In Barre, there’s one thing that Democrats, Republicans and independents can agree on: Money is the root of what makes it difficult to live in Vermont today.
At least, that’s the argument four candidates hoping to represent Barre City in the Vermont House are making as the Nov. 5 election approaches. Whether it’s high taxes, the rising cost of housing and other needs, or the expensive bill coming due for flood recovery and resilience, each candidate cited affordability as a key issue they’d like to address.
That universal agreement might stand out after this year’s legislative session, which was marked by battles between Republican Gov. Phil Scott and the Democratic supermajority, particularly over state spending.
And Barre’s House race could have an impact at the Statehouse, where Democrats hope to hold on to their outsize majorities. The party currently holds both seats in the two-member House district, but with the retirement of Rep. Peter Anthony, D-Barre City, Republicans and their allies could put it in play.
The race includes two Democrats, incumbent Rep. Jonathan Williams and Edward “Teddy” Waszazak, as well as two candidates endorsed by Scott, Republican Michael Boutin and independent Carol Dawes.
Delve deeper into each candidate’s position on the cost of living, and you’ll find fundamental divides over the causes and solutions to the issue.
To Williams and Waszazak, the solution lies in raising taxes on the wealthy and making investments that can curb expenses for the lowest-income Vermonters.
To Boutin, affordability means lowering taxes and cutting back on programs he believes do not help Vermonters in the long term. And to Dawes, the key is overhauling state systems and making better uses of economic development strategies to boost growth in Barre.
There’s other overlap among their views: Each expressed a keen interest in reexamining the state’s education funding system as property taxes continue to rise at a rapid clip.
And they all profess a commitment to supporting Barre City, a working-class municipality that was hard-hit by major flooding over the last two summers.
“In the aftermath of two floods in 365 days … Barre’s needs are severe,” Waszazak said, including big budget holes and “tens of millions of dollars of flood mitigation projects that we need to do if Barre is going to survive for another 100 years the way it is now.”
The Democrats
On a September morning, Barre’s North End still showed the signs of the flooding that swept through it in July 2023 and, to a slightly lesser extent, in July 2024. Homes remained visibly damaged or under various stages of construction. The former home of the Salvation Army store sat vacant.
At the same time, a different trend has affected Barre’s outlook in recent years: A wave of newcomers has bought up homes in town. Longtime residents have noted that change could cause a shift in Barre’s political dynamics.
It’s noteworthy, then, that Barre’s two Democratic candidates both moved to the city within the past 10 years. Williams and Waszazak share another point in common: Both have worked at nonprofits devoted to food security — Williams as a grants manager for the Vermont Foodbank and Waszazak as a lobbyist for Hunger Free Vermont.
Williams said his experience at the foodbank inspired his initial run for the House. He wanted to streamline the process by which small nonprofits obtain state grants. “Very naively, I thought, well, I can get that fixed,” he said. The legislation he sponsored passed the House but stalled in the Senate.
Williams has claimed success with other initiatives, particularly as a member of the Flood Caucus, a coalition of legislators from flood-damaged regions across Vermont. The group worked to give flooded municipalities a break on their portion of the education property taxes they lost due to flood abatements.
Waszazak, a former member of the Barre City Council, also touted his record of bringing bills to the finish line for Hunger Free Vermont. He said he led the organization’s successful fight to require Vermont schools to provide free breakfast and lunch to children, regardless of their family’s income.
“One of the reasons I’m running is because we’ve passed a lot of really good policies to combat food insecurity in Vermont, but there is a long way to go talking about the affordability crisis,” which affects Vermonters’ ability to afford food, he said.
Waszazak said he plans to step down from that lobbying role if he were elected to the Legislature.
Scott’s allies
Dawes and Boutin have longer backgrounds in the region than their Democratic opponents. Dawes grew up in Northfield and worked on dairy farms into her 20s, then moved into the theater world in New York City. She returned to Vermont to become the executive director of the Barre Opera House.
Dawes served on the Barre City Council for a few years before running for city clerk and treasurer, a role she held for over a decade before retiring this year. She said it gave her a unique perspective on collaborating with people across party lines that helped inspire her run as an independent.
“The clerk/treasurer position is completely nonpartisan,” she said. “It is about as independent as you can get. And that really meshes with my political philosophies, public service philosophies, that you need to be able to have conversations with everybody.”
When it comes to her political views, she said she hates to put herself in “buckets” but generally described herself as socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
Boutin’s ties to Barre go back several generations. Except for a “moment of weakness” when his parents moved to Connecticut, he said he has spent his entire life in the Granite City. He has worked as a claims examiner for the National Life Group for 16 years while serving on the Barre City Council and the school board.
In May, he narrowly lost his seat on the council to challenger Amanda Gustin. He said it was the “push” he needed to run for state representative instead.
On the money
Boutin said he has seen the impact of “terrible legislation” on schools firsthand. Barre was the last school district to pass its school budget this year after three failed votes. He blamed the not-quite-fully integrated consolidation of Barre City and Barre Town schools for the problem.
“When they do legislation to consolidate, they come close, but they fail to hit the mark, and you can see that impact in Barre City and Barre Town,” he said.
The three other candidates said they were also in favor of making education funding, and the corresponding rise in property taxes, a priority for the coming legislative session. Dawes said she wanted to explore the idea of a more centralized education system — even a statewide teacher contract, if need be.
“We can’t afford to have schools with classes of 10 kids per grade, because we can’t maintain those physical plants, those buildings,” she said. “We can’t have the administration associated with all these little school systems. We need to find economies of scale.”
Williams and Waszazak took a more measured tack, saying that they would like to see the recommendations of an education commission, expected in a few months. Williams suspected that the suggestions would include a switch from a property tax-based system to an income-based one.
When knocking on doors around town, he said, he hears, “‘I’m on a fixed income. I’m retired. Why should I pay for schools?’ Well, if you’re on a fixed income and we have an income-based tax structure for education funding, then you’re good, because you wouldn’t be taxed as highly,” Williams said.
The two Democrats also supported restoring Vermont’s highest tax bracket, which was removed in 2018, claiming that it would help ease the burden of those taxes on lower-income Vermonters.
Are those making $45,000 to $95,000 a year “feeling an affordability crunch in Vermont?” Waszazak asked. “Absolutely. But those who aren’t are making $500,000 plus. They’re not feeling the crunch, and those folks can afford to pay in a little bit.”
For his part, Boutin criticized the Legislature for “ravaging” the poor while claiming to help them. He had harsh words for the clean heat standard, a proposed framework intended to incentivize the transition to less-polluting methods of heating.
Critics of the standard, including Scott, have said it does so by penalizing lower-income Vermonters who can’t afford the switch with additional fees on their heating bill.
“(The standard’s) not going to affect your upper-echelon individual making $100,000 that has a heat pump,” he said. “That’s going to affect your mother, who is working 60 hours to put milk in her refrigerator and barely covering the expenses for rent, electricity and heat” and can’t afford a heat pump.
Dawes said she was “conflicted” about the clean heat standard. “I agree with what it’s trying to do. I don’t necessarily agree on how it’s proposing to do it,” she said.
She said its potential fees could be a “regressive” tax on people with aging homes, including many Barre residents. Half of Barre City’s housing units were built before 1939, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s double the Vermont average.
After the floods
Barre is experiencing other housing issues plaguing the state, too. The city lost dozens of units during the flood, exacerbating an existing housing shortage. Barre Mayor Thom Lauzon — who is also one of the city’s largest property developers — told VTDigger in May that the high cost of new construction has stunted housing growth.
There are some reasons for optimism amid the struggle. All of the candidates praised a new Barre project to sell a little-used parking lot to Downstreet Housing & Community Development for $1, allowing the organization to build new housing there.
The Seminary Street project would provide 32 new housing units, according to city manager Nicolas Storellicastro. The city has a letter of intent in place with Downstreet and hopes to begin the groundbreaking next year.
Boutin and Dawes said they would be interested in exploring another avenue of promoting new housing: extending the model of Tax Increment Financing districts to new types of projects, such as private homes.
The financing system provides municipalities with a break on the taxes they send to the state so they can make infrastructure improvements that can further development, and, in theory, provide additional sources of tax revenue in the long term.
TIF districts have come under fire in recent years, with a state audit finding “substantial mistakes” in Burlington’s implementation of the program.
But Dawes, the administrator of the Barre City TIF district, said most critics of the concept “aren’t making the connections” of how the financing would eventually put more money in the state’s coffers.
“All they’re seeing is that at the end of private development there’s an increase in taxes, and the state isn’t getting their portion,” she said. “And my response is: yet. The state isn’t getting their portion yet, and if there hadn’t been a TIF district, the state wouldn’t get anything additional at all.”
Boutin said that a TIF district-like program could help homeowners who want to raise their homes to mitigate their future flood risk. “I would rather build people up … than throw them out,” he said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency provides funds for homeowners to leave their homes entirely through a buyout program, but that presents its own problems for the city. Since the city can’t develop on bought-out properties, each buyout is a “permanent hit to our grand list,” Williams said.
Storellicastro said the city had accepted 30 buyouts out of 68 applications.
That leads to the question of how the state can help local communities getting walloped by flood bills. Waszazak said that there were “two things communities really need after flooding: contractors to help clean up and rebuild, and big bags of cash.”
“Nobody knows better than the residents of Barre City, than Plainfield, than Lyndonville… what their communities need and what projects are going to be most impactful for them,” he said.
That might mean a lot of money is needed at the state level. But “not doing anything about climate change is more expensive for taxpayers” in the long term, he added.
Addressing homelessness
Candidates also addressed the debate over the future of the motel housing program, which has removed hundreds of people over the past few weeks from motels as their benefits expire.
Waszazak said both the Legislature and the administration have fallen short when it comes to helping the program’s beneficiaries.
“The motel program has been alive and rolling for four years now, and there has still been no actual plan for how to get out of it,” he said. Until the state has that plan, he said, it should continue to house the remaining recipients, who are some of Vermont’s most vulnerable people, since the program is designed to support special populations, such as people with disabilities.
Dawes agreed the state had “kicked the can down the road” too many times on finding a long-term solution to housing Vermonters experiencing homelessness.
Boutin took a more hard-line stance: He believes the state should end the motel program without having an alternative in place, beyond programs for people with mental health or substance use disorder issues. “It’s not affordable and, based on what I’m seeing, it’s not helping,” he said.
“This gets into, what is our responsibility?” he said. “This is a problem that we have inflicted on ourselves.”
With Scott or against him?
After a legislative session during which the governor traded barbs with legislative leaders over who is more responsible for toxic political divisions, one question was guaranteed to divide Barre’s candidates: How do you feel, exactly, about Gov. Scott?
“When it comes to sound bites, the administration and Phil Scott have the advantage, because it’s so easy to say ‘cut taxes, cut taxes,’ and not have any real solution for affordability,” said Williams, a member of the Democratic majority.
Waszazak had similar sentiments. He pointed to Scott’s absence from a high-stakes meeting in June during which executive branch and legislative leaders sought to overcome an impasse over property taxes. “That’s not negotiating,” Waszazak said.
“Nor do I think that just issuing vetoes that he knows will or would be overridden is also not good policy,” he said.
Dawes, by contrast, gave a spirited defense of the governor, even though she hasn’t joined Scott’s party. “I think he’s in a hard place because of the fact that he’s trying to … maintain services with the limited resources that a small state like Vermont has,” she said.
She said she admired his decision to break with his own party’s base over gun legislation. “He has proven that he can act on behalf of the people,” she said.
Scott endorsed both Dawes and Boutin in the race, according to the governor’s campaign manager, Jason Maulucci. That decision has led to some debate over Boutin’s positions on social issues. Boutin decried a recent blog post attacking him for his lack of support for the Black Lives Matter flag and his vote against an LGBTQ+ bar, Fox Market, buying a property in Barre.
He said he led a petition attempt against the sale to Fox Market only because he was opposed to selling the Wheelock House at all.
Boutin said that he did, in fact, back a measure to fly the Black Lives Matter flag. He voted in favor of an initiative to fly 23 flags, including Black Lives Matter, in 2020, then later proposed a Town Meeting Day referendum that would remove all non-official flags from city property entirely.
Asked about his thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement, Boutin said he agreed that “Black lives matter,” but that he is not supportive of the organization Black Lives Matter. “This is what I get confused about with the question and the issue,” he said.
He emphasized that he has remained civil with his political opponents in Barre before. “I don’t have a problem working with people that are good people,” he said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: In Barre’s battleground House district, candidates focus on affordability after the floods.