The Platform

Land use and local control

Decisions about this place should be made by the people who live here.

What I'll do

• Oppose any land-use designation that removes local decision-making without delegating real authority and capacity back to towns.

• Push to make permitting faster and more predictable for homes and small working-land businesses, so building here stops being a privilege of people who can afford the lawyers.

• Stand with select boards, not over them.

Last session, people in these towns came to me worried about the Tier 3 designations in Act 181 and the absurdity that maps drawn far from here that could decide what a family is allowed to do with land they've worked for generations. So I went to Montpelier and testified against them. I was one of the first conservationists to go on the record in opposition, and I did it knowing it could cost me professionally.

My objection was never to conservation. I've spent my career on it. My objection is to who decides.

Place-based governance means decisions made by place-based institutions like select boards, planning commissions, town meeting. Not unelected boards in the capital. And reform has to be honest about it: every time authority is taken away from a state board, that authority has to land somewhere local, with the staff and the funding to actually use it. Otherwise it isn't reform. It's just abandonment with better branding.

This isn't abstract for me. I spend a good part of my working life helping select boards and individual landowners navigate Act 250, and I've seen what the permitting system does to a family trying to build a home, start a farm business, or put up a sugarhouse. The Tier 3 fight is won for now, but it will be back next session. I intend to be in the room when it is.

A Vermont Public Bank

Vermont's money should work for Vermonters, not Wall St.

What I'll do

• Introduce or champion legislation to charter a Vermont public bank, capitalized by consolidating existing state lending programs.

• Design it to partner with Vermont's community banks and credit unions, not compete with them.

• Build in lending for housing, working lands, small business and municipal resilience from day one.

Read the full Policy Paper Here

Right now, Vermont's economic development money is scattered across a patchwork of revolving loan funds and lending programs, each with its own rules, its own staff and its own limits. Meanwhile, the money Vermonters and Vermont towns tax deposits gets swept onto the balance sheets of banks headquartered far from here. Banks that answer to shareholders in Wall Street Boardrooms, not to our communities.

Wall Street has had its turn. In 2008, the biggest banks in the country gambled with other people's money, lost, and handed the bill to taxpayers, and they came out the other side bigger than ever. Not one of them has ever lain awake wondering whether a young family in Sandgate can get a mortgage, whether a sugarmaker can finance a new evaporator, or whether a town can fix its bridge before the next storm takes it out. That's not their business model. It should be ours.

North Dakota solved this a century ago. The Bank of North Dakota has operated since 1919, and it's not a radical experiment. It's a conservative institution in a conservative state, partnering with local community banks to keep capital circulating at home.

I want Vermont to charter a public bank on that model. Not with new money, but by consolidating the lending programs the state already runs and moving their capital into a single institution built to lend here. Grants would remain, stacked on top of that foundation instead of being the only tool we have.

Lending with a purpose. A public bank still lends responsibly and turns a profit, but it answers to the public shareholders, like you and me. The bank can then use its profits to make sub-market loans by prioritizing community benefit as much as it values the return on the loan. Two programs top the list here: refinancing student loan debt at fair rates, so young people can afford to stay and build a life in Vermont instead of leaving to chase a paycheck, and financing the reconstruction of derelict homes, turning the empty, falling-down houses in our towns back into places people can live.

Dividends that come home. When Wall Street makes money, the profits leave. When a public bank makes money, they come back to the people who own it through the state budget, easing the tax burden that's pushing too many Vermonters out.

Every day, I sit down with people across this county who are trying to start or grow something. A farm, a small business, a housing project, but I watch them get stuck on capital. A public bank is how we get them unstuck.

Vermont money, lent by Vermonters, for Vermont. Let Wall Street finance the next hedge fund. We'll finance the next farm.

Schools

Protect school choice and increase flexibility.

What I'll do

• Oppose efforts to restrict or phase out tuitioning for towns that have long relied on it.

• Defend the independent schools that serve this region as partners in public education, not competitors to it.

• Work to strengthen our public schools at the same time, with local voices at the table.

• Watch the Act 73 and Act 170 implementation decisions closely so our schools aren't quietly stranded by a rule written for somewhere else.

• Judge every education bill by what it does for student outcomes, not by what it does to a spreadsheet.

• Build coalitions across party lines with legislators from other tuitioning towns.

Vermont has an education system most of the country has never heard of, and it's one of the best things about this corner of the state. When a school district doesn't operate a school at a given grade level, the state's education funding follows the student to a public school in another town, or to an approved independent school.

That's how kids in these towns go to high school. Burr and Burton Academy has been educating students here since 1829, long before Vermont had an Agency of Education. Towns across this area could have built public high schools of their own. Instead, they chose to keep sending their kids to the academy that was already serving them well.

Burr and Burton isn't the only one. Long Trail School celebrated its 50th anniversary last year and was the first school in Vermont to offer the International Baccalaureate. Stratton Mountain School has been educating and training homegrown Olympians for years. Parents here get to look at those schools and pick the one that fits their kid, and that choice is worth something.

It works. Families here have kept choosing it for nearly two centuries. Students get a range of courses, arts and athletics that no small town could offer on its own, and towns get a high school without taking on the cost of building and running one.

It's also one of the reasons families choose to move here at all. Vermont's deepest problem is that we're getting older and smaller, and good schools are one of the few things that reliably draw young families to a place. We can't solve a demographic problem by undermining the very schools that make people want to live here.

None of that is an argument against public education. Our public schools educate most of the kids in this state and they are the backbone of the system. I want them strong, and I want local voices at the table when decisions get made about them. These two systems don't compete. The measure that matters for both is the same one: are students coming out of school able to read, think, and build a life here. That is the metric I'll use on every education bill that crosses my desk, not whether it moves a number on a spreadsheet.

There is real work happening on that front already. Act 139 put Vermont behind evidence based literacy instruction and started fixing how we prepare and support teachers to teach reading, which is the closest thing to a sure bet we have for improving outcomes. The move to Cooperative Educational Service Agencies gives schools a way to share the services and expertise no single district can staff on its own. Both are steps in the right direction, and both say something about where our effort belongs, which is behind the teachers doing the work.

That tradition of choice is under pressure in Montpelier every session, and it's always one bad bill away from being traded off for something else. Act 170 is complex, but it's the law of the land, and the legislature will make critical decisions about how it gets implemented in the next biennium. I'll stay informed and engaged throughout, so I can do what's right for our area and for the state. Students deserve no less.

I stand firmly behind independent school choice and tuitioning. On this, I'll be a reliable vote no matter who's asking. Education is not a partisan issue, and this biennium it especially can't be. The Speaker, the Senate pro tem, and the House Education chair will all be new, and the Speaker picks every House committee chair. The relationships that decide how this lands haven't been formed yet. I'll work with any party, any caucus, to protect what works here.

Health care

Care people can reach, at a cost people can bear.

What I'll do

• Support legislation commissioning an independent study of universal primary care in Vermont.

• Support expanding association health plans for small businesses, with protections against age rating.

Health care costs are one of the quiet reasons people leave Vermont, and one of the loud reasons small businesses can't hire. I don't think there's one sweeping fix, but there are two practical places to start.

Study universal primary care. The most expensive care is the care that comes too late. When people can't easily see a primary care provider, small problems become chronic conditions, chronic conditions become specialist care, and too often the first real point of contact is the emergency room. Universal primary care has the potential to lower costs across the whole system by catching things early. Vermont should find out, with a rigorous, honest study, whether it can work here and what it would take.

Expand association health plans without age rating. Association health plans let small businesses band together and cooperate to negotiate better prices, the way large employers already can. That's a real tool for a region built on small employers. But lowering costs shouldn't mean pricing out older Vermonters, so I'd support expanding these plans only without age rating.

Current Use for Small  Farmers

Open the door for the next generation of farmers.

What I'll do

• Create a small-farm tier. A new Current Use tier for parcels under 25 acres that generate around $5,000 per year in farm sales. Farms in this tier would be exempt from the two-acre housesite carve-out, and the primary residence could be classified as farm worker housing. On a small farm, the farmer is the farm worker.

• Treat leased land fairly. Within that same tier, land a producer is actively farming, their own or a landlord's, would count as agricultural even if farming isn't yet more than half their income.

Vermont's Current Use program is one of the best tools we have for keeping land in agriculture. It lets working farmland be taxed on what it produces, rather than on what a developer might pay for it.

But the program was built around what the Vermont farm used to have: big acreage, a full-time farmer, a house set apart from the operation. The farmers who could renew Vermont's farm economy mostly don't look like that. First-generation farmers usually start small, with a few acres, a flock, a sugarbush, or a market garden, and most keep an off-farm job while the farm grows. As written, Current Use largely leaves them out.

Two rules do most of the damage:

• The two-acre housesite rule. Every dwelling has to be carved out of enrollment along with two acres around it. On a small parcel, that can take a large share of the land out of the program, and the farmer's own home is taxed at full market value even when it sits at the center of the operation.

• The farmer income test. Land a small producer leases only counts toward enrollment if they earn at least half their income from farming — a bar almost no new farmer clears in the early years.

New farmers shouldn't be penalized for keeping the day job that makes starting a farm possible in the first place. Tying both changes to the same tier keeps the reform aimed where it belongs: at small farms that are actually producing, and at the people trying to build them.

Farms, food and working lands

Bennington County has been passed over long enough.

What I'll do

• Expand the Working Lands Enterprise Board by redirecting funds from underperforming programs, not adding new spending.

• Make sure Bennington County gets its fair share of state agricultural and clean water funding.

• Support farm startups, business transitions and generational succession, so working land stays working.

For years, this county was an afterthought. Agricultural programs that other parts of Vermont took for granted simply weren't available here, and state and federal funding streams, like USDA programs and Clean Water Fund project money, flowed around us instead of to us.

I've spent years on the front line of changing that for the whole county by working to reestablish programs that had long since left Bennington County behind, and achieving the policy changes that wrote us back into funding we'd been shut out of. Day to day, that means helping farmers get started, helping them transition to new business models, and helping families hand a farm to the next generation. It means working to build a food system here that's healthier, more sustainable, and a genuine force for good in the community.

In Montpelier, I'd bring that same approach to the budget.

Fewer programs, better funded. The Working Lands Enterprise Board is one of the best tools the state has for seeding small-scale agricultural and forest businesses. I want to expand it, but not by piling on new appropriations. Vermont runs plenty of programs that aren't delivering. I'd identify them, reduce or end them, and redirect that money to Working Lands, where it builds businesses that stay here.

Floods and disaster preparedness

Ready before the water rises.

What I'll do

• Work with first responder organizations to sponsor legislation that raises readiness and breaks down the silos between towns, agencies and responders.

• Establish funding to conduct disaster response training that's open and accessible to the public.

• Create programs to generate and maintain public inventories of emergency response equipment, so every community knows what exists and how to get it.

• Build municipal resilience lending into a Vermont public bank from the start.

• Support bridge financing so towns aren't forced to choose between recovery and solvency while they wait on federal funds.

• Keep local knowledge at the center of resilience planning. The people who live beside the river know it best.

When the floods hit in July 2023, I helped convene the first community resilience forum in Bennington County. That forum grew into a working group that is still meeting today, and what I learned from it is simple: preparedness is a financing problem as much as a planning problem.

Our towns already know which culvert is undersized, which road washes out, which bridge won't take another storm. What they don't have is the money to fix it before it fails. So they wait. And after the disaster, they sometimes wait years for federal reimbursement.

This is one of the strongest reasons for a Vermont public bank. A state bank could lend towns the money to do resilience work before the next storm, and bridge them through the long wait for reimbursement after one. Neighbors will always show up when the creek rises. The state should, too.

But money is only half of it, the other half is knowing what to do. Right now, our emergency response system isn't adequate to the storms we're getting. Too many of us wouldn't know where to go, who to call, or what help exists when the next one hits. And too much of what does exist sits inside separate agencies, towns and organizations that don't plan together until the water is already up.

Coastal communities that live with the threat of tsunamis or hurricanes don't leave readiness to chance. Evacuation routes are posted, drills are public, and everyone knows where to go. We should bring that same seriousness here. That means disaster response training that's open to the public. It means public inventories of response equipment. Knowing who has the pumps, the generators, the saws and the boats, and how to get them, so no one is scrambling to find them mid-flood. And it means breaking down the silos between towns, agencies and responders, so that when the moment comes, we all know what to do, where to go, and which resources to start tapping into.

I'm a co-author on several reports advising the state on how to conduct environmental justice work properly. That work is exactly where my concern about Vermont's current direction comes from.

Let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not arguing with the goals. We need to move to an economy that isn't carbon-intensive, and we need to protect the land and water that make this place what it is. I've spent my career doing that work.

Vermont's conservation success didn't come from Montpelier. It came from the farmers, foresters, sugarmakers and private landowners who have cared for this land for generations. The working land stewards are the reason so much of this state is still forest and farmland. Yet when it's time to plan and write policy, their voices are too often the last ones heard. That has to change. We need to recognize, support and uplift the people who actually steward this land, and give them a real place in planning and policy decisions. In Montpelier, I'll make sure the people who live and work on this land are heard at least as loudly as the lobbyists.

What I am saying is that too many of our environmental policies place their heaviest burden on the people least able to carry it. When the cost of reaching a climate goal lands on the rural poor, like the family that can't afford to comply, the farmer who can't afford the permit, the homeowner priced out of the place they've always lived,  that isn't a side effect. It's an environmental justice failure.

A transition that dispossesses people of their livelihoods and their homes is not a just transition, and it won't hold. Vermont can do better, and it has to.