WASHINGTON COUNTY – Three Senate seats are up-for-grabs with six candidates looking to fill them in the Washington County Senate election, Tuesday, Nov. 5.
Three Democratic incumbents, including the senate’s senior member, Montpelier’s Ann Cummings, are running for re-election. Marshfield’s Andrew Perchlik and Barre City’s Anne Watson round out the trio.
Running for the first time, Donald Koch of Barre Town was the sole Republican in the primary. Barre City Councilor Michael Deering lost his attempt to serve in the house two years ago in the Republican primary by five votes, but write-in votes during the primary added him to the ballot. Michael Doyle, a Montpelier resident, ran unsuccessfully for the Vermont Senate in 2016. He was asked by Washington County Republicans to run again after Stowe’s Rob Roper won their primary as a write-in candidate, then declined to serve for personal reasons.
The candidates’ answers to seven questions are summarized below.
Question: Tell us a bit about your background, why you want to fill the position and why you are a good candidate for it.
Cummings: I’ve served on the Montpelier City Council and Planning Commission, the regional planning commission, as mayor of Montpelier for three terms, on the board of Capstone and on the initial board of what’s become Prevent Child Abuse Vermont.
I’ve served in the senate since 1997, chairing the finance committee for most of that time, and have served on every committee except natural resources and agriculture.
I love my job, believe in democracy, really like solving problems and bringing people with diverse backgrounds and ideas together to find common ground; hopefully moving us all forward.
Perchlik: I’ve been a state senator for the district for six years. I started on the transportation committee with Dick Mazza as the chair and Jane Kitchell, great senators to learn from.
I was also on the education committee, learning a lot about issues we’re facing there. I was elected the majority assistant leader, the whip, the last two years. And the last two years. I switched from education to the appropriations committee where I was the vice chair working with Jane Kitchell and learning about the budget process, which has been very interesting and informative.
Outside the legislative processes I work for the Department of Public Service where I’ve been doing renewable energy work on clean energy, renewable energy policy and other energy policy work for the state for over 20 years.
Watson: I have a degree in physics and have been teaching science and math for 20 years. I’m a mom and union member who’s really passionate about taking care of our community and our environment. I’m running because I’m worried about the future of my high school students. I do this work so they can thrive.
Deering: My biggest motivation is the fact that I have four children between the ages of five and 15. Over the last two years I’ve moved closer and closer towards unaffordability for the future and unsustainability. To me it’s about putting all of the information that I’ve acquired over the last three years on city council, being involved as a community advocate, into play in the best way I know how. I’m a person that puts my money where my mouth is. I constantly work with children at Barre City School as the transportation sub-coordinator. I see that children are vital within our community. Without them staying in our community, there’s no lifeline.
Doyle: I was born in Montpelier, graduated from UVM with a degree in psychology and a commission in the United States Army Reserve. I went into the Peace Corps, served in Ethiopia, Korea and went to Silicon Valley where I got a master of science degree in environmental management. I worked with hazardous materials, as an industrial hygienist, safety engineer and an environmental expert. I returned to Montpelier after my mother died and I inherited the family guest house, which I have been running since. I worked for Senator Bill Doyle as his driver. He’s not a relative. I learned a great deal from working for him for 25 years. I am on the psychology board and from time to time serve as an ad hoc member on the allied mental health board. So I have had some experience in the state. In Pennsylvania, I served for 10 years on the school board in a city a little larger than Berlin. So I’ve had some political experience in that.
Koch: I am a lifelong resident of Barre Town, I went to Spaulding High School, then Johnson State College where I majored in psychology with a minor in music. I attended the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, exploring a call to the ministry, but decided that was not the path I was going to follow. Shortly after that I returned to Vermont where I held a couple of different jobs before I got my commercial drivers license and became a truck driver for eight and half years for Bellavance. For the last 10 years I have owned my own independent trucking company, working in collaboration with Bellavance.
I am running because people cannot afford to live in the State of Vermont. The governor is trying his best, but the supermajority, one-party rule, is doing what they want to do. We need a little bit of balance, the governor cannot sustain his vetoes. I am looking to be a part of that balance, I couldn’t stay still any longer.
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?
Cummings: I chair the tax committee. A new, small payroll tax was added in July to cover child care, which businesses had asked for to help employees be able to have time to work.
One tax that keeps going up is the education tax, based on property. We have a problem. I am on the steering committee on the Commission on School Financing. Our school age population has been declining for over 20 years. We still have an extensive system of sometimes very small local schools. Funding is voted on by local districts. The state sets the property tax based on those budgets after subtracting other funding sources. Property taxes are still too high for some people so we’re going to have to make some changes.
Perchlik: Meeting the education needs of our students and our children is paramount. The problem is not that we’re not meeting the needs of the students, it’s how we’re setting our budgets; we don’t have good budget controls.
It’s more about having local control and setting a statewide education budget. Those two things are in conflict. We need to have a tighter connection between what people are doing at the local level and what their taxes are going to be. We must return to having strict budget control so that we don’t have instances like we did this year with a 14% increase, that’s not sustainable.
It’s always important for legislators to remember the Constitution has the line in it about, we shouldn’t raise any taxes, if it’s not better kept in the pockets of the taxpayers. I did support some of the tax increases we’ve had that have been specific. We didn’t do the income tax. The taxes I think that we’ve done have been very targeted: We increased taxes on mutual fund registrations as a way to help reduce property taxes.
I have in front of my mind that this is taxpayers money and we shouldn’t do it unless it really is meeting a need and not just a want.
Watson: This is my top priority going into the next session because I believe wealth inequality is one of the worst issues of our time because it makes everything harder. I want to bring back some balance and stability for middle class Vermonters with their taxes, particularly property taxes.
My strategy is to try to align our taxes more with income. There’s work being done to study school funding before we know what’s possible. New information about property taxes leads me to think we can break out the non-homestead tax, allowing us to tax second homes at a much higher rate, which should provide some relief for middle class and working Vermonters. We can look at petitioning the federal government to help cover mental health costs that schools are providing now. Other things need to be looked at long-term; adequacy formulas and cost-containment are a useful part of the conversation, but I don’t want to see it happen on the backs of kids.
Deering: How we fund that is a huge question going on right now; between the local control of allowing our school boards to decide what’s most important in our school budgets, and being able to balance that on a state end with equalized education. There are ways we can save millions of dollars by centralizing things like transportation. Education funding needs to change to a more income-based approach and less property tax approach. People need to have more skin in the game when it comes to paying their fair share into the educational system; not just on the backs of the property owners, then they would have more stake in what’s being done at home.
Doyle: A recent study called the PICUS study says the people of Vermont are spending about $400 to $500 million too much already for schools. One of the first things I would advise is start looking into ways to economize. Vermont has the fifth highest per capita student expense, paying about $17,000 per student.
I worked for about 10 years on a school board in Pennsylvania; big school board, big budget. I developed a suspicion of teachers unions. We should be a little tougher in our negotiation. I am not against teachers being fairly paid and fairly treated. We need to be competitive. Our school system ought to be a good company to work for, but the first place we should look for savings is in what we are already spending.
Koch: As voters have said this year, the current scheme is not working. Nobody understands it, including the policymakers that created it. I would propose we consider shifting school funding away from property taxes as a primary source and create a baseline funding for the schools from the income tax, shifting to what people can actually afford rather than the value of their homes. If a school district needs money for additional programs or students with special needs, they can get funding from the property tax.
Question: What do you see as the solution to creating affordable home ownership and rental options for Vermonters? How does that work to make Vt. attractive for young people?
Cummings: The housing crisis is national. Vermont has Act 250 and some of our own quirks. I’m a retired realtor and have been told because of labor and material costs you can’t build a new home at a price the average working person can afford.
I’ve served on the housing committee the last two years. We have done work on mapping to set three levels of building. There will be some areas without Act 250, some review at the next level and full review as you go up the protection levels.
Over $800M in federal ARPA funds were put into building affordable housing, but building costs are hitting us there too. Property taxes and the tight housing market is having inflationary pressure on rents. More and more people are being priced out of the rental market, which has an impact on homelessness.
There’s no simple solution and it will probably take a federal initiative on the scale of the G.I. Bill without all the issues that had.
Perchlik: We need affordable housing to make it attractive for young people, so that people can afford a starter house or their own home. We need a healthy rental market where people could move here for a summer. It’s an essential part of our economic development that we have affordable housing and housing in general. We can put money into affordable housing and support it. What we’ve done last year with the Act 250 and housing bill will help get more housing built, where we don’t need to have such a strict environmental review.
In key areas around our river corridors, where we’re seeing this flooding and damage to homes, we do need an environmental review. Let’s focus our limited resources on where we need it and let housing be built in other places. For affordable housing, it’s really federal and state money but for other housing it’s permitting, and it sometimes takes time for the market to correct itself.
Watson: We do need more housing at every level, including for older people who would prefer to downsize, including spaces families can afford to move into. I’m proud of work I did to loosen some of Act 250 for affordable housing without having a negative effect on the environment. The cost of labor and materials is a huge barrier. We should look at subsidizing it; it is an investment that will get more children in our schools and more workers. We can encourage home shares. We have a lot of housing with second homes and can encourage people to live here by having them pay for that.
Deering: It costs way too much to build. There are opportunities we have presented like a five-year freeze that Governor Scott’s administration had proposed. It’s essentially where you pay the base of the property tax of the building, you build on the building, and then you incrementally have that increase to the maximum property value. It allows them to have a lower cost to start up in the beginning. It’s not something that you’re going to see right away but it’s something you’re going to see continue under the tax rolls for 20% each year. Even if you needed to extend it to a 10-year, you could do 10% each year, but things like that are ways that we can invest into the future of our housing. We haven’t invested enough into our housing.
Doyle: One of the first things we should do to make housing more available is to look for expenses and expensive regulations to get out of the way. We have watched Act 250 for about 60, 70 years now. It was designed in a time when the Vermont. economy was based very largely on family-owned farms. Nowadays family-owned farms are a pretty rare thing. Act 250 made it fairly difficult and complicated and expensive to build anything. We ought to go and give Act 250 an overdue makeover. We’re not the same Vermont we were when that Act was written. There are people that actually make an awful lot of money, building and selling real estate. One of the reasons they haven’t been able to thrive in Vermont is because our permitting process is long, complicated, unpredictable.
Koch: We need to reduce the ACT 250 process. The permit process sometimes drags out for years. When a developer has to get a permit and an environmental study, and zoning permits, they’re surprised with another permit they didn’t know about. The legislature did something this year to make it easier to build affordable housing in the cities near public transit, but actually expanded Act 250 instead of making it easier. We need to consider people who want rural homes too.
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?
Cummings: We need to get rents under control. Rent control legislation could be looked at beginning with the bigger cities. We need to put as much money as we can come up with into affordable housing and get some control of increases.
Perchlik: We need to build more permanent shelters if we’re going to continue to have this high of a homeless population. Putting them in the hotels, we used to pay $147 a night for years and that wasn’t sustainable, largely off the federal dollars we had. We can’t continue to use the hotel program as a permanent housing solution. If we were actually going to house the homeless, we need to support the shelters and long-term, affordable housing built for homeless people so they have the services to get them into permanent housing.
I support what the senate has done to try to limit the use of the hotel program, just because it’s not fiscally able to spend that much money on housing and hotels. It will take other money to support it. If we increased the transfer tax a little bit on second homes to try to find some more money so that we can support this kind of affordable housing programs. We already use the transfer tax to support the work of the Vermont Housing Conservation Board, which I think does the kind of work we need to do.
Watson: I was pleased Vermont bought motels to convert into housing, which can reduce the cost. Additional support for the homeless is needed. We can listen to advocates to understand causes. A housing first model can save money and will provide a return on investment if we can figure out where to build it.
Deering: During Covid-19 I was the operations manager with the Salvation Army, dealing with people. The original impact of allowing everyone to get into a free hotel room for safety was great, but there were really no guardrails put into place for that program long-term.
We need to say these are the things that we need you to continue to do to better yourself, in order to have this housing. Right now, we’re in a situation where people are coming against the cap and how many days they can stay. I don’t know how to fix that problem. We can bring people up out of some of these situations but we also need to provide them with mental health services, substance abuse services, counseling to get through the housing crisis, to actually find somewhere to live. Throwing money at things isn’t going to help them.
Doyle: When you finally run out of money, you use what you have rather than what you wish you had. As a result of the Covid-19 epidemic and a number of other things, we have created a lot of empty, heated, plumbed electrical space here in Vermont: empty offices. The state has quite a few empty colleges. It’s a matter of finding a way to coordinate and use space we already have. If there is a way a developer of some sort can actually make some money doing this, it will happen pretty fast.
Koch: There are homeless in all sorts of circumstances. There are those who simply choose to be homeless. If someone finds themselves homeless because they lost their job, or for whatever reason they couldn’t pay their rent, if they’re willing to help themselves I’m willing to help them. We need to stop importing the homeless. We make it easy to be homeless in Vermont. I am willing to provide resources and fund agencies to give assistance to those who need it.
Question: How can the state meet the challenges of maintaining the state and town 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?
Cummings: Road usage legislation was put in place to start having electric vehicles fill in the gap because they don’t pay the gas tax.
Historically we built in the flat lands along rivers where we needed mills and good farmland. FEMA is working on new maps and we can work incentivising people to build out of floodplains. We need to compensate farmers. One year between major floods isn’t enough time to do anything significant.
Perchlik: We added a fee for electric vehicles that will start in January of 2025. At first it is going to go to the electric charging infrastructure so we can make sure lower income people have a way to charge cars, or people in apartment buildings that don’t have garages, or don’t control their property to put up charging stations. That will switch to helping fund our roads and bridges. It is a major concern as somebody on transportation for the past six years, there is a huge gap in our transportation infrastructure funding compared to the need. We rely a lot on the federal government.
The resilience work that we did last year around flood protection and flood mapping so we know where areas are that we can predict a little better. We can build the infrastructure to protect those assets where we’re needed. We’ve been slowly replacing old culverts to a much bigger size that can handle flash flooding events so we don’t get so many washed out roads. It’s a long process.
I support the state helping the towns. Little towns that have major weather events are not capable of rebuilding their infrastructure in a timely way, and they don’t have the financial resources. The state should set up a program specifically for municipalities. There was a small program last year after the flood. It should be a permanent program where the state is loaning money to the towns for immediate needs.
Watson: I supported legislation related to the climate superfund bill to have the largest oil companies pay for some of the damages due to climate change. It’s a long way off before we might see any money, but it got the process started. I supported the increase in registration fees for electric vehicles (EV) because we all value having functional roads. Initially those fees will go to EV infrastructure.
Deering: There are huge funding gaps in general. We see that within the Barre City Council trying to rebuild after two floods. We’re taking a long time to be reimbursed. We need a more regionalized approach with our storm watershed management. Small communities don’t have the manpower to put these grants in. We’re seeing a lot of changes in urban management when it comes to the city of Barre, one of the larger cities within the state. These smaller towns like Plainfield, or Cabot or Marshfield or even out in the valley to try to complete robust FEMA applications is just insane and it’s not sustainable. We need help from the state with technical assistance and help for municipalities to draw down federal money.
Doyle: We’re talking about predicting the weather. That never has been an exact science. I believe the climate is changing. The unpredictable part is knowing exactly how that’s going to affect things.
It’s always been a federal responsibility to build the interstate highway system and maintain that. So we’re going to have to rely on the federal government as we always have. On a local basis, Vermont has got quite a network of trails and roads and dirt roads. We’ve always been able to afford to maintain those ourselves. It’s a matter of civil engineering. I’m not sure I can give you an answer on how to do that in two minutes. We don’t even know what we’re going to be driving 10, 15, 20 years from now.
Koch: I don’t think any reasonable person can deny climate change exists. We are limited in how much effect we have on that, but we need to do what we can. We’ve done a lot in emission reduction, I’m a truck driver and we actually use filters that put out cleaner air than what comes in. You rarely see black smoke coming off of trucks. We need to consider what we can do and what we can afford to do.
We seem to be in a cycle where we are getting a lot of heavy rain. Local municipalities should develop a plan and the state should be there to support it for when these weather events do happen. I’m hearing more and more about dredging the rivers. I think they need to do more dredging in key locations, so the baseline water level is lower and there is more capacity to handle the water.
Question: Please 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?
Cummings: Vermont has done the utmost we can with a Constitutional amendment on that. They are very personal decisions and a woman should be able to include who she feels she needs to include in that discussion. We have provided sheltering for anyone who comes here and won’t send information to other states.
Perchlik: I support full reproductive autonomy and reproductive rights, I supported the constitutional amendment we did last election into the Vermont Constitution, to make sure that that’s always a protected right. I don’t support any restrictions on abortion. The medical profession, the ethical standards, the licensing standards that the doctors have to go through is sufficient to protect both the woman and the fetus from any kind of malfeasance on the part of the doctor.
People bring up super late-term abortions. Doctors and the licensing boards will deal with that. That’s the proper place to deal with that, and not the state legislature trying to mandate at what exact point an abortion can or can’t be carried out.
Watson: I am glad we have protected reproductive rights in the state constitution. The overturning of Roe v. Wade ought to be scary for everyone in the country. Those coming here to receive services should be protected as much as we can.
Deering: To me, this is pretty simple. It was decided by the voters of Vermont in 2022, and the voters made their choice. My opinion as a person doesn’t matter whatsoever because there are laws put in place. I have no stance to repeal or replace any of these laws that are currently in place.
Doyle: I might have some personal opinions on the matter, but this is the sort of matter that I need not to look at my personal opinions, I need to look at representing my constituency; what I believe a majority of people who would be electing me would actually want. I believe that would include the formula: safe, legal, and rare. I believe that rape, incest and the mother’s health are key considerations. I also believe this is a matter that hasn’t been definitively settled by the United States, and therefore this one still belongs to the states and to the localities. The people haven’t decided this issue.
Koch: I have accepted Roe v. Wade. On a personal level, I don’t believe in abortion. I also don’t believe in government interference. I believe in an all-knowing, all-loving God that is willing to forgive that person who is making that horrible decision. That said, it was returned to the states and Vermont made it clear, put it right in the constitution. I believe in following the constitution, and not just parts that I agree with. All of it.
Question: Is there anything we haven’t asked you about that you’d like to share and might be important to your constituents?
Cummings: There’s been a lot of talk about age in this election cycle. I’m the senior member of the senate now. Over half of the senate will have [served] one session or less next session. For democracy to work we need a balance of age, points of view, sexual orientation, whatever.
We’ve done some really bad things, including under-funding teacher pensions to get through bad times. It’s important to have that experience for a balance that new legislators don’t have.
I’m asking to have my experience sent back.
Perchlik: There’s misinformation coming from the governor and the Republicans about what the democrats did last year; that we purposely wanted [the school portion of the property tax] to be 14%. We were trying to get it down as low as we could. There’s only limited things that we can do without totally upending local control. When I first got there there were a lot of fights about closing schools. You don’t hear people talk about how we can lower property taxes, saying the things that would be very unpopular like closing schools. When we had those discussions, they were pretty upset people talking about whether they need to close their schools or lay off teachers, or not do the universal meals program, which isn’t going to really save that much money anyway. I think it is important we have a system that doesn’t have these kinds of tax increases. We’re working on that.
I hear people saying those of us that were incumbents should not be reelected, as the clean heat standard is something that we have enacted. We didn’t enact a bill, but just to study it. It’s important we look at making Vermont more affordable. Imported fossil fuels aren’t an affordable solution for our heating and power needs and we need to look at ways we can support the local economy. Vermont has a really great opportunity to build on our economy with local renewable energy sources, and that includes wood. That’s from our local forest and supporting the forest products industry. We are a state that’s leading on renewable energy development and renewable energy economic development so I want to continue that work.
Watson: I am passionate about protecting the environment and want to be sure we keep a balance so that people of low income or people of color are not bearing the impact of regulation.
Deering: It’s really about listening and how we haven’t had our legislature listening. I’ve been a person who’s always listened twice as much as I speak. So, it’s really just about listening and being an advocate for our future.
Doyle: I would like to see Vermont become an attractive place for young people to move. Presently, it is not. There is no place to live when you get here. There are people offering jobs, but there’s no housing for them. We need to increase our entrepreneurial spirit. We need to make it easier to build things, easier to do things, easier to make money and get things done. How do you do that? One of the quickest ways is to lower the price of energy. If you do that, all of the prices of everything, goods and services will also begin to fall as surpluses are created. That’s just a principle of supply-side economics I’ve always believed works best.
Koch: I’m a Get Real candidate. Get Real is a state party platform to get more moderate conservatives elevated. One of the things is the Global Warming Solutions Act Reform. The socio-environmental policies, creating regressive taxes makes it difficult for people to afford to live here. We need to turn energy mandates into goals. Setting a date of 2035 is hugely expensive and unattainable. We don’t have the infrastructure in place yet for electric vehicles. We need to slow down; as people buy those electric vehicles the infrastructure will come at a natural pace.
