlier on in education and make sure opportunities are available because people are going to prison is really much more a symptom of societal problems where we haven't funded our education system properly or where we haven't trained our law enforcement to not have biases in their enforcement or where we haven't made economic strides to where families have domestic challenges because they're struggling so hard and then people suffer domestic violence and either perpetrator goes to jail or the person suffering domestic violence then turns to substances to deal with their pain or to bury their challenges and those substances lead them to addiction which leads them to crime i mean the women in prison today are primarily uh folks who suffer tremendous domestic abuse or have now become addicted to drugs those people should not be in prison i mean in a so so all these issues are resolvable well i'm just wondering in a situation like you have is there a place that you can see that you can inject like a you know a mentoring program for women with economic instability and like provide you know how-to's on small business and math well i think unfortunately maintenance from a policy perspective lieutenant governor actually has very small role i don't write laws i'm not a senator or representative anymore that's the work of those folks the top policy position in the state is governor and that person runs a lot of those kinds of opportunities and programs that could be started through human services and other i'm in the middle in this sort of no person's land but what i do have the opportunity to do is through programs like this through the soapbox lieutenant governor affords through those newsletters through the face time discussion where i have people in i actually had folks from mobius and other mentoring programs in to talk about what is mentoring and so if my position can help expand the opportunity for all of these organizations you know Alzheimer's support groups and mentoring support groups and drug addiction support groups to get out there so people know about them because many of these services exist and people don't even know about them you know there are services through human services with ebt programs and nonprofits working with them to expand your dollar your ebt dollar to buy local food at farmers markets and to you know farm to family coupons or women infants and children through farm to family coupons and seniors with low income through farm to family coupons to get healthier food a lot of people don't know about those programs so if i can talk about those programs over and over and sometimes i'm repeating myself but it's different audiences every time right uh that can really help impact people's lives through the programs that already exist we don't always need new programs no we sometimes just need to make sure people know about the ones that exist one of the things i'd really like to see us do and i've talked about it for years and it's related to property taxes and education and educational outcomes and human services the governor wants to flatline education spending well the biggest place spending is going up is in the social services in our schools but we already have a huge human services budget in state government why not look at the overlap between our school spending on social services and our human services spending on social services blend them reduce redundancy save money for taxpayers and create a better flow of these services between the families outside the schools and then the kids in the schools and actually have a better continuum of service for the kids we could save money and we could have better services so fewer of those kids end up in these challenging situations we talked about the governor i brought to the governor i think it's millions and millions of dollars and he chose not to follow up on it and that's you know that's the difference between me and the current governor and we're not running against each other but you know it's important to understand policy as governor and really delve into it and use the office to go into human services and go into education and go into natural resources and dig down and see where we can improve services for people not just you know cut taxes well what's going to get cut by that let's save the money right to be able to cut taxes let's make better programs so that we can save that money that would be my approach well i think it's very it's um it's timely you know that you can look at it in that way because i think it's true the amount of people incarcerated is ridiculous compared to the amount of people going to state colleges it's it's criminal and and the money that goes into incarcerating people that could be spent seventy five thousand dollars per year per person whereas your college education is going to be forty thousand max going to princeton or some great school with the well it might be a little more than that now but in a lot of a lot of cases there's there's grants or there's low-rate loans but yeah if we put money towards higher education and we got some of these you know addicted moms out of prison and into treatment uh we would spend less on them or just having to prevent people even the of going in which is actually what i'd like to do with our with cannabis reform right is put the first money towards drug treatment highway safety youth prevention for sure but then any added money let's put into the higher education trust fund so that we make college more and more affordable over the long haul let's put some of that money because we don't know what's going to come in let's put it into an economic development endowment so we can invest real money in economic development you served on economic development for years you know there's no money and so if we created a fund over the next 10 years it might have 30 or 50 hundred million dollars in it and we suddenly had two or five or seven million dollars a year to invest in economic development think about all the needs that exist in economic development that you are unable to fund and support because there was no money let's take short-term windfalls and make long-term gains out of them not peter them away on short-term feel-good measures right self-aiming question well i'm just thrilled that we get to have you to ourselves yeah this is really nice can we get you let's you get the last word then how do you want to leave it well i just it's it's been a real honor to serve as lieutenant governor the the biennium is is over and and i still am the lieutenant governor through january certainly i would love people's support to get back in that office i think a lot of people are taking elections for granted it's feeling very quiet out there at the state level a lot of people are looking at national level issues and they rightly should be but i do hope people recognize that we need to keep voting here at home whether you vote for me or not i hope people turn out and vote and participate in democracy because low turnout just gives a sort of fewer people with a lot of money more power and i would say whether you're to the right or the left you know donald trump's populist message was to a lot of working class people who don't necessarily want corporate power i think they got duped by by donald with you know his tax giveaway to the rich and so forth but um but ultimately a lot of working people have been really suffering from a government that's not serving them well whether from the right or the left and i just hope they get out and vote and everybody gets out and votes and participates question for yourself i think he's got it he nailed it i think you know it's been wonderful to have a progressive thinker in a position of power it's it's inspirational for those of us on the fringe i think and and generally um it makes the state house feel more accessible for the general public which i really appreciate and thank you for my goal and your energy and effort towards that and bill's done the same thing just really you know reminding vermonis that the state house is their house that's right and it's important to when i was first elected michael obahowski was the speaker and he always called it the people's house yeah and uh some people think that's corny but it really um it's an important thing to remember that we are public servants as elected officials i like to call myself a publicly elected official whenever someone says you're a politician i said well no publicly elected official you can use either term you want but one really kind of puts forward a a thought process that i am beholden to the people of this state of vermont right and i know many reps from across the political spectrum and senators feel that way as well uh here in vermont we're very lucky and i hope uh that i get another opportunity but it's up to the voters to decide so if you and i thank you for the interview absolutely thanks for having me it's great to see you bill thank good to see you absolutely thank you for joining thank you so much absolutely thanks everybody