White River Junction
Hartford voters in the two-seat Windsor 4-2 Vermont House district — which includes White River Junction, Wilder, Hartford Village and the area south and east of Route 4 in Quechee — have some choices to make on Nov. 8 about who they want to send to Montpelier.
Meanwhile, a Democratic lawyer from Hartford is running unopposed for the Windsor 4-1 district that represents the rest of Hartford, along with Barnard and Pomfret. State Rep. Teo Zagar, D-Barnard, is not seeking re-election.
The incumbents in the Windsor 4-2 district are Democrats Kevin “Coach” Christie and Gabrielle Lucke, who held off primary challengers Ashley Andreas and Jeff Arnold in August, and now look to defend their seats in the general election.
They’re being challenged by military retiree Kevin Stuart and telecommunications executive Charlie Davenport, who hope to become the first Republicans to represent Hartford in the Statehouse since the end of John Clerkin’s term in 2010.
Christie, 66, is the current ranking member on the House Committee on Education, and also sits on the Hartford School Board, where he has held a seat since 2007. He spent many years teaching and coaching in the Hartford School District, and has also been a case manager for foster children.
Christie said that he’s learned, over many years in the Statehouse, that party labels are less important than individuals.
“As people get to know how you respond to different issues and concerns, they have a very strong feeling that they can trust you to to react a certain way,” he said.
The 56-year-old Lucke, a former member of the Hartford School Board, has spent much of her professional life in academia as an administrator, faculty member and health educator. She currently works as a senior consultant with Dartmouth College’s human resources department.
“With my first term behind me, I have some insights and experience,” she said. “It’s exciting for me to think of hitting the ground running instead of being a little shell-shocked when I arrive.”
A member of the House Committee on General, Housing and Military Affairs, she said her top priority will be housing.
“I don’t know that we have gotten a handle on the wide range of housing needs for people who live in Vermont,” she said.
Davenport, 39, is a graduate of Oxbow High School and worked at Topsham Telephone Company for eight years, leaving in 2013 when he became president of his Lebanon-based company, SecureSyscom, Inc. He currently owns a few companies, including a property management firm in White River Junction, and says that most of Vermont’s ills could be solved by making the state more business-friendly.
“I’m not much of a fluff guy,” he said.
Stuart, a 63-year-old retiree, served active duty in the U.S. Air Force during 1973 and 1974, and has held various positions with the reserves and Air National Guard of Vermont and Massachusetts from then until 2008; he has also worked various civilian jobs in the computer industry, including two-year stints with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and TomTom forerunner Geographic Data Technology in Lebanon.
He said he’d like to freeze the state budget for a year.
“I know that would be harsh but I feel like it’s a tax-and-spend mentality that just permeates through Montpelier,” he said.
Stuart said that his No. 1 priority if elected would be to defeat an active effort by some Democratic lawmakers to impose a tax on fossil fuels, including gasoline, commonly referred to as a carbon tax.
Lawmakers have proposed measures that seek to curb fossil fuel use by taxation, and redistribute the large majority of the revenue collected to reduction of the sales and income taxes, and a per-employee rebate to employers, with the balance going toward weatherization and energy independence programs.
“You want to slap an 85 cent tax on gas per gallon?” said Stuart. “To me, that’s going to drive Vermonters far away. They’re either going to be so poor they can’t move away, or they’re going to have enough so they can barely get out of the state.”
Stuart said the idea runs counter to how he would grow Vermont’s tax base, which would be by enticing business to come to the state through tax incentives.
Christie said the idea of a carbon tax affects such a broad spectrum of Vermont life — the economy, the heating bills of low-income Vermonters, the environment — in such complex ways, that his position would be informed by the details of projections of the bills’ impacts.
“In order for me to feel that it does what it would need to do for folks that I represent, we’d have to get a lot of more information to start,” Christie said.
He said he wouldn’t be an idle spectator to the proceedings.
“It isn’t just a wait-and-see approach,” he said. “If it moves forward and I’m part of the process, I have to take that strong view. If it’s going to be done, let’s attempt to do it right.”
Lucke said that she wanted to see more specifics before she committed to a stance on the carbon tax.
“You can talk about the general theme of an issue,” she said, “but until you see the actual language of the bill, it’s hard to turn down or support. … There’s a lot of rumor and speculation.”
Lucke said she was wary of a bill that might be seen as good for Vermont, at the expense of communities like Hartford, which border New Hampshire.
“One of the key components I’ll be paying attention to is the impact on a border community,” she said. “This is one of the areas where I get really Hartford-centric.”
Davenport, like Stuart, had harsh criticism for the carbon tax.
“That is absolutely asinine that we would do that,” he said, adding that it would be certain to drive more businesses out of the state. “Leave it to Montpelier to come up with some crazy idea like that.”
He said the tax would be most punishing for those who don’t make enough money to live comfortably, but who make too much to qualify for government assistance with their heating bills.
He accused Lucke, Christie, and other Democrats of expressing concerns about the tax only because it is politically expedient.
“I think their real reservations are, they need to be reserved about it until after election time,” he said.
Another issue that’s likely to come to the floor during the upcoming legislative session is whether to legalize marijuana — Christie and Lucke were among just a handful of Upper Valley lawmakers who voted against a measure that would have allowed Vermonters to cultivate two marijuana plants at home.
Lucke admits that this has been a particularly difficult issue for her.
“That is something that I wrestle with and continue to,” she said.
The cause for her angst, she said, stems from her position as a board member for Second Growth, an Upper Valley nonprofit that provides services and counseling for children. Second Growth has been staunchly opposed to marijuana use for years, arguing that it is a gateway to more dangerous drugs. Lucke said she now feels torn because, in the last session, she heard compelling testimony that has her at least partially convinced that legalization could reduce, rather than increase, usage among youths.
Lucke also echoed Christie’s concerns about a broader legalization bill they didn’t support, and which failed, that they say would favor a big, centralized distribution system.
“It was a framework that was designed without Vermont in mind,” she said.
Her positions on the issue have changed since May, when she first cast a vote against the bill. She said in late May that her position was evolving, and that “I recognize we are in a process as a state and I really want to do it right.”
This month, she said she’s decided not to take a position until she sees the details of the bill. She also said she will consider stepping down from Second Growth after the November vote.
“I’m putting that decision off until after I’m re-elected,” she said.
Christie said that, though he voted against the legalization bill, he would vote in favor of a bill that addressed his two main concerns.
First, he said, in the original bill, “there were still a number of unanswered questions that hadn’t been resolved around testing,” which he said muddied the waters around both employee drug testing and testing for the impairment of drivers.
Second, he said, he was concerned about a legalization framework that would allow a few large entities, possibly from other states, to come in and control a centralized distribution market, which he said goes against the Vermont ethos of backyard farming.
“We don’t just create three or four millionaires,” he said. “We would hope to allow as many Vermonters who are capable to be involved in a constructive way within a new system. That’s probably the nicest way to put it.”
Davenport said he doesn’t have a firm stance on marijuana legalization, but “there are bigger issues in Vermont that we need to focus on.”
He said legalization would bring with it moral conflicts for adults across the state.
“You tell kids ‘don’t do drugs’ and all of a sudden you’re legalizing marijuana,” he said. “That’s a difficult place to be.”
Stuart’s position held a lot of principle, if less nuance.
“I’m dead set against it,” he said. “That will not ever change.”
Stuart said his position was informed by his time in the military, when he worked with drug interdiction forces in the Bahamas and Colombia, as well as a five-year stint urging youth camp attendees to avoid drug use as a member of the Vermont National Guard’s Counterdrug Task Force
“It’s a gateway drug, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “We have such an opiate addiction problem, let’s not make it any easier.”
Stuart said that, after seeing the benefits of medical marijuana on pain levels experienced by his mother during a battle with lung cancer, he supports the fact that Vermont has legalized medical marijuana.
Lucke, Christie and Stuart all said that they favored reviewing Act 46, the education reform law passed last year that pushes school districts to merge into larger units. The law has come under fire for several reasons, but one of the primary objections is that some districts, including those in Hartland, West Windsor and Weathersfield, cannot currently merge with a district that operates a high school without giving up school choice.
Lucke, who voted for Act 46, said the law gave some districts the push they needed to better serve students. Other districts, including many in the Upper Valley, now need more tools, she said.
“There are places it has worked and places it has not,” Lucke said.
Davenport called Act 46 “a joke.”
“I’m not a fan of taking local control away from our communities when it comes to the education of their children,” he said. “That’s essentially what they want to do.”
Davenport said education funding would come more easily if Vermont would be more business-friendly, which he said would bring more employers and families into the state and allow schools to grow instead of shrink.
Stuart said he favors school choice and would consider repealing Act 46 altogether, but he also said he favored an even more aggressive approach to merging school district administrative structures, so that each county would operate under the control of a single superintendent and school board. He said he envisioned larger towns, including Hartford, having the right to opt out.
Christie, who helped craft Act 46, said the law has accomplished some of its goals by allowing school districts more flexibility in addressing the needs of their students and families, but he acknowledged that the choice issue needs to be fixed somehow.
“We’re not going to be let off the hook until we resolve it,” he said.
Sue Buckholz, who has owned a law office in Quechee since 1995, is running unopposed for the Windsor 4-1 District Seat representing Pomfret, Barnard and West Hartford and much of Quechee. She would replace Zagar, who is not seeking re-election.
Buckholz, a Yale graduate and former town and school moderator in Hartford, said her professional life revolves around children and families, and has informed many of her political positions.
Her top priority, she said, is gaining more and better support services, such as universal daycare services, for children under six years of age.
“If we don’t take care of our children from zero to five, we’re never going to get a handle on our prison budget,” she said. “We’re never going to get a handle on our school budget.”
Buckholz said she was a strong supporter of both the carbon tax and of marijuana legalization, which she said would destroy the black market that brings otherwise law-abiding citizens into contact with other drugs.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.
Clarification
State Rep. Gabrielle Lucke, D-Hartford, describes her position on marijuana legalization as “evolving” and said she is putting off a decision about whether to stay on the board of the nonprofit Second Growth until after the November election. An earlier version of this story confused her decision about her tenure on the board with her stance on marijuana legalization.