I ran for the Vermont Senate this year. Between May and August, I knocked on nearly 2,000 doors in 21 of the 25 towns in the Windsor Senate District. It took three pairs of shoes. I had planned to spend that time explaining what I would do in Montpelier. Instead, I spent most of it listening.
In Chester, I met a man who was recently laid off from a retail job in Claremont. His job, like a great many held by Vermonters, was across the river. He talked about the money, but that wasn’t all that was on his mind. Losing a job takes something from a person beyond a paycheck.
In Windsor, I met a small business owner working on thin margins, struggling to make payroll as his fixed costs climbed each year. An outside buyer had made him an attractive offer, but he wanted the business to stay locally owned. When we spoke in July, he was still wrestling with what to do.
In Hartford, I met a homeowner still absorbing the town’s recent reappraisal. She did not dispute the need for it. What troubled her was the swing — in her assessment, and in the tax bill that followed — and the difficulty of planning around a number that moves that much. “It’s hard to commit to a place when you don’t even know what it will cost to stay,” she told me.
Three conversations out of hundreds and they were not unusual. Beneath the particular concerns — an aging school building, a hospital under financial duress, a school budget that keeps climbing — ran a theme I did not expect: Dread. In town after town, and most of all in southern Windsor County, longtime Vermonters and recent arrivals alike asked the same two questions: Can I afford to stay here? Will my kids ever afford to come home?
What surprised me more was how they asked. Often with a hedge or a note of apology. As if they were the sole cause of their own predicament. As if they should have planned better or saved more. All of this on their own front steps, about a state that has priced out the people who built it.
I said this at their doors, and I want to repeat it here: these are not personal failings. Housing costs, health care costs, stagnant wages, property taxes — none is a choice any individual Vermonter made. They are outcomes. They are the accumulation of decisions made and not made in Vermont over many years. Nobody standing in their own doorway owes anyone an apology.
The same holds in reverse. My family can live in Pomfret, in part, because of when we arrived, not because of anything we planned for or predicted. Good timing is another way of saying luck and luck is a poor foundation for a state’s economy.
The other thing I heard, over and over, was fatigue at having the same conversations every two years. And frustration that the promised solutions don’t seem to be solving anything. Some believe their representatives are powerless to change course. Others think they are unwilling. I don’t believe either is quite right. My view is that Vermont’s problems are tangled together — yet we keep trying to solve them one at a time.
None of this was settled on Aug. 11. The voters made their choice that day and I called every candidate that night. What I learned at 2,000 doors now belongs to those who will represent us. The conversations will continue.
In the meantime, much of what I heard lands on selectboards and school boards long before it reaches Montpelier. The morning after the primary, I was back at work in Pomfret, and there is no shortage of it. A Vermonter who works hard should be able to live here with dignity and a measure of security. That is not a lot to ask. Right now, for too many people, it is.
Benjamin Brickner is a Pomfret resident, practicing attorney and chair of the Pomfret Selectboard. He was a candidate in the Aug. 11 Democratic primary for the Windsor Senate District. The views expressed are solely those of the author.