hello everybody and welcome to right to democracy television other episode live at five twenty five on the fourth friday of every month where happy to bring it to you again and cooperation with channel seventeen local channel seventeen inch it and county c c t v the center for media democracy in town meeting television rights and moxie is a by state grassroots people powered organization committed to bringing independent political change we're here this month with rad members dustin tanner down on the far end of the table and adrian pasdar well all right well it's good to see you guys  come thanks for joining me happy to be here they're very cool very cool so just to bring everybody up to speed what we'll be talking about this month is we're going to respond to recent hate crimes in claremont new hampshire and the northeast kingdom west glover to be specific and then we're going to talk about teachers unions and their right to strike in relation to recent events  in burlington and about a year ago in south burlington and how that relates to worker protections and raise up vermont campaign then we'll talk about some development projects and burlington and their their ability to change the face of burlington and really change how people view the city and when they show up and how we live here marcus he's been working to design a fair development assessment tool for a more dramatic democratic communal decision making process around development projects and then finally we're going to review a bit about rads overall modus operandi movement politics which is really how we're going to focus on  actually hung from a tree and eight year old boy thankfully little boy survived but the response from the claremont police department has been not very satisfactory focusing on protecting the the teenage perpetrators and not really standing up for the bit so something helpful that you can do is call the police department in claremont and let them know what you feel about that type of way of handling this juvenile so you can talk to them you can also public publicize everything you can about this event on your social media account and national news sources if you can get it up there all the better the more news we can get spread around this the better and then just recently even more recently than that and less clever vermont at the end or some bill farm employees found a swastika and some other racist graffiti spray painted on the barn the jasper hill officials posted a message on their facebook page announcing a one thousand dollars reward leading to the arrest of the person responsible so personally i just think that this is more divisive kind of behavior that i think is creating issues with our political movements and i would love to talk about it you know you know there is a line of kids being stupid when you're young and i think we can all say that we've done our fair share of dumb things as a young teenager or young kid even mean  mean the i had to go to tolerance camp when i was in some grade because of things that i said because i saw them set on a t v show and i said them to a student and that was not correct to say but there is a line that no matter what age you are you shouldn't cross and you know i was thinking about the klan on new hampshire incident and i was looking into it and the more i looked into it the more i got disgusted because there was no response there is not then a response you know it's different if you know a kid threw a rock at a truck or something or if a kid you know said something stupid or i want to school and said something dumb in front of a teacher like that because you give them the education give them training on why these things are bad but the fact that they actually put a rope around the kids neck is just it's sickening it's sickening that these kids i am morris i am more sick over where they get the idea that this was a good idea for because what does that say about the influences in the house and the influence that they've been seen in the media and in school because nobody just gets this idea to do something like that out of the blue nobody's like a guess what we're going to do today they obviously you know racial source is feeding into this to give those kids the idea of thinking you know that's ok or that's a good idea and it's not and even if you learn about lynchings from our past as a country to get the idea to go do this and actually carry it out yeah i mean this is what it's mind blowing you know that's where i go from like ok it's kids being stupid like these are kids who did something wrong and you know if this have died i think we're talking a totally different story right now too i think with ali kids who are facing charges as adults and i think if it's in a different community you know claremont new hampshire is not you know no new england new hampshire and vermont are very not you know are not the nicest place to live if you're a minority because you're outnumbered and there's a lot of ignorance in our communities up here yeah there's a lot of people there are a lot of white people who are very ignorant on the racial issues and it just makes me sick to think about and i really wish would have handled it handled it better and i really wish us a society could teach these things better and educate on why racism is wrong and  i could go into that a little more but i want to let agent of the floor for a little bit here to give his life as well oh yeah totally so i think particularly when you look at the case in west glover i know that i've read a lot of news stories about jewish cemeteries being desecrated and tombstones being broken and things like that especially in the philadelphia region and i think that seeing this instance swastikas and anti semitic refer to being drawn and somewhere that so  close to burlington and somewhere that you know where we probably have friends or have been to that neighborhood i think is kind of scary and intimidating and the question really becomes is this part of a larger trend that we see that is correlated with the current administration and the tensions that people are feeling now after the events that happened in virginia and things like that so i'm just really hoping that this isn't indicative of a greater trend in that we as a community stay as vigilant as we can be when it comes to incidences of hate and discrimination and intolerance so i think it's i think it's you know you're seeing this in other places in the country but the hope is is that as long as we're we're aware of these things and that we report on them and that we draw attention to these issues and condemn them in every way that we can that it's something that we can help mitigate in the future let's keep talking about  racism and anti semitism i think you should see if you see something you say something he actually had another example that came out today in georgia substitute teacher led kids in the nazi salute in this is the seven days off message as of today and the district had a great response they fired her immediately immediately fired the teacher that led this and robin counselors to educate the children on this and you know it's it's more widespread than you think and i think a lot of people because of the current administration are willing to come out and have these terrible thoughts and say well i can have these terrible thoughts now because i know who's going to punish me and it's it's bad it's bad ok  so just so let's see the end of last week at the beginning of this week burlington city teachers went on a citywide strike the students were still able to participate in extracurricular activities such as the varsity sports and even some of the recreation programs but this brought up a lot of issues around the workers rights the rights of the community who hires the teachers expects and to be teaching the kids whether or not it should be legal for teachers to strike who it's hurting with and message getting crossed and i just wanted to take a second and really talk about that  dustin you work in a school system yes i work at a school system that doesn't have a contract i work at milton elementary school i'm in the i'm a district employee of milton town school districts which have also been in the news for quite a few things ourself but you know striking is the teachers really only option when the negotiations break down and there are a lot of teachers that are not being compensated well and this burlington strike wasn't even really about the compensation it was about the work environment and i think that's something that is not really being discussed amongst our school boards in our schools right now or school work environments have taken a trend downhill statewide i would say for the last several years now and you know i saw a article by a local newspaper a local news station talking about how the teachers you know they painted the teachers as greedy as greedy greedy greedy and that's not the case  first up there is not a teacher who is like i'm going to go get a college degree because i want to make six figures there is not a single teacher who is in it for the money because if you know anything about teaching in the state of vermont and teaching in general it is not a cash  cow these teachers are not driving around lamborghinis some of the administrators might be and that's a problem with talk about towards the future or but you know these teachers are coming and they're educating kids every day class of thirty to forty and they're teaching these young adults these students how to be members of society and the think that they are not worth the ability to have good working conditions is it still you know it's insane it's sickening it's something that i look at you know i obviously supported the burlington teachers because you know wow you're going to get good working conditions well you know like what are you going to do just keep working under bad working conditions and hoping the hand that is feeding you these bad working conditions will say well i guess we'll make it better that's not how change happens you know you don't get change by going along with it and i think the strike is going to be one of the big events that helps turns burlington schools around i have a lot of friends down here who have sent kids to burlington schools who have worked at the burlington schools and they have talked about how just got worse it's just gotten worse and teachers aren't getting enough prep time teachers aren't getting a lot of teachers leaving the ground it's a turnstile about like ernest point that you know if you go i read one article i was like the only people teaching burley's in high school are lifers and new teachers because new teachers need jobs and they come in get a couple good years on their resumes leave for the better job leave for the better working conditions and you know pretty much a farm team and shit in county for teachers and that takes away especially when you're biggest your biggest school in the state of vermont you know i don't south burlington see of us if they may have more numbers like the numbers spoke to in the four of them i don't know what they are off the top of my head but you would think you would want the best teachers in the state at a school like burlington you'd think you'd want to keep them there because you are the biggest city in the state with the biggest budget in the state as f iris population you would think would be important to listen to your teachers and say well actually we do need to give them these abilities to work better on curriculums and give them more prep time because they have to prepare for more because you know a teacher a burlington teacher could walk into a classroom and have ten different kids speak ten different light which is and that's not something you will get in other parts of the state and it takes a very special teacher to a have the patience and be have the know how you know i have the knowledge to be able to teach such a diverse classroom you know being an educator is five days a week rolling with whatever punches are thrown your way and saying wow i'm going to make the best of today and i'm really glad they were able to strike a deal  it's it's one of those things where it's about messaging too so we don't want to paint the teachers as as wrong or greedy or evil no what about the school board they are greedy and evil i mean they were trying to hose a contract which everybody thinks is kind of a terrible thing but they kind of had it what do you think yeah definitely so i actually serve on the steering committee for words two and three neighborhood planning assembly and at our most recent event we had representative from the school board li and discuss this very issue of what the school board is going through during some of these negotiations obviously there are things that can be discussed but i think the fact that it's i think it's very important for everyone to remember that people who work for the school board or were or who are on the school board are working in a volunteer capacity thankless position yet well it's a very thankless position and on top of the fact that their budgets have been cut tremendously in the past five or six years  and i remember miss kerr mentioned something like over five million dollars have been cut from the school budget which makes it really hard to guarantee teachers three four five percent increases in their salaries raises  and i know that a big concern of theirs is also property taxes and you know we really don't want to raise property taxes substantially in burlington because then it inhibits new people from coming into town and deciding that they want to live here or investing in real estate in burlington and it i i think that raising property taxes to fund our school board which is something that we've been doing recently burlington now has the highest property taxes in the state around th the surrounding school districts i mean i think we're pushing people out of our district in that way if we say well only people who can afford to live here can live here and that's the only way that we can fund our schools and i'm glad you mention this because what we saw in burlington is not going to be special to burlington it's going to happen state wide the mechanism we use to fund our schools is woefully outdated and it targets the middle class  using property taxes to fund our schools is the biggest slap in the face of middle class people who want to educate their kids because the fact the matter is that you know you have we need a little bit of school consolidation which we're seeing but we need to change the way we fund our school system because it's not fair that you know none of us at this table are paying for our schools we're all three working people who have jobs and have incomes that you know we can expand and you know the you know your grandmother you know the seventy year old grandmother on social security is paying for our schools and it's because she bought a house and that is not fair to anybody in vermont because one a lot of us can just turn a blind eye to what we're seeing in our schools and too it really creates this perception that every time a school needs more funding well that's greedy and they're going on the backs of taxpayers but you know only one third of a model is really paying for our schools and the fact the matter is that our schools really affect our whole community and going on something adrian said being on the school board there is no such thing as a bad or a good side because the school boards have one of the roughest jobs in the state of vermont especially because governor phil scott governor for the working people scott decided to at after a lot of school budgets and contracts have been negotiated say you need to find thirty million alors to cut which is if i'm on a school board one of my supposed to do i've tried to negotiate in good faith with my school you know of my teachers teaching union and you know i've already had to make some concessions because property tax revenue is down and it's not the best way to fund things but you have to deal vance and now you say i have to find thirty million more or it backs a school board in a corner where no matter what the school board does they are the bad guy in a back teachers in the corner because teachers are not going to i'm not going to unwillingly take millions off my hell if you do this this this big charge was due to health care funding right and which is another writes in a marker see campaign that we're working on save health care create health care for all that would be a big deal but so if we're working on that front then we're facing less of an issue when we look at our school boards and there are strikes in our and our need for our workers at the school level the teacher level to strike on their own behalf to get the health care you know or something like that alleviate one more of those stressors so we probably got about fifteen minutes left about halfway through maybe ten so i wanted to get into talking about fair development the fair develop an assessment tool is something that writes in issues around burlington town center the redevelopment of our largest kind of property in burlington which is going to become the tallest building in the state of vermont with the new zoning changes that they allowed to go through for that project there's another development project called cambrian rise and that's taking up some very valuable open space in burlington and it's going to  build on it some condos and some pretty exclusive properties that only a few people will be able to spend a bunch of money on and see the see the sunset and i see the lake views and that  didn't seem right to a large part a large portion of the populace of burlington so we're trying to bring these issues to light a lot sooner so that maybe people can get a little more involved in the planning process in burlington we do have neighborhood planning associations as adrian just mentioned and this is where people are supposed to get out and voice their concerns for development projects but still even at those meetings and if you can't get to them for whatever reason we're still working to create a way that people can be a little bit more connected democratically to the decision making that goes on in their towns specifically right now what we're looking at is memorial out of tory m which is kind of a gateway open to the city opening to the city of welcome to the city and city hall park which is just like a treasure to everybody in burlington and people who are not even from burlington and and  exactly come visit the town it's nice to have that there so you want to talk about what you've been seeing at the neighborhood planning association around this yeah definitely so i'm i'm just going to talk quickly about city hall park because i think it's a it's a very important issue in our community it's one of the few green spaces that burlington has and it's a place where people can sit down and relax and eat lunch and hang out outside and not feel the pressure of the rest of the city even though you know public inquiry and comment on this issue as i remember back in november in my neighborhood planning assembly for wards two and three we had someone come and present megan told specifically from  department of planning and zoning working on city hall park inviting public comment for the month of for a couple weeks in december and taking those comments and running with them and then incorporating the comments that you heard at that meeting into a new plan that was revealed on august fourteenth that was also an open public forum where people could come and discuss these new changes so at the last city council meeting that we had this past monday this city councillors voted to continue with the development of the park in the design phase so they decided that they were going to allocate about half a million dollars towards the contractors so they could continue work on design but nothing is set in stone yet for the final plan of the park although we do have a blueprint regarding the blueprint a couple of issues that i've noticed that are really contentious in the community are things such as let's see the kiosk is a really big issue you also have the water feature that a lot of people are up in arms about which is something that i think people are used to having the fountain is the central component of city hall park a lot of people concerned about will if they're found goes what's what's going to bring that central eighty two to the park and are we going to have any other water of attraction to invite people into the park can i ask a question ye or this kiosk what is this key explain to me the kiosk what's the yeah yeah the controversy around the key just a little background last adrian offhanded mentioned this in a rad meeting and i was like why so i want to  key i want you to explain to me that's why people are arguing about it sure sure so you know the issue is that a lot of community members feel like they don't want to have a commercial entity in the park to sell them goods and that the park should be sort of a haven from the rest of the commercial aspect of main street and church street and things like that the idea would be that it would be some sort of a coffee kiosk that would be open all year round and go get a five dollar coffee yeah get a five dollar coffee people can afford that they're concerned so there are a couple of concerns the big one is that you know people don't want to feel invaded when they're in a park by someone asking them for for money to buy something or whatever and another big concern that people have is the trash you know if there's a kiosk that's in the middle of the park people are going to have food and drinks and things and those make it put around in certain places and it might require more maintenance on the positive side there's this idea that it would be good to have a private entity in the park in case there is any  i don't know misconduct taking place in the park or people are acting inappropriately so that someone could call the cops if there was a concern because there's a concern now that people congregate in the park for the wrong reasons which is true cos which is true i mean yes isn't yeah so those are just some of the concerns that people have regarding their skin and still being debated and discussed for the final the final plan anything else that people are really wound up about the park yeah i think bathrooms are a really big issue in burlington especially public restroom facilities right now i think the plan does include a public restroom the concern that the mayor's office a lot of other advocates have is well who's going to staff these bathrooms in case they get out of hand or they need a lot of attention and work right now there's no access to public access to bathrooms on the weekends in burlington because city hall is closed which invites a lot of public urination and i know that's something that we don't want in our city have bathrooms and i want to people going to you know what are people going to do so the hope is that with this new city hall park will have a bathroom that's available to people on the weekends that will be kept clean and orderly and it will be a way for you know at least taurus will have someplace to go if they need to go to the bathroom i mean burlington gets about three million tourists a year which is also led to the degradation of city hall park in itself so that's a concern that we have to and i think that's why the park definitely needs an update anything any about memorial auditorium  well and it'll be an opportunity for different members of the community to come in and talk about their opinions on memorial auditorium and what they hope to see in the future how they envision this space being used memorial auditorium is gone through  a bunch of different phases but it's essentially been cut out of a lot of the funding that the city has which which is to do which is a shame the more a lot of joy i am in the favor of building an exact same memorial auditorium just with twenty seven thousand commodities right way it is because it is just it's something as a statewide thing that people have been attracted to and i burlington needs a civic center burlington need some type of civic center which the more  an auditorium played a greater role to know back when i was a little kid i'd go watch the w w e smack down at the memorial out of joy and they just had a bunch of shows it was a great place and they have a sampling colleges to play basketball there like i they just need to rebuild and i'm really going to if if i have you know a lot of patterns in burlington have gone towards private development and a certain person in power is strong arming the city into private development and touted as the way forward touted as the way forward in the way to be better and in a really sleazy non burlington like way and it's going to be a shame if a place like more auditorium gets thrown down that same line and we lose a thing like that in our community which is you know a statewide thing that people from all across the state would come and enjoy so keep it public and accessible and  in burlington telecom it kind of got mismanaged and so people lost a little bit of trust in it and when that happens what is the was that private industry do is say oh well can't do that can't manage it was as a public option you better let us handle it where the pros are right so  we've got three people bidding to purchase burlington telecom right now i'm in the camp of keeping it as a co op where the people that pay for the service on the service i think it's a great thing that we should  protect there is a city council meeting this monday and we invite everybody to come and speak in support of whatever type of city hall park you want to have or please come and speak in support of the co op to keep managing