[V]ermont’s two major party candidates for governor faced off for the first time Friday morning in a wide-ranging debate in which Democratic challenger, Christine Hallquist, and Republican incumbent, Gov. Phil Scott, clashed on issues including taxes, marijuana and education.
Friday’s debate, held at the Tunbridge World’s Fair and hosted by WDEV Radio, brought into focus the many areas that the two relatively moderate candidates disagree.
On some issues, like taxation and regulation of marijuana, their platforms are starkly opposed. Hallquist embraces a legal market for marijuana to curtail the risk of laced cannabis on the black market and generate revenue. Scott refuses to support such a system until the state finds a way to fund additional highway safety and substance use prevention initiatives.
Hallquist believes the state should fight to keep Vermont’s small schools open arguing that they’re a draw for potential residents. While Scott didn’t openly advocate for closing small schools, he pointed out that schools in some towns, like Rochester, only have a handful of students in each grade level, and said he would instead prioritize funding early childhood education and vocational training programs.
“We have to think about the kids and what’s best for them,” Scott said.
Hallquist argued schools’ woes are a symptom of a larger problem: a faltering rural economy.
“The reason these schools are dwindling is because the jobs don’t exist,” she said. “We should be building toward restoring our rural economy.”
Hallquist pitched her plan to expand broadband to every home and business in the state as a solution for many of the state’s financial woes including its aging population, antiquated farms and struggling rural businesses.
Her plan calls for requiring electric companies to hang broadband cables, rather than internet companies, a shift she says will lower the cost of expanding internet access throughout the state.
Improving internet connectivity in Vermont will encourage more people, including entrepreneurs, to settle outside of the state’s urban bubbles and inspire more small businesses to set up shop there, according to Hallquist.
“You will not get young people to Vermont if they can’t get connected,” she said.
She also said that better internet access would be a economic boon for the agricultural sector. Struggling farmers — including those in the dairy industry grappling with low milk prices — would benefit from improved internet connection, giving them the opportunity to sell some of their products online, Hallquist argued.
“That’s how we’re going to help farmers get out of this in the long-term,” she said.
Although Scott acknowledged that better internet access is “part of the equation” in developing Vermont’s economy, he said it’s hardly the silver bullet.
He noted that 90 percent of Vermont’s communities already have broadband access, including towns like Newport and Springfield, which are farther away from Vermont’s biggest urban centers.
“It’s not the entire answer,” Scott said of internet connectivity. “We have to address some of the cost problems we have in the state, some of the affordability issues we face as a state.”
Scott’s economic strategy continues to be defined by his effort to prevent new tax hikes, fees and policies that would place additional costs on Vermonters and businesses operating in the state.
If re-elected, Scott said he would continue to oppose proposals to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour or create paid family leave programs, unless such programs were were voluntary. The paid family leave plan pitched in the last legislative session would have been funded by a payroll tax on employees.
Hallquist has blasted Scott for vetoing the minimum wage and paid family leave bills and called the state’s failure to hike the minimum wage to keep up with the cost of inflation a “systemic attack on the working class.”
“It’s a way to keep the money with the wealthy,” she said.
Scott criticized Hallquist — who is proposing a plan to offer free college tuition, and is championing a single payer health care system — for having a “knee jerk reaction” to raise taxes. She retorted that the incumbent governor’s approach to universally denying tax and fee increases would come back to bite him.
“A good business person doesn’t just do cost control, because cost control puts you out of business,” she said.
The governor boasted that during his first term, his administration prevented $71 million in property tax hikes, and it’s likely that the governor would continue to oppose any and all proposed tax increases in a second term.
But in an interview Friday, he acknowledged there is one factor that could make him think twice, and end his pledge against new taxes and fees: the state’s ever-growing debt from unpaid pensions.
“The elephant in the room so to speak is the unfunded liability for pensions that absorbs an incredible amount of money regardless of the growth of the economy,” he said. “So we have to weigh all that out and figure out if we can continue.”
He stressed that for now, he isn’t contemplating any new taxes, and that to sanction any additional levies would be an “absolute last resort.”
