Democratic gubernatorial candidates applaud the organizers of the debate held at Sterling College on June 18. From left to right, the candidates were state senators Susan Bartlett, Douglas Racine and Peter Shumlin. At the far left end of the table is Jon Margolis, who served as moderator. Photo by Joseph Gresser
CRAFTSBURY COMMON — The debate held at Sterling College lacked two-fifths of its advertised content. Only three of the five Democratic candidates for Governor appeared for their scheduled meeting here on Thursday evening, June 17.
The three who did show up for questioning by veteran newspaperman Jon Margolis and an audience of about 120 people espoused similar positions on many issues, but gave clues as how their styles of governance might differ.
State Senators Susan Bartlett of Lamoille County, Douglas Racine of Chittenden County, and Peter Shumlin of Windham County made it to the debate, but former Senator Matt Dunne was home with a newborn child and Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz had a conflicting event on her schedule.
Mr. Margolis stated that Vermont is generally a prosperous state with low poverty and child poverty rates except for Orleans and Essex counties. He noted that the candidates’ economic plans focus on jobs that require a college education, and asked if they had ideas that would help a rural Vermont high school graduate?
Mr. Shumlin began by touting his experience as a businessman. He said he had been creating jobs since he was 22, and offered a plan that promised high-speed Internet access across the state by 2013. He said he viewed broadband the way his favorite governor, George Aiken, saw electric service.
He advocated “a single-payer health care plan where health insurance follows the individual, not the employer.”
Mr. Shumlin proposed a partnership with higher education that better prepares students for the jobs that are going to come as “we get off our addiction to oil and move to renewable technologies.” There will be jobs in these fields for people with all levels of education, he said.
“Kids from the Kingdom” will be able to get well-paid work installing solar panels, wind and biomass systems, he said.
In a shot at the presumptive Republican nominee, Lieutenant Governor Brian Dubie, Mr. Shumlin told the audience, “I think we need a governor who stops badmouthing Vermont as a place to work.” He accused what he termed “the Dubie-Douglas team” of spending the last eight years “telling anyone who’ll listen that Vermont is a terrible place to do business.”
Mr. Shumlin pledged that he would promote Vermont. “I have never sold my product by telling people how terrible it is,” he said.
Mr. Racine began by disputing Mr. Margolis’ premise. The poverty rate throughout Vermont and the U.S. is increasing, he said. While acknowledging that childhood and family poverty rates are especially high in the Northeast Kingdom, he said he was concerned with what he said is a statewide problem.
While he hoped that students would aspire to higher education, Mr. Racine said “we’re going to need a broad range of jobs.” He said that in addition to high-tech and green jobs, it is important to create jobs in agriculture and forest products.
In addition to the “land-based economy,” Mr. Racine said, travel and tourism jobs are needed. “We build a strong economy by having a very diversified economy.”
He said that means “making sure that state government is there, not just for the larger businesses and the larger operations, but also for the small farms and small businesses.
“My background is in small business. Small businesses are the backbone of the state of Vermont,” Mr. Racine said.
“The Northeast Kingdom has different job requirements than the rest of the state,” Ms. Bartlett said. “My family moved to Orleans when I was 15 years old and my dad was involved in the management of Ethan Allen,” she said.
Ms. Bartlett noted how dependent the Northeast Kingdom has been on the company. “When Beecher Falls closed they’re still struggling, trying to figure out how to replace that, and before that when the smaller Island Pond mill closed that’s never successfully been replaced,” she said.
She pointed to the example of Jay Peak where, she said, Bill Stenger has the vision of creating year-round employment in an industry that previously earned a bad reputation for providing only seasonal jobs.
Mr. Margolis’ second question also had special resonance for a local audience. A bill to save the life of Pete the Moose effectively transferred ownership of as many as two hundred white-tailed deer to a private landowner. How, Mr. Margolis asked, could candidates reconcile that decision with the public trust doctrine which holds that wild animal belong to all citizens of the state?
Ms. Bartlett, who was one of the sponsors of the bill in question, said the decision to save Pete involved a conflict among wildlife biologists in and out of the state about the threat of chronic wasting disease. “If you get a hold of a group of scientists who agree on something, it will be a miracle,” Ms. Bartlett said about the hearings held on the subject.
She said the situation regarding Pete the Moose was one in which “pure policy in theory runs into the real world and how to resolve it.” State fish and wildlife officials wanted to slaughter Pete the Moose and all the deer who share his fenced-in area to avoid a threat that had not been shown to exist, Ms. Bartlett said.
One solution considered to resolve the issue was to declare Pete to be a dog or a cow or a horse, she joked. But in the end, transferring ownership of the herd was “our very pragmatic solution to a difficult situation.” Ms. Bartlett told the audience that if she is elected governor they can expect her “to go with pragmatism most of the time.”
Mr. Racine agreed with Ms. Bartlett that the decision to save Pete at the cost of transferring ownership of wild animals to a private citizen was a tough one. He said it was a time “where the emotional response sort of trumped the more scientific based response.”
“The best part of what we do is find those sorts of balances,” Mr. Racine said. He added that the bill had passed in the last minutes of the legislative session and that it was hard for lawmakers to gauge the full range of implications in their vote to save Pete.
Mr. Shumlin said his position as President Pro Tem of the Senate made him the least popular person in the State House. That made his decision on the bill easy, he said, because “I’ll always vote against anything that would slaughter Pete on the Senate floor.”
Under Mr. Margolis’ prodding all three candidates said they would respect the public trust doctrine in future decisions.
Speaking to Mr. Racine, who has received endorsements from the teachers union, the state employees union and from the state chapter of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), Mr. Margolis asked if he expects Republicans to use these groups’ support to portray him as being in the pocket of labor.
Mr. Racine began by saying that he is proud of his endorsements, which, he said, resulted from a recognition that he has championed issues that concern the members of the organizations. He said that as governor he would approach negotiations with state employees from a place of respect, but that he would be in management, on the other side of the table. Mr. Racine said there would be times when he and the unions would disagree, and that he would not always say yes to them.
Ms. Bartlett said, “Whoever wins this primary is going to get the bejesus beaten out of them by the Republicans, and the fact that we’re Democrats means we’re all tax and spend and we’re crazy.” She said the winner of the primary is going “to be stuck with all the endorsements, so there we go.”
Mr. Shumlin said Democrats have long been unsuccessful in gubernatorial races. The last Democrat who won an open race for governor was Madeleine Kunin, he said.
That is because the race cannot be won without carrying the middle of the electorate, Mr. Shumlin said. While Vermonters like to send people who will shake things up to Washington, D.C., they prefer a more moderate leadership at the state level, he said.
Mr. Shumlin called himself a “social liberal and fiscal conservative,” and claimed that his was the position most likely to defeat Mr. Dubie in November.
Mr. Racine said he too considers himself a fiscal conservative, adding that he voted against the budget this year because he believed it asked the Governor to fulfill the Legislature’s constitutional duty and find a way to close an $11-million budget shortfall.
Ms. Bartlett called herself a moderate. “The thing about being a moderate,” she said, “is you get beat up by both sides.” She said that by 2012 state revenues will have declined to 2005 levels, and that will require finding ways to trim the budget to match the available resources.
Should she be elected, Ms. Bartlett said, she would try to institute a more transparent budget process. “I believe, when consumers, taxpayers, see that they are getting a value-added product for whatever government spending is being done, then you don’t mind paying taxes.”
Mr. Margolis began a question about education by saying that Vermont’s schools are generally pretty good, although expensive. Surveys show the state has the nation’s lowest student-teacher ratio, he said. How can costs be cut without hurting the quality of education, he asked.
Mr. Shumlin began his answer by telling about his educational experiences. In early grades his teachers thought him incapable of learning to read, he said. It was only because one teacher believed in him and was willing to put her time and energy into encouraging and teaching him that he gained that accomplishment.
Had he not, Mr. Shumlin suggested, state taxpayers might well be paying $50,000 a year to maintain him in a correctional facility.
Mr. Shumlin said he has seen no evidence to suggest that small schools cost more to run that large ones. Healthcare, he added, is a greater drivers of school costs that teachers’ salaries.
If elected, Mr. Shumlin promised, he would “end the war of words against school boards, teachers and students.” He also pledged to rid teachers of needless paperwork stemming from testing provisions of the No Child Left Behind law.
Mr. Shumlin said society should acknowledge that some school costs stem from the fact that “we’re asking schools to be the center of the community,” and to provide a range of services for which they are not compensated.
Mr. Racine said that it is hard to get schools to work together. He said that while on his school board he tried to get nine schools to consolidate the operations of their cafeterias.
He said that school boards have been trying to keep costs under control, but the state has shifted programs that were formerly paid for through the General Fund to the educational budget and property taxes. He gave the examples of health education and educational programs in the Department of Corrections as evidence. Mr. Racine agreed with Mr. Shumlin that health care costs play a large role in school budgets.
Ms. Bartlett said the problem with educational spending is a difficult one, and there are no easy answers. She suggested that larger supervisory unions might allow better use of resources through economies in scale in purchasing supplies and the ability to move teachers between schools as student populations fluctuate.
She pointed to the prospect of a $120-million shortfall in next year’s budget and said that $30-million of that is related to health care, $30-million is connected to the rest of the state government, and “$60-million is about education and the money that the General Fund needs to be shifting into the education fund to keep spending levels and to pay our share of the retirement fund.”
Ms. Bartlett said that unless school spending levels are reduced somehow, they will “break the back” of either the General Fund or of the property tax system.
Glover resident Nick Ecker-Ratz revealed a gap in two candidates’ education when he asked a detailed question about policies to encourage the forestry products industry. Both Mr. Racine and Ms. Bartlett said they did not know enough to answer the question, but vowed that they would learn more about what each said was an important part of the Vermont economy.
Mr. Shumlin said his farm has a sawmill on it that runs every day, and that he is familiar with forestry issues. He warned that Mr. Ecker-Ratz’s question could be rendered moot if buckthorn, an invasive species, continues its northward migration under the spur of global warming. Mr. Shumlin said he is a “buckthorn killer junkie,” but maple groves in southern Vermont have buckthorn thickets in place of growing maple saplings.
In response to a question from Peter Roudebush of Greensboro, all three candidates said they have not visited Pete’s Greens, but Mr. Racine and Mr. Shumlin confessed to consuming and enjoying his produce.
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