My first priority is representing the needs of rural Vermont honestly and directly — and that starts with how land-use decisions get made.
Vermont is living through this with Act 181. I care deeply about conservation — protecting our forests, our farmland, our water. And I care just as much about housing, because families can’t stay here if they can’t afford to live here. Those two goals aren’t in conflict. But Act 181 was written by urban and suburban NGOs without enough input from the people who actually work this land every day — and that’s exactly why rural Vermonters organized, pushed back, and won a repeal of at least the road rule and Tier 3 this spring. That’s not a failure of conservation. That’s a failure of the process. Sure, there were “public input” opportunities, but the sheer length of the bill required practical application to see where it fell apart.
I am also concerned there’s more social science in Act 181 than physical science. Most of Vermont’s towns were developed hundreds of years ago on waterways because, without electricity, they were used for power, drinking water, and waste. Today we don’t need to live in these flood zones and they should not, for both conservation and costs, be where we expect development.
These are some of the lessons I want to bring to Montpelier: good policy on land use, housing, and conservation has to be built with rural Vermonters, not handed down to us.
My second priority is breaking the cycle of interconnected costs that’s squeezing families in this district.
Property taxes are strained by how we fund education. Rural health services are stretched thin and in some cases non-existent, driving up family healthcare costs. Housing costs, insurance, energy efficiency, and utility costs are all tangled up together. In Montpelier, these issues often get split apart into separate committees, separate bills, separate conversations — and that’s part of the problem. When you separate them, you lose sight of how one decision ripples into the next.
I want to hear what issues folks in the Bennington Senate District are dealing with. I have a lot to learn and I want to hear from you.