good evening and welcome i'm diane meyerhoff host for tonight's candidate forum for state representative in chittenden county district four two in heinsberg tonight show is being aired live on channel seventeen in streamed live on the channel seventeen website we welcome your comments and questions please that the candidates will make opening statements of up to two minutes and they will answer prepared questions also for two minutes with a possible one minute rebuttal we're going to start with opening statements about why the candidates are running and what their priorities are for the two year term and we're going to start with bill thank you well i'm pleased to be here and running again for election in heinz bird which is really the district that we're looking to represent we're fortunate that it's one town except for one tiny little corner of his word i'm looking forward to representing the folks of heinz berg and working for the people of vermont one more time my background which i bring to this race is my work as a director of a mental health clinic i worked in heinz berger as a justice of the peace i've lived there for forty years and so i'm looking forward to bringing my leadership skills to the next two years in the statehouse i feel fortunate to have been appointed by four different speakers to leadership positions and currently chair of the house health care committee i'm looking forward to continuing my work in building safe and healthy communities as well as working for civil rights for  as well as continuing to do the work which happens on a regular basis nonpartizan response to heinsberg voters and citizens i've worked for highway traffic safety i've worked to support suicide prevention i've worked to strengthen the mental health system i've worked to and drunken driving on our roads to save lives to prevent and domestic and sexual violence and i believe that these issues are important to the well being the safe and healthy communities that we deserve in vermont and in the last session i did support and proudly support the gun safety legislation which has become an issue and an issue of difference between me and my opponent and i hope we get a chance to talk more about that i look forward to serving vermont again and serving the people who are inspired thank you thank you sarah tell us why you're running we were unable to get any kind of response including to an e mail at the time so we found that at the time that the representative with not really representing a segment of the population so i figured you know i would do my best to fill the gap so i am i was able to meet with mr burt on primary day we talked for a long time fact we talked for five hours and you know we got to know each other pretty well but the i think that in some areas we are definitely in a different to the point where to have a series or prepared questions i'm and i'd like to start off by talking about health care how do we limit health care spending on vermont while also are remaining one of the healthiest states in the nation and i'm sorry you can start us off i think the going to the quickest way to limit healthcare spending is to bring it is to balance out the currently aging population with a  you know younger families with children bringing them into into vermont because of the fact that only the elder folks are do are generating more health costs so the younger are contributing to the health care pool you know and not and the expenses are balance will balance  out but in addition there is also that we need to pay full cost of expenses to providers for patients on medicaid programs which will also end the cost shift which is a major factor in driving up the cost of private insurance bill tell us how do we contain health care costs well vermont is one of the healthiest states in the nation we're fortunate in that we're also rated we're the second we have the second lowest rate of uninsured for reminders lowest rate of uninsured people in the state and that's because vermont has made a commitment to health care reform and health care to reducing health care costs  one of the one of the areas that's completely outrageous is the increases interest coaching the cost of prescription drugs in the last session our health care committee took several actions to try to address this by increasing the transparency requiring the prescription drug companies to actually justify the costs of the increases some of them which are outrageous some of them increased by five hundred percent in addition we passed a bill which was the first in the country which will allow us with the state of utah to approach the federal government to look at importing prescription drugs from canada safe prescription drugs and we because a traditionally red state we're a blue state we're approaching the federal government jointly to try to take president trump up on his campaign promise of reducing the cost of prescription drugs we are also working very hard at shifting vermont to a health care system where there is not an incentive to bill for every procedure that takes place we're moving from fee for service to a quality of care meant mechanism and that we believe will actually reduce the costs will bend the curve let's be realistic i think we're not going to reduce the cost specifically but we should bend the curve on health care costs this in addition this last this past session i'm very pleased to say that we added free ultrasound for breast cancer  diagnosis following every vermonter is eligible for free breast cancer memoir graphy and screening but in the past if you had any kind of unclear diagnosis and it was recommended that you have alt sound you're going to have to pay for that yourself as of this year every vermonter should be able to get a diagnosis of mammography screening for free and this is going to reduce the cost years at the same time when income growth is expected to lag behind do you agree with this assessment is somewhat controversial what is your plan of action i just drank in vermont's economic outlook promoting come growth and gener up first ok well first of all i'm not sure i do i haven't seen the report so it's hard to say the specifics but i would just suggest that many vermonters are struggling and there's no question about that but there's also an issue of is the glass half full or is the glass half empty and frankly i think there's been too much emphasis on the difficulties that vermont creates values that we present in developing our economy i think that we should be willing to claim the successes that we have and to invest more in both job training as well as i believe one of the critical investments we can make to help for monitors in the economy is to invest in higher education i have the honor of having delectably my peers to the trust board of trustees of the vermont state college a system which actually educates more vermonters than all the other colleges in vermont together and in fact provides first time for family members going to college it's estimated that if we have more students graduating from high school than almost any other state in the country but we have the low it one of the lower rates of students going on to further higher education this is how we build our economy by giving vermonters the chance to gain skills both technical skills as well as professional skills by being part of the opportunity to go to college to go to a further technical school and that is going to actually build our economy but which requires an investment on the part of us as the legislature and the governor to make leaving reducing the present in the state from two thousand and thirteen two thousand and fourteen and continuously since then it's said that the nude in addition the job openings that were created are not of the same caliber their service industry their cashiers their waitstaff their housekeepers in hotels you know things that are not you know going to feed families and pay mortgages and and things like that and  the nationwide average is eighty three point three and it has to do with expenses regulations there for expenses incurred in order to comply with regulations taxes everywhere else of that nature just adds up too much to create these good paying jobs so we need to start pulling some of this back in order to strengthen the amounts he cannot outlook because every you know families are relocating currently this last session the legislature saw fit to pay people ten thousand dollars to move to this state to work from home that is not the kind of solution that's going to get very far we need to have the jobs here that draw the the draw the families here because because currently twenty thirty even the vermonters are willing to devote eighteen percent of their adjusted gross income two thirds of tax dollars collectively need to pay for public education and all their major will be required to fund human service programs that doesn't require doesn't count all the other expenses state needs to run the solution who's going to have to be some serious discipline and that's what i'm here for thank you let's switch gears yet again we have a broad topic arrangement here today a lot to talk about let's talk about water quality how do we increase funding to clean up for monza lakes and rivers we certainly heard a lot here about about lake champlain and algae blooms this summer and such i  agricultural industry is suffering at the moment and we just can't continue to pile on more regulations that they can't get past  and so you know there's a few solutions like what we need to make some one time expenditures to improve infrastructure so that the sewage is no longer being backed out into the lake asked a few and they said that was a terrible idea of the in addition we should instead of going straight back to taxpayers in our state is there are a whole host of places we can go in the question that lake champlain and our rivers are part of what's important in our economy it's part of what brings tourism to vermont and i think we have to be willing to step up and recognize that over time we must be willing to raise some funds to address the issues of water quality i think that the that the issue is the numbers i don't have right in front of me at the moment but it's going to require some many millions of dollars to restore lake champlain and i actually share with sarah some of the concern that farmers should not be  targeted fact i think it's my understanding that much of what we need to do because there's a lot of work the farmers have done already in terms of meeting the agricultural standards that have been set by the state setting buffer zones along along the waterways on their farms etc but we also need to recognize that it's the federal government we are under a directive from the federal government to come up with a solution and  we do not find a solution of our own the federal government will step in and direct us to do things and they are going to direct us to put more money into our municipal sewage plants which is been determined to as i understand it only account for about four percent of the pollution into lake champlain and other waterways so we need to bite the bullet the legislature has made several different proposals whether it should be a per parcel cost that is built into the land exchange process when land is purchased or some other mechanism we're going it's going to cost money and i think there's agreement that  treasurer's office that we needed to put some money aside for this year we've done that but there needs to be a longer term commitment and i'm sorry but it's not going to just come out of the air it's going to cost for monsters some funds to preserve what is a treasure for vermont which in fact if we allow lake champlain or other rivers and streams to be degraded as they are with algae blooms etc it's going to cost us in the long run in terms of our tourist economy and so this is an investment this is an investment that we need to make thank you sir do you want to put have someone take a page or would that be helpful for you thank you so you both mentioned on agriculture in this last question about water quality and what about the dairy farms right we have very few dairy farms left is this an important issue for the state what what should be but farmers our dairy farmers are struggling we need to support and one of the key issues is that we need to support movement from dairying to other types of farming that allows for a broad range of uses of that land keeping the land productive is absolutely essential and i were both just recently we both attended a what we called a workshop a meeting of local farmers from the area but it was farmers who are looking at other ways to to use the land in a more diversified manner the future of dairy is controlled in large part the cost is controlled largely at the federal level so we're not going to be able to intervene in that as directly as we might like in vermont but when we what we can do is to continue to support dairy farmers as they make a transition to diversified farming right down the road from where i live there were the farm used to be a dairy farm now it's a pick your own very farm and it's just changed hands because it was able to change hands because of the work that the state has done with the vermont land trust and others to allow younger farmers to come into farming without having the opportunity of inheriting it and so supporting our land trust supporting diversified farming while advocating for dairy farming as well and not imposing new and burdensome requirements is part of what we can do to support dairying and to support agriculture  generally moving into the future is a key part of vermont it maintains our landscape again which is part of what is keeping openly and in vermont is a key issue for the state of vermont  farming and other kinds of farming start well the dairy industry in vermont supports four thousand direct jobs and twelve thousand indirect jobs both inside and outside the state  creates one hundred sixty two million wages and one hundred twenty seven million in tax in state tax revenue this is not something we can really afford to lose and most other crops do not have that type of margin even when the dairy industry is suffering at the moment and and intended to said that it's the longest downturn for quite a while and i regret to see that but i think we need to support anybody who chooses to be it be a dairy farm and in addition to helping diversify just so they can get through these downturn periods and in addition i learned a lot of things during that workshop which was quite useful that quite interesting fact that i think that you know where as i to succeed not just to barely hold on you know the dairy farms are part of you know part of the infrastructure here they're also just part of our identity i can imagine us telling somebody oh yes let's change you over to something completely different and you know the firms that are failing the ones i have less than two hundred cows those are the the people who care so much about their cattle they cry when they when they lose them so we can't be doing that to people these people are you know treats their their livestock as family they t agriculture in vermont and in heinz bird we have the family cow farm which is making raw milk available and so one of the things i helped fight for was to have rational regulations around the sale  and we needed to encourage the state to allow the sale of raw milk which has a market and that allows them to stay at the keep that land in farming we also need to support agra tourism which allows vermonters to share their experience of living and working on a farm with people from out of state who come here there is actually the people people will pay to come to visit farms in vermont which is a good thing and so i think there's  are simply burdensome and may possibly read possibly just checks you know have to have people's phosphorous monitored and have you know if it's at a certain level let them be the stewards of their land not necessarily be so super picky that they can't afford to keep up with their new regulations thank you both obviously an issue that is close to both of your hearts so i'm glad we had a chance to chat about it let's talk a little bit about opportunity a recent p r p b s poll found a solid majority of the monitor's support paid family leave and rescind the minimum wage both house both passed by both the house and  senate and vetoed by the governor this past session they are likely to come back up again how did you or would you vote in the future and star your starting us off this is where we will differ for the plan that i read says point one three six percent of income would find it my husband's base pay of ninety thousand which would mean he would be paying one hundred twenty two dollars a year seventy percent of his wages for twelve weeks becomes ten thousand five hundred dollars so i don't really understand exactly how this program could possibly stay solvent for very long at all they're talking about only needing to have contributed for one year the year before which would make him have having contributed less than a tenth of what he'd be taking out  so i don't think i could i could vote for it as it sits because the implication is that there's x players are going to be made to make up the difference you know well fifteen dollars an hour does not give everyone a raise instead it devalues skilled labor where everyone is then working for minimum wage raising minimum wage also brings out because people out from under the poverty line which is where they are granted assistance so does not mean they going to be able to afford to pay their rent or feed their children or for daycare but then they're they're made in eligible for subsidy so essentially minimum wage well i voted for both i voted for paid leave family leave and i voted for the minimum wage both of which would veto it but governor scott i do want to also because we're coming short on time i think you're to acknowledge that  governor scott also did vote for did pay did sign the gun safety legislation which i think we also have different points of view on and haven't had a chance really to talk about here yet today and so in addition to voting for minimum wage and paid family leave i voted for that what i believe are the common sense gun safety laws that governor scott signed and that the board of the champlain valley union school district supported as well and i i think our constituents our voters should be allowed to understand where we run against people who voted for him gun safety laws the there is absolutely no reason that any of these laws make anybody more safe because the only people who obey laws also do not break them so we are at a stalemate in that department so yeah  i completely am pro second amendment and particle sixteen which is actually considering considerably more lax than the second amendment they when quick i apologize thank you both so much for coming out tonight we appreciate it and don't forget everyone out there you can vote now your town or city hall or on election day which is tuesday november sixth and of course stay tuned child seventeen for more election day coverage thanks so much and good night