ORLEANS COUNTY – The Orleans-4 Vermont House District of Greensboro, Craftsbury, Albany and Glover is currently represented by Katherine Sims of Craftsbury who is not running for reelection.
Candidates running for the seat this year are Anthony “Tony” Daniels, a Republican from Albany; Leanne Harple, a Democrat from Glover and David Kelley, a Democrat from Greensboro.
Question: Tell us a bit about your background, why you want to fill the position and why you are a good candidate for it.
Daniels: I grew up in East Albany. My family’s been there for five generations. I’m a builder with my own business for over 40 years. I have been vice chair of the Lake Region High School board and chair of the finance committee. I was chair of the Albany select board and enjoyed setting the budget. I was on the Orleans Country Club board of directors and the budget committee.
I’m running because I feel I can represent the voters of my district. The years of working in my own trades and working on these boards has given me the ability to communicate with people. I believe I can communicate their message to the legislature.
Harple: I grew up in the Northeast Kingdom, am raising two kids here and love this community. I want it to be sustainable so my kids can raise their kids here. I’ve served on the Glover select board for three years and have worked as an educator at Hazen Union School for 12 years,
Affordability is a concern for the future of families. That helped me make the decision to run when I was asked by Katherine Sims.
Kelley: I grew up in Vermont and went to public schools. I went to the University of Vermont, then I went to law school at Georgetown. I came to Montpelier after law school and spent the next 25 years representing ski areas, working in front of virtually every agency in state government. I spent quite a bit of time working with the state legislature and organizing teacher-student exchange programs. After I retired, I continued to work with the legislature, especially on education issues and wildlife issues.
When this seat opened up, I felt like I could accomplish a lot more on those issues I was most concerned with having a seat at the table, so I decided I would run.
Question: Taxes keep rising as we address the needs of an increasingly complex society. What’s the right balance between meeting the needs of the population and keeping taxes manageable? How does funding schools fit into that?
Daniels: This area of Vermont is not as populated as some areas, so there’s less money floating around. When the legislature votes in bills that are raising taxes, it’s very difficult for some people to make ends meet. We have to make sure budgets prepared statewide are being monitored very well, so that the money is spent where it should be. If every department could come up with a cut, it may cut back on taxes.
Harple: We should look to start paying for schools with an income tax rather than a property tax because people are sometimes land-rich and not income-rich. Systemic changes in that area may help. There are not many places to cut school budgets. We can look at ways to move the cost of human services provided at schools to a general fund rather than paying for them from school funds.
Kelley: What we’re doing today isn’t sustainable. Our classrooms have become, to a large extent, social service institutions. A conversation and a study needs to happen about whether education can be funded by a more progressive general fund and income tax. The notion of consolidating school districts was a mistake, it hasn’t saved any money. We have a very top-heavy bureaucracy with 63 supervisory unions and can find some savings by consolidating.
Question: What do you see as the solution to creating affordable home ownership and rental options for Vermonters? How does that work to make Vermont attractive for young people?
Daniels: What is affordable? Do we need a house with four bedrooms, two baths and a two-car garage? Can we start smaller and as our needs change or family grows, we change that living arrangement? Right now things are very expensive. Real estate always goes in waves. I think the prices will come back down and make things affordable for most people. It’s really too hard to make housing affordable. You have to be careful on raising money to help people get started. If they can’t get started on their own, it might be difficult for them to keep what they have.
Harple: We can look at raising more tax revenue from second homes and vacation homes. We can encourage people to add mother-in-law apartments (Auxiliary Dwelling Units) on their homes. We might help people feel more comfortable with that by relaxing landlord laws. We can use Habitat for Humanity and RuralEdge to redevelop properties to create more homes.
Kelley: One is making housing attainable, especially for young families with children that our businesses depend on and need in this area. We have a homeless challenge. We have a lot of housing stock that is sitting idle, it needs to be restored. I would create four- or five-year tax holidays for people willing to renovate that housing and turn it into multiple apartments. It would add a substantial amount of money to our grand list so towns would be better off in the long run. I would look at zoning; ten-acre zoning does not work in today’s housing market.
Question: Gov. Scott seems to be having difficulty striking the right balance between funding housing for homeless people and reducing spending on programs to house the homeless, what do you see as possible solutions to help Vermont’s homeless population?
Daniels: That’s a subject I’m not really well versed in, I’d like to get more facts before I make a statement on that. Homelessness is becoming a problem, mostly in populated areas, not so much this area. There may be more homeless people here if people can’t afford to keep their homes due to high taxes. Shelters can be available on a temporary basis and we can find out why some people are homeless. We need to figure out why they can’t get themselves their own place.
Harple: We need to provide more low income and middle-income housing in rural areas. We need to look at systems to understand how these problems are connected. We can ask how we can help people to not end up homeless and look at the causes of it by looking at addiction, mental health, jobs and the cost of living. It’s different things for different people. Some of these solutions may take a generation and not a single term.
Kelley: We should consider how to solve the problems of people who don’t have homes at all. Putting them up at $80 a night isn’t the answer. We could do a lot more with the money that we’re spending now and consider creating communities of tiny homes. People without homes include people like the executive director of the Highland Center for the Arts, who can’t find a home. What we need to do is reexamine how we’re spending money and begin thinking about creating new communities.
Question: How can the state meet the challenges of maintaining infrastructure of roads, bridges, water and sewer systems as weather events are increasingly destructive? As more vehicles become electric and the gas tax becomes less effective at funding those needs, how can that funding gap be filled?
Daniels: When you lose proceeds, it’s hard to maintain a budget that you have. You would have to find some way to make up the difference on a gas tax and somehow tax the electric vehicle accordingly to bring that balance back. These two storms we’ve had in the last two years have been devastating. We don’t know if we’re gonna have more storms like that to cause that kind of damage in the next 50 years or the next two years, so it’s really hard to predict what money we’re gonna have for our next road budget.
Harple: We’ve already begun to look at that by beginning to increase fees on electric vehicles (EVs). We need to slow down climate change and make changes to the way we are constructing and what kind of infrastructure we need. We shouldn’t force people to drive EVs. We need more charging stations and better rural electric vehicles.
Kelley: I have some faith in S2-59, the so-called “Super Fund bill.” There’s a substantial amount of money coming from the state from the Inflation Reduction Act. I suggest our towns get together and cooperate and hire people that can do the paperwork and deal with the bureaucracy it takes to get that funding that we need to rebuild our stormwater systems. Our planning commissions have to do a lot of risk assessments, our select boards will have to do a lot of new planning. It is incumbent on us to be prepared because these extreme storm weather events will continue to happen. We have to work more closely together as towns and with the federal government to access funding immediately.
Question: Share your perspective on how the issue of abortion should be addressed in our state and country. What specific policies do you support to ensure women’s health and reproductive rights are adequately considered?
Daniels: Well, Vermont has the laws in place, and it seems to be not such a controversy anymore. It’s an individual situation. I know if you’re a religious person, you aren’t supposed to interrupt life but sometimes it’s best if the person that is involved has a choice whether this is going to affect their life in a negative way.
Harple: I’m so glad Vermont has already passed a constitutional amendment to protect rights for reproductive freedom and the United States as a whole needs to pass something similar. There should be no abortion law. It’s nobody’s business except for the woman herself. We should be protecting women who need to get out of states where they can’t access abortion.
Kelley: Well, I think that Vermont has pretty much addressed that issue with the constitutional amendment that we passed. I think that Roe v. Wade was a good decision that should’ve been left alone. We are at a point in Vermont where we have said women’s reproductive rights are issues that need to be solved between women and their doctors, and I think that’s the appropriate way forward.
Question: Is there anything we haven’t asked you about that you’d like to share and might be important to your constituents?
Daniels: Most towns already tax vacation homes at a higher rate. I don’t think that’s the right way to go. Just because it’s your second home, doesn’t mean that you are financially able to pick up an additional expense. I do not agree with a luxury tax. At what point does that become subjective, and what do we consider as luxuries? It’s really hard to take something someone worked hard for and give it to someone else.
Harple: I’m really excited to do this work and want a sustainable NEK where children can have careers and stay here. I am looking to make it work for all people; those on fixed incomes, those growing up now, expanding broadband internet, solving issues of the digital divide, helping people work with computers and have access to telehealth. I do not want to just change individual laws, but change our systems to make it easier for everybody to live here long-term and create generations of change.
Kelley: I grew up in a family that was very much damaged by alcoholism and substance abuse.
I was very fortunate to have a great high school teacher, who took me under his wing and urged me to join the debate team. As a result of that, I went to college with a scholarship and went on to law school. Education is extraordinarily important to me. I think if we are going to deal with some of the problems we have today with substance abuse and generational poverty, we need to focus our attention on making our schools the best they can possibly be. We live in a war-torn world. One of the things we need to do is create more opportunities for our high school students to be involved globally. I’d like to see many more students participate in exchange programs with other countries, and even other states. I’d like to bring more students from foreign countries to Vermont and more students from Vermont to foreign countries. I’d like to build that understanding.
Anthony “Tony” Daniels did not submit a photo.
Candidate responses are summarized here. Complete video programs of the recorded interviews are available at HCTV.US, the HCTV YouTube Channel and can be downloaded from the HCTV Vimeo page.
