good evening and welcome i'm diane meyerhoff posts for tonight's candidate forum for state representative in chittenden district six four in burlington tonight show is being aired live on channel seventeen and streamed live on the channel seventeen website we welcome your comments and questions please join the conversation at eight six to three nine six six candidates joining me tonight are selena coburn and brian cina both incumbents and i believe you are progressive slash dems is that right ok progressive slash dems since the candidates are running unopposed they are both they are both representing district six for we're going to conduct this more as a forum than as a debate however each candidate will make an opening statement and then we'll discuss t opics of interest to voters so so you know would you like to start off sure i'm selena called learn and i was born and mostly raised in burlington actually not not far at all from the neighborhood that i currently represent prior to being a legislator i was a two term city councilor and also work as a librarian at the university of vermont and the parent to two kids  middle school and i have been running in working at the state level trying to further some of the work that i did at the city level but really when i think have been thinking a lot about what is it that i'm really trying to do here and it's to create of vermont where more people are welcome and more people are thriving really where everyone is welcome and everyone is thriving and i'm excited to talk more about some of the ways i think we can do that tonight super great thank you i'm looking forward to it brian yes so my name's brian sheena i've lived in burlington for twenty years i've lived in the old north end for nineteen of those twenty years and the same house actually and i've been involved the community in burlington throughout my time in many different ways i used to be a school board member representing the central district which is the old north and downtown  i was the co chair pride vermont during the time of civil unions in vermont so that was the year two thousand and two thousand and three i've been organizer an activist for many other causes and probably will one of the biggest things that i've done that i still do is i co founded a group called is good street gardening and other optimistic doings and what we do is we do community gardening we try to change the social environment by making the physical environment more beautiful and we've had a lot of success in reducing crime rate using this method even though that wasn't our original intention so i'm running for to be state representative for many reasons and at the core of my campaign is that i'm a social worker i've been a social worker in burlington for the for the twenty years that i've been here i have a private practice downtown i'm a part time crisis clinician for the howard center so i see some of the greatest challenges facing society  the work that i do on a daily basis and i work with and mostly with individuals and with families and what i recognize a social worker is that i can make a huge difference on the individual and family level working with people but that the social structures and policy and law that shaping the conditions that drive the problems that people have and that i could spend my whole life working with people to try to change things on the ground level but that we also need to be fighting a top of the pyramid and we need to be changing social structure and social policy so as a state representative i seek to sort of take what i gain on a daily basis most of the year as a social worker on the ground level and bring that experience to the policy level as well as try to find ways to create more opportunities for people to be gauged in the decisions that affect their lives gary thank you both and i should just ask you this district do you consider this i think you said you said the old north and downtown is that kind of how this this shapes out your district our districts in burlington do not align with the city wards and strikes so that the more yes so i live in the old north and part of our legislative district that it's a little piece of war two which is the area i live in then ward won its most award one which is where salina lives and then there's like a little sliver of warty and six yeah ok it's marius very small cars of all right so of course if you're if you're if the folks watching know which district and they can always go on line and find out they're all very well delineated on maps on the legislative website so i'll just say that but i sort of said burlington just people have a context of where you're at so we talked a little bit about topics of interest and  mentioned health care was something that was important to you and you know everyone's concerned about health care spending you know how do we reduce how do we keep that spending down but still maintain our one of the healthiest states in the nation apparently so that sounds pretty  health care provider so i can bring sort of that experience to the table and in the health care policy right now one of the biggest things that we've been dealing with is the cost of health care and there's guidelines coming down from the federal level for medicare that's shaping health care policy in terms of cost containment and there's a new model of payment for providers called the the all payer model or accountable care organizations i'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about it because i'd rather talk to people want to want to read about it it's very complicated and the if i have to summarize what it does is it asks providers to look out for the health of the populations and then so providers are going to get paid for taking care of they're going to get paid a flat fee for covering all the health care needs of people over time it's being trans phased in slowly but as part of that flat fee they're supposed to do more than just office visits more and more time and energy spent on follow up and so the idea is that over time if providers are investing their energy into the health of entire populations then people will be healthier and it will cost us less and i think there are some benefits to that model and some challenges i will say that when i think about the big picture that i do think we need to invest more in prevention and  follow up but i think there's greater there's and there's we can go further than the accountable care organizations and once they start to work and bring costs more into check and hopefully we can continue to invest in health care by working towards health care is a public good and one step would be universal primary care there was a bill that i was the lead sponsor on something that was a co sponsor as well as many others and that bill did pass out of the senate into the house and it passed out of the health care committee didn't make it through appropriations and time but i think the idea is not dead and really the vision would be to take steps towards a health care system where we are investing in prevention investing in treatment and really the more we invest in primary care the more we save down the road because what we have now is a system where people aren't going to the doctor because they're afraid of co payments or deductibles and then they get very sick and they end up in the emergency room and then it's very expensive and so i could go on but i would like to give you some time to talk about this well yeah i mean i think the things that come to mind to me are very similar to what brian has talked about really making sure that we're  investing in preventive care in a holistic care that kind of treats the whole person to avoid some of those really acute crisis health care costs down the road for individuals and for the system a large and all of us who are funding it in one way or another i also think universal primary care is something i really support and even just expanded access to primary care and i see that on an issue by issue basis you know we're going to talk maybe about the opioid crisis in a little bit and that's a perfect example of an issue where more access or primary care could really help us turn the corner and then i also think put to me part of more access crime primary care looks at some of those real low barrier models to accessing primary care settings so the community health centers in burlington i think are an amazing example of  a system that just really is helping low income people is providing a whole range of interconnected services in really meeting people where they are and so more of that i think is where we need to be i also will say i'm i think ultimately the answer is for us to be in acting a single payer health care system i'm someone who still really believes in that but we have you know legislative and governance process that's incremental so things like universal primary care know like expanded primary care access our income and so i think on the way to getting us there and how far are we in terms of the use we're universal preventive care primary care how far we've always from that right now i mean  you're on the front lines of this you're seeing this do we have a long way to go are we close i don't don't think we have a long way to go i think if if we had the will to do it that we could create we could improve access to primary care and expand it to provide universal coverage there would need to be an upfront investment and i think that's the greatest barrier is the upfront investment in how you finance it and we could talk more about like some possible ways to do that later  i was wondering if i could give an example of these just to illustrate this because as a as a crisis clinician i actually see some of the most challenging situations play out in the emergency room and you know when you talk about health care sometimes people think of a very narrowly but i actually think health care is more than just going to the doctor and housing is health care an example i'll give that one up when i'm working in the crisis service every night there are people who are homeless who end up in the emergency room because of alrighty of challenges that are related to being homeless and if we we spend over one thousand dollars a night i think it might even be up to fifteen hundred dollars for that one night in the emergency room so if someone goes to the emergency room three or four times in a month we're talking about up to maybe six grand if not more that has been spent and that's money that our system is just paying because people aren't caught don't have coverage or if they do and they have medicaid medicaid's paying  if we provided someone with housing for a month how much would that cost and if we provided services wrapped around that housing how much would it cost it might cost one night in the emergency room for a whole month so if we have if we have vested more in a housing first approach to dealing with with homelessness then we would save a tremendous amount of money the system would say which in this amount of money is so there's little changes like that that we could make over time that would save money because we're investing we're viewing health care as an investment versus a cost i think that's an example of that low barrier approach where we our system is sort of flipped right like there are so many criteria's that people need to meet in most cases to access subsidized or low income housing you have to there's often sobriety requirements there's you need to things happen when that's the case so let's talk about the opioid epidemic at the same time since they kind of go together and maybe some of the same solutions make sense for that to say you know are we are we making progress there was something in the paper today that compassionate measures in a system that's been emulated earn around the country for some good reasons i also think we continue to have an increase in fatal overdoses each year for the last three years and  we somehow have to clear victory on that by saying that we've slowed down the rate of increase in overdoses and that that's an example to me of pretty skewed logic i don't think that's acceptable  and so where i have seen us falling down in my work this is this is really the it were the issue that made me feel like it made sense to run at the state level after trying to work on this issue as a city councilor here in burlington is that i think we need to continue expanding access to treatment really undermanned and to harm reduction approaches because these are the things that or proven again and again to save lives and so in fact the evidence on controlling person grabbing practices and monitoring prescribing practices is somewhat mixed in whether or not it really helps reduce substance  use disorder but the evidence on things like syringe exchange programs like interim buprenorphine access which we're starting to see a much bigger push for locally there's some really good work happening here in burlington around that we need to expand those things and what i've seen i feel like too often is kind of a box checking approach where we do a little bit of those things and we say great we're doing  syringe exchange it's open four hours a week you know one day a week or we're giving out in our can but you only get one dose and that's it because we don't want you to feel like you should use it again and again which is you know kind of  point is that it's there for you when you need it so i think i think the underlying thing that i see is that we still have a lot of stigma and a lot of misunderstanding to address in our state in our system and that some of that stigma is informing even even some of our best work and approaches where where we're making it available but we still have judgments about how much or how quickly people should be able to access it  when i think about you know what we're doing i think that like selena said we're due we're there's some improvements in how policy has changed and some best practices that are being looked at and slowly implemented but i don't think we're doing enough we're not keeping up with it and there's a lot more we can be doing it was frustrating honestly too as a provider of health care to be advocating for what people need and to be told by members of the administration that they need two years to get a better assessment of what's going on before they're going to support us and taking legislation off the walls to work on selena proposed bills i proposed bills other people propose a variety of bills with different angles not repetitive and my hope was that they would all be merged into some sort of the bus opiah bill you know and you know there were members of the governor's administration who pulled me aside and said these are good ideas but we're not ready yet and i think we're twenty years behind when i started working in burlington twenty years ago i was an  worker working with youth on church street who are addicted to heroin and who are dying and who are getting pulled into sex trafficking and it's ten twenty times worse now and so we're really behind on this solution one eyed specific idea that wouldn't be very hard to implement would be a centralized intake in the state for rapid response for outpatient treatment so right now if you you can go to europe to be have this thing called the hub and spoke model where you can go to a primary care office and get medication  medication assisted treatment but you don't necessarily get the mental health the psychotherapy and the social work that you need so people can go on to medicine but and that helps tremendously but there's so much driving addiction and driving the problems that isn't getting addressed and so if we had a way that a doctor's office or person could call a central number either in each county or in the state and say i'm ready for help and have an appointment that they are the next day with a provider it would help tremendously it would fill a gap and that was one of the things i proposed and various professional organizations around the state supported the idea and were willing to reach out to their members and as a psychotherapist i was thinking i could make a slot or two a week for this and many people were willing to do this we had a whole you know army a provider is willing to step up and we were told no we need two years to see what's going on before we'll take action so this is one example of some of the solutions we can create or we can like implement using the resources we already have to respond to this crisis quicker ok let's switch gears from for the economy to forbes magazine on vermont's economy economic outlook is projected to be second worst in the u s of the next five years while income growth is expected to lag behind do you agree with this assessment what's your plan of action to strengthen the on the economy and generate a sustainable economy and would you like strictly not sure  so i tried to look at the for the forbes study or and their it's pretty short on methodology so i'm a librarian and it's hard for me to know exactly what those projection s are based on but i i did spend a little time with a report that our state auditor produced this summer for really looking at economic development issues in our state and in fact he actually addresses the forbes study is pretty good at poking holes in some of the notions that is not a business friendly climate or or just doesn't have a healthy economy and he found that but a number of measures including just income growth that actually we're doing you know better than a number of states in the us that made the studies and just trying to understand the evidence on what really works for economic development you know we're spending fourteen million dollars a year in the state on things like marketing and tax incentives and kind of very selective job training kinds of programs and there's not a lot of evidence in in research that that this is necessarily creating new  wealth new economic development that we there's some evidence that we may be throwing some money at growth that would have happened either way by contrast there are a number of strategies that have been shown to stimulate economic development and those things do include things like technical assistance and financial help to businesses more broadly distributed workforce development work and and training but also things like affordable housing like child care like energy efficiency like broadband access so i really recommend that people take a look at this study it's it was really really eyeopening to read i would say you know some of the strategies that i and a number of other legislators supported especially after hearing about this what the governor often calls an affordability crisis where things like trying to raise basic wages in the state which has been shown to be a strong economic development tool a fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage ensuring paid family leave so if part of what we're trying to do is keep keep people in the state and bring people in the state those things are really important and i think having a strong public education system is really important to and i'm and worried have been worried in my time in the legislature about the kind of continued threats to the public education system so i could maybe we'll talk about that next i want to talk about the economy first i want to say appreciate having selena as a district me as a librarian because she's like we both bring a very different angle like i'm like sort of hands on practitioner and you bring this like  last year we had stay economists present to us sort of like a state of the economy and what they showed us was throughout united states history the cycles of booms and busts and how we are in a boom right now and how every boom is followed by a bust and everything that is happening on the federal level is would you shouldn't do going into a bust and so we may be facing one of the biggest financial crashes in our country's history possibly worse than the great depression based on those numbers and it was a grim thing to hear and shocking to see that that doesn't get more attention because people tend to like be like sort of in this bubble and in denial so i really think we need to look at how do we prepare vermont for that future as well as taking into account that as climate change comes upon a yes we're going to have to face some of our greatest challenges artificial intelligence is going to change the nature of the workplace there's a lot of things coming i do have a specific solution and it's to transition from on to what we call a zero waste economy so i proposed a bill in the last session that i'm going to bring again in the next one and what it does we will study the state and look at every region and have  engagement with different stakeholders like chambers of commerce and representatives of the business community environmental protection groups solid waste districts and assess what are the strengths in every region and what are the way what's the waste and where the holes and how can we recruit businesses to come in or be built to fill those holes and use the local waste as source material and if we could do this properly and strategically we could create circular manufacturing around the state so we would create more economic vitality while the limon aiding the waste and this would include things like carbon emissions water pollution as well as plastic any kind of waste that's being produced so i am i'm going to propose this idea again hoping we can look at it because if we think about the thirty to fifty year range if vermont can set the example for the country that the answer is to like sort of eliminate waste and change other than the exploitive extractive nature of our economic system that we may create a more sustainable future i would love for you give me an example  of that that's a little in the large me to grasp so can you can you can you tell me something that might be something that is a waste something that's i mean i just make it real simple yeah that would be hell so like imagine that there's a small town and that they have a lake a lumber industry so you may maybe what's there now is is people logging and maybe it goes to a mill well you know maybe you try to have furniture being built in that town where the mill is instead of having it shipped across the state that you wouldn't you could divert some there and then maybe in the place where they're making the furniture the wood that they don't use goes next door to a wood burning plant or maybe before that there's another manufacturing business a place that could use the scraps for something so the idea is that you cite in within a written area a series of businesses that are using the waste products of one for the the source of the next and so at the end you no longer have the waste and they can't you can build on that so another thing is like packaging or building things like we could say that nothing is allowed to be built in vermont that you can throw out has to be reused in some way so maybe businesses take stuff back and fix it or take stuff back and reuse it so that's just like i tried to make it really simple but if you look up circular manufacturing online is a lot of information about this look up biomimicry look at which is at you creating industrial processes that mimic nature because they're they create less waste there's a lot of evidence out there around and there are some examples of cities and countries around the world who have begun to look at this it sounds almost like an old fashioned notion i mean the idea that we had things all created in a town or an area right now before we sort of pulled everything apart right yeah i mean in some ways it sounds sort of old fashioned actually in alignment i would say with that sort of that old fashioned vermont or the you know old fashioned yankee ingenuity the idea of like you don't waste anything you use every day my grandparents were like that they didn't they used every part of an animal they never didn't waste anything my grandmother had like five washing machines going back to the twenty's in her basement because they lived through the depression and they saw and i think you know we should learn from that before it's too late but the reality is we're headed i think we're heading towards a rough time we need to like prepare ourselves wow that's really sobering thank you for that but i guess you know you're right i mean booms and busts that's that's the way it is right i mean we don't just keep going up and up and up at some point so i'm i guess i'm glad that the two of you are out there you know addressing this more because it is  it is pretty pretty sobering we have just a couple of minutes are there any other topics you would just like to you know make us the sort of a closing statement if you like or just tell us about something you're thinking about for the for the next by any of start up or by we sort of covered we've that was one of the potential things we were going to talk about we and equity looks like a lot of things but i think we have some real work to do in the state around racial justice and even just dig knowledge ing the the depth of the racism in the state and the challenges the people of color are facing here on a daily basis and and you know we we both worked with  morris she is my colleague on the judiciary committee and it was just really heartbreaking to see because they hate that was directed at her and the stress that it put on her family and and even more heartbreaking to see the amount of down questioning about whether that's possible here so that's been a really i think grammar minor just how much work we have to do but i think  actually leaves a legacy of some really important work that she started on that issue along with many others including the idea in ethnic studies curriculum in our schools that will start to really address issues of cultural competency in were minors from a very young age looking at bias in our criminal justice system i see that a lot of my work as a member of the judiciary committee it's a very very real and significant issue and we've we've done a lot of work to advance a fair and impartial policing policy and state and we have a lot of work to to really have those policies be truly enacted so there's there's just at all level work to do there and i think it's really really important for us as we're miners to be recognizing that day and brian when anything what i would just say is that you know when when you're when you serve in the in the government you encounter a lot of people and you get a really wider view of society and even though we represent burlington we're meeting people from all over the state and hearing from people all over the state and you know are our our nation is at a crossroads where we could really heal from the cot the conflict that we're going through as a society could drive us to a better place or could all fall apart and what what i think is really important right now is that we do our best to try to listen to each other to talk with each other and to be open to each other and not to like push each other away and not to shut each other down and some of the most transformative interactions i've had is when i someone attacks me in some way and i reach out to them and try to like work through that with them but that being said we we can only tolerate so much and when our colleague is being physically room people are being threatened for physical harm i think there's a limit and so i don't know what the solution is to this but i'm very concerned about where our society is heading if we continue to have sort of intolerance  grow and if if we it's kind of a paradox if we tolerate you know we want to be tolerant but are we going to tolerate people being abused are we going to tolerate the system so of continuing oppression  and continuing trauma you know continuing to traumatize people and oppressed people so i still think we have a long way to go with this work and there's a lot of policy decisions we can make that would have that affect that but up in the end i think what it really comes down to is the day to day interactions and like how are we treating each other on a day to day basis how we managing our conflicts right food for thought and thank you both for being the legislature and doing this really really important work and we all appreciate it and we're know you'll both be back in january and thanks so much for coming out tonight we really appreciate it we hope you'll come in the future as well and let us know how these efforts are going on and i want to tell everyone don't forget to vote right now at city hall vote early or vote on election day tuesday november sixth and of course stay tuned a chance seventeen for more election coverage over the next few weeks thank you and good night