hello and good evening and welcome to the channel seventeen town meeting television tonight we have another of our candidate forums this is for chittenden six seven for state representative and we have two candidates and only one is here right now we have hell colston and we're waiting and then hopefully when she gets here we'll have a d n a can solace as well now these folks are representing when you ski and we're going to go through we're going to start with how this is a pretty easy one how i want to tell the folks exactly why you're running and what brings you to the table tonight sure thank you howard i'm running for representative to be a voice for the people i believe that we need to have a voice under the golden dome that speaks to social economic and racial justice i also up have a platform three things i want to focus on housing policy so we have policies that are fair for all people living in when you ski as well as from on i'm interested in economic development when you ski is a growing city and i want to make sure all of our voices are heard and community development community  engagement we have a very diverse city and when you ski where the most diverse city in the state if not the region and i want to make sure that all boys are heard and i have experience as a social entrepreneur or i started the good news garage i started neighbor keepers and all of those efforts community engagement has been a very important strategy for making sure all voices are heard so i want to be the representative for all of new that's how tell me a little bit about you know what you have found for the economy and one of the things that we're it looks like that armont is got a bleak outlook for the economy coming up who knows if that's  us kind of the prediction right now what do you think your role would be if you were our representative to help for mot pull out of that prediction i think we do have challenges with our economy going forward  where the second greatest state in the country we have baby boomers who are retiring every day and are coming out of the workforce so we have a challenge but i think we also have an opportunity we have many new american residents who have skills who are engineers who are doctors who are nurses who are professionals and the way our current system is set up and their credentials aren't acceptable so we need to find a way to engage that part of our potential workforce and move our economy forward as fascinating i want to also remind our viewers that you can call in questions and the number is eight six two three nine six six if d'anna you're out there and trying to get to us you can call in also if you'd like that's eight six two three nine six six maybe you can get a voice in that way so that's interesting so let's tie that that whole thing and a provides such a service and value to our healthcare system that it's it's one tenth of what it would cost the hospital i saw online so the goal of getting people back into their homes and under that kind of collaborative care is really really crucial i think to holding down our cost and i also believe that the all payer model that the u v a medical center is testing out for the next five years is something to look closely at their goal is to have seventy percent of the health care providers into that system into that network as a way to cap and hold those costs down well that's let's expand on that a little bit so what where do you see  if that holds true how's that going to affect because we do have a diverse community i'm from a new school as well and how does that impact we obviously have a community not only diverse ethnically but also economically as well so well as as i mentioned before with regards to how do we move our economy forward how do we employ and engage our new american neighbors to be in the health care profession there are folks out there with qualifications but we have to find a way to honor their credentials and that been a problem well yes i think so i think that's a challenge for our current system  recognizing you know and looking at apples and oranges we need to take a real serious look at how do we revamp our credit patient system so the licensing system yes out of the state is right now a kind of not allowing practitioner and feel safe and comfortable and be able to engage so i think we have we have a right in front of us we can have to figure out how we're going to make this work yeah that's fascinating  kind of looking our list of questions own little bit is a little bit about the paid leave and what what your feelings are about either supporting or not supporting the paid family leave and i'm i'm all for the paid family  i believe at the end of the day are our approach to budgeting and creating our plans to to allocate our resources is really a moral process because a budget is a moral document and we need to be doing the right thing to support families to help them thrive it's a disincentive i think for for folks who don't have that kind of benefit and they're going to be more apt to go elsewhere where they can find that benefit and how do you see when you see right now are we are we growing are we shrinking i mean in terms of population and those were do i what do we know about wh happen where we're almost out of space to develop at this point we're really looking at affordable housing and how do we make sure and sure going forward that we have suitable stock of affordable housing  we have one of the highest rates of renters in the state so so we we have a mix of folks who call when you ski home but i think going forward we're really looking towards a major revitalization of army corridor the twenty three million dollars bond was passed by the voters are looking at you know we having our pool that's been out of commission for the last couple of years you know those things that make a quality of life and attract families so i think we will continue to grow we also i think have a gem in our school system the new school district where i was going next what do you think as a state representative who obviously the whole idea of paying for schools comes right back on the state revs which comes right back to the local thing what's how's your what are your thoughts on how we can afford our school systems in the future well i just want to sail a bit more about when you ski schools we were very fortunate to benefit from a major grant from the nellie mae education foundation and i was involved with the partnership for change for the past five years and  particular the high schools a while and to help them shift to a student centered proficiency based learning system or that i do remember the whole presentation on the exactly which which is starting to shift the paradigm about how teachers deliver education so instead of teaching to the subject you teach to each and every student s and with both of those high schools having the diversity where there's forty plus different languages spoken it comes a real challenge for teachers to to connect and to deliver their education so so having that that that shift i think has has really made new ski middle high school a real gem where if it was located in another city it could be a charter school with people lined up around the block to get in so it's it's really i think producing the outcomes that we want to see where our kids are graduating with a sense of  purpose of aspiration and opi successful in community college or career ok so let's go back to the states role in all that and how they can help us achieve those things for our kids well with ak seventy seven that passed several years ago the flexible pathways legislation it's given schools the mandate to shift to this model that i just described so by two thousand and twenty all of our students will be graduating based on proficiency and what that means is that you have to demonstrate that you have mastered a unit and a course before you move to the next unit to the next unit as opposed to being pushed through and sometimes graduating without the skills and the twenty first century skills that we all know that are important you know collaboration communication creativity problem solving and being civically connected so those are the kind of s skills that we need now in our workforce so having schools shift to that kind of model is going to be better for our communities and for all of our students but for many of the citizens in the new sea it's really comes down yet their costs are going up as well so you know as a state rep you're going to be you know having to you know kind of work with all the short i'm willing to look at some other ways of funding our that has had a huge impact on rogers in general and folks specifically so my first term in one of the bills that i was part of was be on the box and that bell says that if you are applying for a job you it is not now legal to have a little spot that says have you ever been convicted of a crime and that now is something that you can do which opens up the doors for for folks that have had interactions with  the system in some way or another and it just makes it possible for people to get to that next step of actually face to face so it's one very small thing that has a really big impact that was able to be part of the first time that i was in session  my first term and last year i was also part of some really impactful things and two things that i want to highlight around employment and one was that vermont did not have any protection for workers that were pregnant so there was just a hole in the law and we saw her fix stories in that people losing their jobs or having unsafe working conditions and so we fixed that and so now there are protections for employees who are pregnant and then we also looked at what happens when people give birth and looked at and passed and paid family medical leave insurance program that would have it have had a great benefits for unfortunately that bill was vetoed and that is something that myself and a number other legislators are really looking to try again on and things like that have very tangible results for folks is something that i'm very you know what what's the and i want the behind the scenes on of things ok this is how i figured out how to get these things done so well i think the biggest thing is really listening to your constituents so what is it that is happening in people's lives and what is it that people mean so it's not always possible for people to articulate what it is that they need to get fixed but it is possible for people to say this is the problem that's happening and i need something around it and so then i really see it as my job to take what folks are saying about what it is that is going on for them and then see how we can address that at the legislative level there's so many avenues for social change and the legislative level is just one of those and they're really the thing that i figured out in my two terms is talking to people so it's my responsibility to talk to constituents and listen to folks and it's i responsibility to talk to my other legislators and see what is it that they need in order to move forward on things that i think w little bit of what we need to do to address this because that is impacting our area and tell me what you think your thoughts are on that wow i think it's even bigger than opioids i think we have an addiction you know epidemic and i would look to the work that's being done in burlington they have a structure called comp stat and they bring together probably thirty to forty people including the mayor and the police chief and and all these these organizations that are involved in this work and they sit around the table and they communicate you know about you know john doe who's having challenges who knows this person who's doing what for this person it's  s collaboration live and i think we have to have that kind of approach because these are our neighbors you know and we have to realize that they need support and they need help and we've got to make sure we're all working on the same page and i think w you ski can learn from that model and i'm looking forward in the future to see how we might participate in that model do you think i think one of the things that we forget to talk about is not just the direct service which hal is talking about and very vital to really look at what services individuals who are struggling with addiction need but we also need to look at why there is an addiction issue in the first place and it has a huge thing to do with the economics and a huge huge factor of do you have hope see opportunities to see options and when we pull back and look at the economics and i know one of the questions on your list is mean we all have already talked about that but that we have low unemployment in vermont's however most of those jobs are low wage jobs and we do not have folks that have enough money to get by we can look at our little wage index that we have vermont that says if you are childless if you live with the roommates if you have no debts and you have no savings and you never go on vacation then fifteen dollars an hour is a livable wage now finally somebody that doesn't have debts that doesn't want to save for the future and that has all of those conditions it's going to be a rare person yet i can find lots and lots of people that are making below minimum wage and that and we were able to pass increasing the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour by two thousand and twenty which i think is still kind of slow and it was but it was on a track that enough business owners were able to see how that would be possible to do and again our governor vetoed that and so  really looking at when we're looking at addiction we need to pull back and look at the economic situation and the hopelessness that a lot of people have when you're in a dead end job that doesn't make a livable wage and so it's hard to have hope and that's when people turn to addiction how do you want to respond to the ball i totally agree with ya no i think people don't wake up and want to be poor and we have a structure that really makes it so difficult for for folks to move into that liberal way drome and what happens is we pay downstream you know with our h s budget which is rebellion dollars and so we have all these resources interventions that we have to pay for and i think it's really pound foolish that we need to really focus on how do we grow our economy with economic development and jobs that really support families and how do we do that i mean  guess that's really the golden question in some ways that you know there will be people who say well we have too many if we cut taxes or make it easier for businesses to come in that will bring in jobs and others that say no you know that's you know that it pool and you know talk that we consciously have how does that how do you at the state say ok how can we make the economic environment better for not only one who's key but everyone else so you think well i think one is forward thinking in lots of ways and one way that we have done it that we have great opportunity and and how as a lot of experience in this is with that person is learning plans that we have in our school system now and so with those there's an opportunity for apprenticeship and internship like there has never been before and so really connecting high school students with the job training that they need to fill the jobs that we have vermont we have high skilled jobs here in vermont we have tech companies that are begging for fulfillment and yet we're not quite matching that and i think that the person is learning plans can really assess that and those are still information in a lot of places but it's a really  great opportunity to connect and looking at that we need to think about timelines so one of the challenging things about creating legislation is that we're on to your cycles as elected officials and yet the economy is not here cycle and education is not on a two year cycle and so looking beyond that is vital to saying even though i'm only elected for two years at a time and i hope to to be able to serve you never know but nevertheless i need to look we need to look beyond that time frame to see how we can support our education system that's gone through a lot of different changes with governance merging and an ak forty six and all of these ways yet it's still we're still able i think to encourage the systems that are ready in place to help match the skilled jobs that we currently have in vermont i would also look to education the data shows that when a child is in elementary school their level of aspiration is at its highest and then by middle school it starts to dip and then by high school it tanks so how do we make sure kids are inspired to welcome their education there's an example with the cell phone to high school there's a program called big picture learning so at the school within the school and it's all project based learning and big picture learning as a network not only around the country but around the world and they have shown in their data their longer to data that seventy percent of their students are in a career path that was directly related to their project so how do we really get kids excited about education is really the key that's going to be a little bit self indulgent but i do want to remind our viewers that you can call in  you know it's an issue for us if those of us that believe in democracy then to be an army what do you think would reduce c you know funding sources are starting to dry a little bit do you think communities will back increase  and help us in the open media where i think we need to be really creative and figure out how do we how do we look to the netflix's and who are out there drawing  billions of dollars and they too i think have a role in supporting this is part of our of our democracy so i think we need to find that strategy to bring them to the table and to have those conversations about how do we how do how do we tax them in a way that's going to support our community media and our local democracy yeah well i think that when we look at the scope of funding that we are able to offer as a state i think that avenues for democracy are key and we have been able to do a lot of non funded movement in terms of democracy and vermont being one of the few states that has same day registration now so these pieces that are in structurally and really i think we need to be key and maintaining an open media and part of that is finding places like this where people have access to information about local candidates information about what's happening in our local community because as as as how brings up these different big media things that are  information is getting narrowed and narrowed and specialized and specialized and so in that our view of the world is getting narrowed and it's really important to maintain that places such as such as you see t v in order to keep open access and keep democracy so that we're not just narrowing in we're down to just a few minutes and so i want to give an opportunity for both of you to give a couple minutes of closing but if you can indulge me a little bit about government effectiveness what you think you have both to have been involved in communities and working with their work how can we improve government effectiveness why i think transparency i would love to see how we can  make public the the day to day transactions in the legislature you know the committee meetings why is that behind closed doors you know i think we need to look at different ways to to bring in the community in our work at the legislature so i think transparency is an important one i think we also need to look at how do we how do we capture good data and utilize it across all the various departments and and so that we effectively working as i gave the example of a comp stat model that we're all on the same page and we have data that we can work with and that's going to change our behavior it seems like if we could do this at the high school that we have had in people are not falling and so there's pluses and minuses to that and so part of the minuses that we can see in the last two years in the last by any m is that we got curveballs at the end of  calls for you know building relationships across differences and how do we learn to really listen understand and accept our differences and learn what it really means to be in dialogue and to collaborate and i think if we can accomplish that we will do great things i am trying to find which camera to look at with the really i'm so excited to be running again for a third term as i mentioned big in the beginning it's been very humbling to be part of amazing legislation that made a huge impact on people's lives and i hope to continue to do that to really look at the ways that we can can shift things to benefit folks in many ski and across from want well i want to hal is as a write in candidates and i'm on the ticket with of you and and so we're in good to very good right there and i want to thank the folks who've been watching you can find this online also you can find repeats of this if you want and don't hesitate to support a town meeting television and open media of all types and there we are really appreciate thank you so much for watching tonight