welcome to channel seventeen is continuing coverage of general election twenty eighteen election day is november sixth and we are getting ready here by bringing you one hundred candidates in thirty one forums in the month of october so we're glad you can join us and today we are with two women who are representatives in burlington's district six five in burlington south then we have joey donovan and mary sullivan thank you both for joining us our pleasure face for having you now technically your running is joanna joey for the two seats and why don't we just start with a reminding the voters why you're running and what qualifies you for the position and maybe joe you can start you know when i ran for the first time in the year two thousand i thought i would probably serve a couple of terms it has been really one of the most honorable things i've ever done in my life i feel very very fortunate to be able to serve the city of burlington and my poor i go back again and it's will be for my think temped term because there are issues that i've been involved with over the years that still have not happened and i want to be able to pursue those i was very disappointed with our governor last year when he vetoed the minimum wage bill and also the paid family leave bill paid family leave we've been trying to pass now for more than a few years and it's not a great expense to the taxpayers of vermont but it makes sense i know in my family i was very grateful that we had the federal paid leave when we my husband had illness that i had to leave work it would have been a lot easier had it been paid but at least i knew i had a job to go back to and it gave me time to do the job that i needed to do with him so i'm going back to finish some of those things that i'm interested in and i hope that the people of the south and and health section of burlington will agree that i deserve to do that time it won't just be that that will be working on but those will be important starting i think with paid family leave and minimum wage i think it's crucial when you talk about an affordability agenda these are two really  solutions kakis those are issues that i'm very passionate about and i really want to see the state moving forward so that we started chipping on greenhouse gas emissions goals that everybody says that they're very much in favor if you have goals without a plan to achieve the goals they are useless and that's what i see is happening a lot so and i think it's very important for people to know that this is not only  environmental it's also an economic development agenda that when you spend a dollar on fossil fuel in the state of vermont any sense of that goes on in the state that is not strengthening our economy at all will be many issues that i'll be going back and hopefully working on and i really hope we can get some of these through this time around let me segue to the question about how i'm a change that we had prepared and that question is are there opportunities in climate change for vermont maybe you could your spirit there were there are huge number of opportunities and i think that's where you see the people who are visionary in their legislative approach that they see these opportunities they don't just want to do the same old same old because that's what we've been doing and to move toward renewable energy and better farming practices so that your reabsorb in the carbon into the soils that strengthen the quantifiable fewer avoidable deaths and lost work time and so there are a lot of health benefits for getting fossil fuel lot of our out of our air and then what do you think the opportunities are in climate change when you say what do you see as the answer to that question i see a lot you know we have the renewable energy business out there and that is the real growth industry we have a lot of young people working in these jobs that high salaries good pay good benefits you know this is where we're going to be growing our economy down the road and i think we really and there's a little advantage to kind of getting out there and doing it for us to not i was led to leave behind i often say to people that we get up on the floor of the house and brag about how vermont was the first to do this we were the first to do that and when it comes to current times it's like well let's not be too much of a rush let's not be the first we're proud of our forbearers for doing that and i'd like to see a little bit more of that same attitude in the legislature these days i think recently as recent as last week i read or heard some top scientists say that we really only have about a ten year window to really start to be serious about this and start to make the change and it is unbelievable as mary says that we have a number of climate change deniers in the state house we certainly have the chief climate denier in washington who is sending a message that  it's not the crisis that it is i look to my grandchildren and think it is imperative that we address this and you know mary serves our natural resources and and she's my chief adviser on all issues that have to do with energy  and these issues and i think her statements today were really powerful about why we have to do something remind us what committees you serve on i serve on ways and means and tell us let's talk about the budget then we've talked and maybe the bigger issue here we don't you don't do the budget we just find the violin i was just supporting exactly so let's talk about the bigger gallery of the economy and you know how would you characterize that help for months economy and what do you think needs to happen and what role would you play and creating a sustainable future where you know i think we have such kind of doom sayers about the state of vermont we're a small state we can we can't do everything but i'm so impressed with the commitments that we have taken on to make life a little bit better for others and to find a way to pay for it i think for my is in a pretty good shape i think the independent entrepreneurs that we have coming to this state are really really making a difference i think i'm not sure that we brag about our excellent public education system as much as we should i would love to see an outreach where we're talking to skene families that drive up here from boston or new york to say why don't you come here you won't have to pay private schooling more you can get a public school education you can live here you won't have to drive here every weekend really put that out reach out about how good the environment the life work genuinely good workers and great public education that we have that would be a way to also expand our our businesses and i think overall i was reading my friend and jack hoffman from the public at as it's institute i go to their website a lot and read a lot of their materials and i think they paint sort of a brighter picture of our economic future than sometimes those in my let me just ask you before we follow up on that well go ahead and then i was just going to point out that joey makes an excellent point in the fact that we do have excellent schools here and we should be celebrating that and supporting it that's another point where the governor has really knows the only way to get good legislation this together into committee really that it get people in to testify but it seems to be that he really wants to suck so much money out of public education and we are going to be like other states if we do that and we brag about the fact that we have really good schools good public school teachers and we certainly want to make sure that continues how do you know that we have good schools what incredible ation i think in the number of successful to students we have i think where we are failing is getting kids to actually follow through you know they they may go to college for a year and then decide they're going to do something else that we need to do more on higher education to attract kids and to then retain those kids in those programs one of the saddest things i have seen is students that go to college for two years or so leave without a degree but leave with debt and then they're not able to really get the job that pays enough to be able to pay back that debt and already then they're behind so i think we need to do better when we started to have pay for high school kids to college classes i was on the education committee at the time and we really viewed that originally as aspirational for first generation kids for them to be able to be exposed to a rigorous class fail to realize they could do it they could master that curriculum and that they had it in them to go to college and it now has become sort of a general  expectation for many high school students to take those classes and it's it is one of the things that i was a part of in the legislature that i'm most proud of that i see kids now who are going to college and some of them have six eight even twelve credits and so it's saves them money on college and it gives them a sense of accomplishment and i'm a real good sense that they are good thinkers and are really going to be the next generation of leaders here in the state of so mary do you want to just add about your view of the economic state of the economy and for a moment and do you have specific ideas about building a sustainable economy you know i think it's very closely linked to you know looking at climate change and seeing how we can really help our state by changing our economy and keeping up with this you know if we do that we have all of these benefits better jobs cleaner air out in front by not importing fossil fuel so i think making sure that as we talk about growing jobs that it's not like i tracting some big corporation from some far off place to come in and hire lots and lots of people in a certain area but instead really supporting the entrepreneur is that we have here and having the state open so that if other entrepreneur very small grants to you know a farmer or restaurant owner that they might start expanding a little bit and go from two or three employees to five or six that i think is the vermont model that we want to really focus on and make sure that we that we really stay with so what kind of issues do you hear from your constituents in the south and what it what do they care about what are they talking to you about i think a lot of people and  are talking about the crisis of opioids and the dangerous situation that's placing so many people in and the power of addiction i think we need to commit to finding more treatment spaces and different ways of addressing that situation we had a young woman who's a beachwear and now has got her worldwide i think her family has been in burlington for a long time  and many of us are intimately friendly with them and i think how brave they were to share that personal so sore and how open they were to talk about something that people have felt shame before and i think many of us come from families where there has been addiction there's been sort of a quiet desperation about it oftentimes and so i would really hope that health and welfare and different committees that have to do with health will really start to look at that and see what can we do is there any impact that we can have on that issue i think we're having an impact now there's been a lot of resources and time and administrative design and public safety resources reallocate like we've we've been doing a lot and yet we still have a significant problem why is it going down in vermont i mean you know i don't you know i really don't know i have i don that i think we all need to look at and do the research that's necessary what does work you know i heard gary de carolis on the radio this morning talking about places like turning point where there's a safe place for people who have problems with drugs and substance because it's been my experience that those folks have to sort of change their lives they can't go back to be with the people that they had been with and and that's asking a lot you know when you're recovering from cancer or some other disease you still can go back to your friends and your life that you know but the power of that and the and the places like turning point to offer people the computers to help write a resume to just have friendship to be on a cup of coffee maybe those are the types of things we need to reach out and develop more of you know i'm not sure but i certainly want to be able to start a conversation about that issue and that certainly is such a drastic failure allowing the pharmaceuticals to get away with a with what they've gotten away with and you know how do we get them to actually be responsible for this  home they take two for what they need in those twenty eight left over and they can sell them at the high school for some kids and we've learned certainly from this obituary who probably have an addictive type of personality it doesn't take much to become an addict and become a person with addiction and you know we let we have let the pharmaceuticals get away with way too much what are you hearing from your constituents in the south and you know certainly along with the opioid crisis that's certainly the talk of the conversation you know we have water quality issues and that's a big one we ha beautiful lake that we have not been taken care of for a very long time and not to be totally critical of everything the governor does but he was not a fun session last time for sure working with him i don't think you know he talked about no new taxes no new taxes that's all we heard no new fees no new taxes rather than looking is this an investment i mean that's how we run our families our own personal lives our own finances we'll spend something to know that it's a good investment so that you have paid back in the future and there's nothing that will have better payback than starting to clean getting the funding source of that we really improve the part of our life here i echo mary you know julie moore who's the so day of the agency was in the ways and means and we were talking about how to fund the cleanup of the lake and i have great admiration for her and for the work that she has done but she was placed in a position where she had to talk about the reasons that they can't do it and i finally had to say to her it sounds to me is the reason that we can't do it is because of the fact of a campaign slogan which mary referred to no new taxes no new fees and i think i think the governor painted himself into a box with that i'm hoping that perhaps i haven't heard him utter that this time around because you know there are real problems and and we're not over there just to you know find out a new tax or whatever but when you have issues as champlain we have to be somehow invested and i want to also salute beth piers who did a fabulous study on the cleanup of the lake and it's probably the best thing that we had to look forward to or to look and i think we now have g p s map being that can probably do that better i think we have mapping now that can show where there are non pervious things and you know we have a big big parking lots  of shopping centers and all sorts of places that we could say you know here is the map this is what and you should probably be somehow taxed on that or or pay some off that runoff is so important we've we've got to be able to we don't want to just be cleaning up we want to be cutting off the runoff from you know we did start the regulation of small farms which is crucial it should have happened before you know there's a lot of elements that go into making the link dirty but you cannot be having its loss was just one thing off because you're a small farm and so that seems like the farmers have come on board and they have i think we had a discussion i think before you came back to the buffers that farmers would have to put some sort of buffer between that any stream that went through the land and i can remember i thought it was very simple debate and we were there four hours later and it became a private property discussion and that the state had no right you know to impose that on anyone i don't think we have that same viewpoint i did a day  polluting a public good like that you know that's what it's about it's not whether you have you have a right to your own privacy and whatever if nothing you do impacts someone else or something else but that's a different debate when it certainly does i'm prompting this question because if the governor's debate last night i think was emily payton recommended growing marijuana in those buffers as a way to absorb phosphorus so i'm still the question that comes to mind is what's your view on the legalization of marijuana that's taking place do you think this state should go further what's your view on this i was a supporter of legalization  first of all i think any issues around drugs should become a mental health issue and not something that we deal with in courts but aside from that it seemed like our medical marijuana list was growing and growing every year and i hear people talk about how they use it for this thing or they use it for that and i'm thinking well this isn't place prescription medication i think that's a good i agree with mary i'm a strong supporter of legalization of marijuana it does not make sense to me that we legalize alcohol and do not legalize marijuana i also have never heard of anyone small going to joint and going home to beat their wife up it happens on a daily basis with alcohol i think the law that we passed i think is simplistic  it's foolish i thought it was an extremely small step and i think and i'm hoping that with the be some leadership to expand it and that we now when we have quebec which is in business and massachusetts and maine is certainly also going forward that we do start to sell it legally tax it legally and make some money off it  when we first had that study a number of years ago i think that the amount that we were going to be able to make if we legalized marijuana that next that next session which was not in the realm of possibility was thirty five million dollars i'm sure to be less no but again i'm sure much of it would be going to health and it would be going to education which are two wonderful places for it to go but i think the time has come i think marijuana was demonized many years ago in washington and  it needs come out of the shadows now we need to recognize and i was i was kind of doing my due diligence when i was you know i was definitely leaning in support of it but i was talking to a lot of people and talked to a lot of young people and i asked you you were in high school recently if you wanted drug would you have known where to go even the kids who never ever used it said well yeah and i'd i've heard that that you can you there's a problem that you can have that issue and i guess for those people that i know that do use marijuana they have a relationship with their dealer and they know who deeper research let me just as you sir we have a couple four more minutes left i imagine you're not fans of the federal government at this time are the people that are running it perhaps certainly not be more specific so what what do you see as your role in as a legislative leader in a state like vermont in this time where you have said you don't agree with a lot of decisions that are coming out of d c what can you do what can this you know it's interesting last year i few people consulting and making a decision like that and the people in the legislature there's always some who if it's an issue they don't want to push through so that's none of our business it's all our business you know every public policy issue that we have either at the state and federal level and i hope that this man in the white house you know i'm sure he will continue doing the awful things he's been doing that we that we continue to speak up i'm very very proud of our congressional delegation i think all three of them a doing of bilis job and really being leader is and being the moral leaders that we need that lack of morality at the federal level is appalling to me joy i think that what we can do here is work hard to maintain the civility and the types of legislation that we've all done for them for the time that i've been there which really impact vermonters and positive ways it is appalling the situation we have in washington i'm hoping beyond hope that november seventh will bring a bright day that perhaps we have democrats have taken over the house of representatives and so that there will be some sort of accountability i believe there is can be a lot of questions that could be asked at that time from the president's taxes i think the most recent thing that's just so offensive is his lack of reaction to this horrible by every account murder of this saudi disregard for the press and for other people that are really functional in our democracy so i don't know what i'm going to do the same if it took effect if we don't have that  well i want to thank you both for joining us today with god by know we have joel donovan joanna levy donovan and mary sullivan who are both representatives of burlington southend legislative representatives representatives in our house for district sixty five thank you so much for joining us and please stay tuned here to channel seventeen's continuing coverage of general election twenty eighteen and we'll see you november sixth for a live town meeting oh general election results