Windsor County senate hopefuls make final push before primary

They may all be members from the same political party, but the four Democrats competing in next Tuesday’s primary for Windsor County’s three seats in the Vermont Senate have strikingly different views on several of the key issues.

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Windsor Senate Hopefuls Make Final Push Before Primary Alison Clarkson (Photo Lynn Bohannon) Dick McCormack Courtsey photo Vermont Senate candidates Alice Nitka, center, and Dick McCormack, left, meet with voters at Hartford High School yesterday. Valley News - Channing Johnson Democrat Conor Kennedy, of Hartland, Vt., announces his candidacy for Windsor County Senate before supporters at Damon Hall in Hartland, Vt., on May 16, 2016. (Valley News - Geoff Hansen) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com. Purchase a reprint » By Matt Hongoltz-Hetling Valley News Staff Writer Wednesday, August 03, 2016 1 Print WOODSTOCK VT BETHEL VT HARTLAND VT ALISON CLARKSON CONOR KENNEDY ELECTION 2016 ALICE NITKA DICK MCCORMACK White River Junction — They may all be members from the same political party, but the four Democrats competing in next Tuesday’s primary for Windsor County’s three seats in the Vermont Senate have strikingly different views on several of the key issues likely to hit the Legislature next year –— education and the potential legalization of marijuana among them. Each of the four candidates —State Sens. Dick McCormack, 69, of Bethel; and Alice Nitka, 71, of Ludlow; state Rep. Alison Clarkson, 61, of Woodstock; and Conor Kennedy, 26, a Hartland resident who spent three years as deputy chief of staff for outgoing Senate President Pro Tempore John Campbell, D-Quechee — identified a different top priority for the upcoming legislative session. “The single most important issue in my mind in terms of our people is the opiate issue,” Nitka said. She said she would push for funding for more opiate addiction treatment centers in the state. “We’re losing more young people to drugs than we are to car accidents right now in Vermont, which is terrible.” “The main issue,” McCormack said, “is always the economy.” He said that, because he expects a tight state budget to continue to force the underfunding of legitimate needs, his priority is ensuring the welfare of the state’s children. “If you’re not taking care of children, you’re not taking care of the next generation,” he said. “They’re the people who are going to be paying the bills in 20 years.” For Clarkson, it was a tough choice –— she was the only candidate to mention climate change among her top priorities, but she eventually settled on poverty and its “impact on our families in health care, education and the judicial system in our communities.” Kennedy said his top issue was affordability, which he tied to wages that don’t keep pace with increases in the cost of living, taxes and health care premiums. Kennedy’s approach to addressing health care sounded reasonable — “it’s getting everyone in the room, and having them sit down and say ‘how we can make a model that works and that’s sustainable?’ ” — but the flip side of his dedication to keeping an open mind meant that he’s not sure of which solutions he’ll support. “I don’t want to box us in,” he said. “There are a lot of models out there.” While he supports the general goal of achieving universal health care coverage, Kennedy said he’ll be reserving judgment until he sees state reports on the possible expansion of health care coverage for primary health and for the state’s children. On health care, Nitka said she would be reluctant to back a state-based model, and instead leans toward a federal all-payer model, in which an accountable care organization represents all of Vermont’s medical providers. She said she wasn’t opposed to the single-payer system, but “certainly, as proposed, we couldn’t afford it.” McCormack, by contrast, said he supported a single-payer model, and said the task before the legislature is to come up with an approach that is more successful than the recent botched effort by the Shumlin administration. “I think we need to go back to the drawing board and do it once again,” he said. “People say, ‘How can we afford it?’ and my answer is, ‘How can we afford not doing it?’ ” Clarkson said she too was keeping an open mind about how to get to her goal of universal coverage, and was open to an all-payer system. “The benefits are clear,” she said. “It’s this final challenge of shifting away from employer-paid premiums.” Like McCormack, she said doing nothing is not an option. “The call to action is the cost of health care continuing to rise at an unsustainable rate,” she said. The candidates also weighed in on Act 46, the education reform bill passed last year in an effort to encourage school districts to consolidate their administrative structures as a means to bend the curve on education costs. The law has come under fire by educators, including many in the Upper Valley, in part because consolidated school districts must have uniform policies on school choice, which has put pressure on some towns to consider either adopting school choice, or giving it up as part of an otherwise ideal merger. A few of the candidates said they’d encountered widespread public confusion about the law, and had met voters who mistakenly think that it closes schools. “People are still worried that it means closing small schools, which it doesn’t,” Nitka said. “If you don’t want to close your small school, you don’t have to close it.” Nitka said she thinks the law needs to be given more of a chance to work and be evaluated, though she expects there to be tweaks this session. Nitka said she thinks the threat to school choice has been overstated. “They will not lose school choice,” she said. “I don’t believe that for a minute.” McCormack, who opposed Act 46 in the Senate, disagreed, saying the loss of local control that comes with consolidated administrative structures could set the stage for school closings. “Consolidation doesn’t mean closing schools, but in other parts of the country, it actually has been the effect,” he said. He said the bill needs a major overhaul. “There are communities out there that hate Act 46, but they have been acting in good faith to follow the law. I think it would be a mistake to just go pull the rug out from everybody and say we changed our minds,” he said. “However, we can address several of the most vexing problems.” He said he would favor grandfathering school choice in for families, and questioned the need for consolidation. Elements of the law bothered Kennedy — he said it’s important to preserve school choice for families that currently have it, some of who might have moved to a town or made major life decisions based on existing policies. He said he would support a review of the law to measure its impact and consider future changes. Kennedy said he would tackle education costs by encouraging more bulk purchases of heating oil and equipment, including school buses, to take advantage of bulk rates. Clarkson said that she expected changes to the law to address the unintentional impact on school choice, but that it’s important not to lose sight of the problem that led to the law’s passage in the first place — the high cost of education in Vermont. She said the burden for the low student-teacher ratios that tend to come with many unconsolidated districts should be borne by the communities. “If you want to continue to afford to educate in the fashion you’re doing without consolidating governance, you need to own that,” she said. On marijuana, Nitka was the only one of the four candidates who said she opposed the legalization of recreational marijuana use, a position she said came from her career as a social worker who saw the impact of drugs on Vermont families. She remains in support of medical marijuana, she said. Kennedy, Clarkson and McCormack all said they supported some form of legalization for adults, but all were cautious about rushing into a plan that hadn’t been fully vetted to protect against some of the problems that states like Washington and Colorado saw in the wake of their transitions to legalization. Both McCormack and Clarkson said they would favor a version of legalization that allows for limited use of home-grown plants, which was one of the main areas of disagreement between the House and the Senate when the issue was considered in the most recent legislative session. Kennedy said he would support home-grown marijuana plants, but that, in any plan, a portion of the proceeds would have to be used to support education campaigns targeted at children. The winners of the Democratic primary will go on to face three Republican candidates — Mark Donka, of Hartford; Randy Gray, of Springfield; and Jack Williams, of Weathersfield — who are unopposed in the Republican primary. Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.