I love Vermont.
I love that we don’t have any billboards but our VTtrans highway signs say things like: “camp in the woods, not the left lane”.
I love that we’ve got the only state capital without a McDonald’s but more farmers markets, breweries and coops per capita than any other state.
I love our town meeting tradition and the fact that there is never more than one degree of separation between you and anyone else in the state.
These aren’t just charming facts about Vermont. They reflect something much deeper about who we are.
We’ve always believed that communities matter more than corporations. That neighbors should know one another. That local businesses deserve to thrive. That our working lands should be protected. That democracy works best when ordinary people have a real voice in shaping the places they call home.
I believe Vermont already has everything we need to thrive.
We have incredibly skilled workers, innovative entrepreneurs, family farmers, extraordinary teachers, healthcare providers, artists, local businesses, and communities that know how to care for one another. Our greatest challenge isn’t that we lack talent, resources, or ideas. It’s that too much of the wealth we create leaves our communities instead of strengthening them.
For too long, we’ve been using the wrong economic playbook. We’ve been told that prosperity comes from attracting more people, more corporations, or more investment from somewhere else. I see it differently.
The future of Vermont won’t be built by waiting for prosperity to trickle down. It will be built by investing in the people, businesses, farms, and communities that are already here—creating an economy where more wealth is created here, stays here, and is shared more broadly. This is not about isolating ourselves but investing in ourselves, our strengths and our communities so that we can weather the storms ahead and lay the foundations for a more prosperous future.
That’s what this platform is about.
It’s one strategy to make Vermont more affordable, more resilient, and more democratic by putting more wealth, power, and decision-making back into the hands of Vermonters.
Because I really believe that together, we have everything we need to lead.
Together, we can strengthen Vermont’s economy from the bottom up by investing in local businesses, workers, farmers, entrepreneurs, and the industries of the future—creating good jobs, producing more of what we need here at home and keeping more wealth circulating in our communities instead of flowing to distant corporations and shareholders.
For too long, we’ve been using the wrong economic playbook. We’ve been told that Vermont’s future depends on attracting outside corporations, outside investment, and outside wealth. But Vermont isn’t struggling because we lack talented people, innovative businesses, or hardworking communities.
We’re rich in entrepreneurs, farmers, skilled workers, researchers, artists, creatives and communities that know how to solve problems together.
In fact, 99% of Vermont businesses are small businesses and about three-quarters are sole proprietors, yet too often our economic policies are designed around the needs of large corporations rather than the businesses that actually make up Vermont’s economy. That’s backwards. We should build a system where small businesses succeed because of our policies—not in spite of them.
The challenge is that too much of the wealth we create leaves Vermont. Every day, money flows out of our communities through profit oriented healthcare systems, corporate monopolies, national retail chains, online marketplaces, financial speculation, and distant shareholders. As wealth leaves, our small businesses struggle, wages stagnate, downtowns decline, and communities lose the power to shape their own future.
We can choose a different path.
Instead of competing to attract investment from somewhere else, we can invest in the people, businesses, industries, and communities that already make Vermont strong. By helping Vermont businesses grow, connecting local producers with local buyers, expanding local ownership, and producing more of the food, energy, housing, healthcare, building materials, and other essential goods we need here at home, we can create an economy that’s more prosperous, more affordable, and far more resilient.
When Vermont businesses buy from other Vermont businesses, the benefits multiply. A local farm that purchases equipment from a Vermont manufacturer, banks with a Vermont credit union, and hires local workers keeps that same dollar circulating through our communities again and again before it ever leaves the state. Strengthening these local supply chains is one of the most effective ways to create jobs, support small businesses, and build long-term prosperity.
This isn’t simply an economic development strategy.
It’s a strategy for strengthening Vermont’s economic self-determination.
This strategy isn’t about creating an entirely new economic development system. It’s about investing the resources we already spend more strategically.
We’ll redirect existing economic development subsidies away from expensive recruitment incentives for large corporations and toward investments that strengthen Vermont businesses, workers, farmers, and communities for the long term. Public financing, partnerships with Vermont credit unions, community lenders, and mission-driven investors, together with returns from community-owned investments, will help multiply these dollars while keeping capital rooted in Vermont.
Because locally owned businesses recirculate significantly more of every dollar they earn than absentee-owned corporations, these investments will strengthen local tax bases, create better jobs, expand entrepreneurship, and generate lasting returns for Vermont communities.
When more businesses are locally owned, more money stays in Vermont. That means better jobs, thriving downtowns, stronger family farms, lower energy costs, healthier local food systems, more opportunities for young people, and communities that are better prepared for economic disruptions, natural disasters, and political uncertainty.
Instead of depending on distant corporations to determine Vermont’s future, we’ll build an economy that gives Vermonters greater control over the things that matter most.
Together, we can create an economy where wealth is created here, stays here, and is shared more broadly building stronger communities, greater economic security, and a Vermont where every region has the opportunity to thrive.
By investing in permanently affordable housing, helping Vermonters build and own homes, and asking large corporate investors, private equity, luxury second homes, and commercial vacation rentals to contribute their fair share, we can lower housing costs, reduce property taxes, and put more homes back in the hands of the people and communities they were meant to serve.
Vermont communities are being hollowed out because too many Vermonters can no longer afford housing in the communities they love. Housing costs have skyrocketed, property taxes continue to rise, young families are struggling to buy their first home, seniors can’t find affordable places to downsize, and too many homes are being used as investments rather than places to live.
For decades, we’ve treated housing as an investment rather than a home. More homes are being purchased by investors, second-home owners, and corporations while working Vermonters are priced out of the communities they grew up in. At the same time, we haven’t invested enough in permanently affordable housing or made it easy enough for ordinary Vermonters to build, renovate, and own homes themselves.
We can choose a different path.
A resilient Vermont is one that has the capacity to house itself—investing in local materials, local workers, community ownership, and permanently affordable homes that remain affordable for generations to come. Across Vermont, organizations like the Champlain Housing Trust, one of the nation’s most successful community land trusts, have shown that limited-equity homeownership works. Communities are leading the way through housing cooperatives, cohousing developments and innovative local projects like Weathervane United in Lincoln, which has provided affordable senior housing through community leadership for decades, while in Brandon, VT local builders are transforming an abandoned high school into co-housing while training volunteers in basic carpentry and reclaiming building materials.
Instead of treating these as isolated success stories, we can make them the foundation of Vermont’s housing strategy.
Together, we can put homes back in the hands of Vermonters by investing in permanently affordable housing, rebuilding our capacity to build and renovate homes locally, reducing property taxes, and ensuring more homes are owned by the people and communities they were meant to serve.
Revenue from taxes on private equity, large corporate housing, second homes, vacation rentals and luxury estates will be reinvested to reduce property taxes for Vermont residents and expand permanently affordable housing. We’ll also leverage state and federal housing programs, revolving loan funds, municipal partnerships, and mission-driven investment to help communities create housing that remains affordable for generations.
By taxing digital advertisements, data monetization and large online marketplaces (see Ban AI Data Centers & Retake Control from Big Tech Policy)
By investing in local builders, technical education, Vermont-made building materials, adaptive reuse, and community ownership, we’ll keep more construction dollars circulating in Vermont’s economy while reducing long-term housing costs.
We can build a Vermont where homes are owned by people, neighborhoods still know their neighbors, and every community has the opportunity to thrive. By making it easier for Vermonters to rent, buy, build, and remain in their homes, we’ll lower housing costs and property taxes, help young families put down roots, enable older Vermonters to age with dignity in their communities, reduce homelessness, and create good-paying jobs in the skilled trades.
Just as importantly, this plan will rebuild Vermont’s capacity to house itself—strengthening local builders, supporting Vermont-made building materials, expanding community ownership, and keeping more wealth circulating in our towns instead of flowing to distant investors. Housing should create community wealth, strengthen local economies, and give every Vermonter the freedom and security of a place to call home.
For generations, Vermont’s schools have been more than places where children go to class, they are the heart of our communities.
Yet instead of building on this strength, Vermont’s current education strategy is focused on consolidating districts, closing rural schools, and sending children farther from their communities. Consolidation changes where children attend school, but it does little to address the core drivers of rising education costs, including rising healthcare costs, growing student mental-health needs, and the increasing expectation that schools respond to challenges created far beyond the classroom.
We can choose a different path.
A resilient Vermont is one where every community has the power and capacity to meet more of its own needs. Schools are one of the few public institutions that still exist in nearly every town. Instead of concentrating more services, resources, and decision-making farther away, we can strengthen the institutions that already bring people together.
Building on the Vermont community school pilots in 2021, community schools integrate primary care, social workers, mental-health support, childcare, food access, continuing adult education and other nonprofit and state services into our schools as a way to improve educational outcomes while investing in the social, economic, and civic infrastructure that makes communities stronger.
This isn’t just about bringing more services into schools. It’s about redistributing power back to communities.
Community schools give towns more capacity to solve problems locally. They make it easier for parents to work by expanding childcare, improve workforce participation through continuing adult education and job training, reduce healthcare costs through prevention and create stable local jobs. Instead of dozens of community service organizations operating separately, schools become shared civic infrastructure where people, ideas, and resources come together.
They also make Vermont more resilient. Strong communities are built on strong relationships and trusted public institutions. Community schools create year-round places where neighbors learn together, support one another, organize, and respond during floods, public health emergencies, and other crises. They become the foundation of stronger local economies, healthier communities, and more resilient democracy.
Vermont is already showing what’s possible. Winooski has connected schools with health services, food access, and family support. Newport has expanded health, wellness, and early-childhood services through the state’s Community Schools initiative. Small rural schools like Peacham Elementary have integrated childcare directly into the school building, helping young families remain in their communities. Instead of treating these as isolated success stories, we can make them the foundation of Vermont’s education strategy.
Research shows this approach works. Well-designed community schools improve attendance, academic achievement, graduation rates, family engagement, student health, and school climate because they address the barriers to learning before they become crises.
Community schools aren’t about asking education property taxpayers to fund more services. They’re about making better use of the public investments we’re already making.
Today, healthcare, childcare, workforce development, mental health, nutrition, family services, and education are often funded separately, delivered separately, and located separately—even when they serve the same children and families. Community schools bring these investments together, allowing every public dollar to accomplish more.
The Agency of Education, Department of Health, Department for Children and Families, Department of Mental Health, Department of Labor, Agency of Commerce and Community Development, community health centers, designated agencies, nonprofits, and philanthropic partners will each continue funding the services connected to their missions. The difference is that those services will increasingly be delivered together through trusted community institutions rather than fragmented across multiple buildings and bureaucracies.
A child cannot learn when they are hungry, sick, frightened, unhoused, or unable to access the support they need. A parent cannot fully participate in the workforce when there is no childcare or don’t have access to the social services they need. An elder cannot remain connected to the community when every gathering place disappears. And a rural town cannot attract young families or build a thriving local economy after losing its school.
Community Schools allow us to address these challenges together.
By bringing services to the places families already know and trust, we can improve educational outcomes, reduce pressure on teachers, make health care and childcare easier to access, support local jobs and businesses, reduce isolation, and diversify the funding that sustains our public schools.
The answer to rising costs and struggling communities is not to withdraw more public institutions from rural Vermont. It is to make those institutions work better for all of us.
Instead of consolidating our public schools out of existence, we will protect and invest in them as the foundations every child, family, and community needs to thrive.
Artificial intelligence is one of the greatest threats of our time, left unchecked it risks concentrating extraordinary wealth and power in the hands of a small number of billionaires while accelerating mass layoffs, expanding surveillance, increasing energy demand, spreading misinformation, and weakening democracy itself.
A handful of corporations now control the computing infrastructure, cloud services, digital marketplaces, communications platforms, advertising networks, personal data, and AI systems that increasingly shape our economy and public life. Their decisions influence what information people see, how businesses compete, who gets hired, how workers are managed, and even how governments function. No democracy can remain truly free when so much of its communications infrastructure and economic activity depends upon corporations accountable primarily to shareholders rather than the public.
Technology is not an inevitable force acting upon us. It is the result of human choices, public investment and political rules. We can choose an economy in which technology gives people more time, security, knowledge and democratic power—not one in which it concentrates wealth, replaces human relationships and places our communities under permanent surveillance
Vermont has already demonstrated national leadership by strengthening consumer privacy protections and even advanced some of the most ambitious data privacy and AI data center bills before they were vetoed by our current Governor. Just as previous generations confronted monopolies in railroads, oil, banking, and telecommunications, our generation must take on the concentration of wealth and power by artificial intelligence and big tech before it’s too late.
Vermont can be a leader and work with other states to build common standards, coordinate enforcement, restore competition, and reclaim democratic control over the technologies shaping our future.
There is a reason that the federal government keeps trying to prevent states from regulating AI- it’s because we have real power and it’s critical that we use it now.
Many of these reforms establish new rules and protections rather than creating significant new spending. Investments in cybersecurity, digital resilience, community broadband, local journalism, and public-interest technology will be financed by ensuring that the technology companies extracting enormous value from Vermonters finally contribute their fair share.
Taxes on digital advertising, data monetization, dominant online marketplaces, and AI infrastructure will serve two purposes: they will help discourage business models that extract wealth, data, and economic activity from Vermont communities while generating revenue to invest in the digital infrastructure and public institutions that strengthen our democracy. Those revenues will be reinvested in community broadband, cybersecurity, local journalism, open-source technologies, public-interest innovation, and programs that help Vermont businesses compete and encourage Vermonters to buy local whenever possible.
Technology should give people more freedom, security, and opportunity—not less.
This plan will protect Vermonters’ privacy, strengthen democracy, create good-paying jobs in cybersecurity and public-interest technology, expand access to secure digital infrastructure, support independent local journalism, and help local businesses compete more fairly against global technology monopolies.
By investing in digital resilience, public-purpose innovation, and democratic technology, we’ll keep more wealth, knowledge, and innovation rooted in Vermont while reducing our dependence on corporations whose business models often undermine local communities, workers, and democratic institutions.
Together, we’ll build a future where technology strengthens our local economy, expands freedom, protects our rights, and gives Vermonters greater control over their own data, digital infrastructure, and economic future—ensuring that technology serves people and communities, not the other way around.
Together, we can rebuild small-town medicine by making primary care free, strengthening community healthcare, and ensuring every Vermonter has access to trusted care close to home while laying the foundation for a universal healthcare system.
For generations, healthcare in Vermont was rooted in relationships. Families knew their doctor, local hospitals and independent pharmacies served as anchors of their communities, and people could receive care close to home from providers who understood their lives.
Today, that system is disappearing. Rural practices are closing, independent pharmacies are struggling, healthcare workers are burning out, and too many Vermonters delay care because they simply can’t afford it. At the same time, doctors and nurses spend more time navigating insurance paperwork than caring for patients, while our healthcare system spends billions treating illness after people become sick instead of investing in the care that keeps people healthy.
We can choose a different path.
Across Vermont, communities are already showing us what the future of healthcare can look like. Towns including Thetford, Tunbridge, Norwich, Hartland, Hartford, Strafford, Reading, and West Windsor have established Community Nurse programs that bring trusted healthcare professionals directly into their communities. These nurses help people manage chronic illnesses, coordinate care, make home visits, connect families with local services, prevent unnecessary emergency room visits, and help older Vermonters remain healthy and independent in their own homes.
We will build on these successful models by ensuring every Vermont community has access to a locally based Community Health Team—including primary care providers, community nurses, mental health professionals, community health workers, care coordinators, and independent local pharmacies—working together to keep people healthy before small problems become expensive crises.
By making primary and preventive care free and investing in community-based healthcare, Vermont can improve health outcomes while dramatically reducing the need for costly emergency room visits, avoidable hospitalizations, and expensive specialist care. Every dollar we invest upstream in prevention saves money downstream by reducing the burden of chronic disease, improving mental health, supporting healthy aging, and helping people receive care before conditions become emergencies.
This approach also makes Vermont more resilient. Nearly one-third of our state budget depends on federal funding, leaving our healthcare system vulnerable to changing federal priorities and corporate consolidation. By strengthening local healthcare providers, rebuilding small-town medicine, supporting independent pharmacies, and expanding community-based care, we can ensure every Vermonter has access to trusted healthcare close to home regardless of pending federal cuts to Medicaid and attacks on public health by this administration.
This isn’t simply about expanding healthcare.
It’s about rebuilding a healthcare system that rewards keeping people healthy instead of treating illness after it has already become a crisis.
And by creating a universal system of publicly funded primary and preventive care, we’ll lay the foundation for a future where every Vermonter has access to comprehensive universal healthcare—building it step by step on a strong, affordable, community-based foundation.
This plan will be funded through our Fair Share Tax Proposal, which asks the wealthiest Vermonters to contribute the equivalent cuts from the Big Beautiful Bill. Those who have benefited most from decades of rising wealth and tax cuts should help ensure every Vermonter can access the healthcare they need.
At the same time, we’re not simply spending more—we’re spending smarter.
Today, billions of healthcare dollars are consumed by insurance administration, fragmented funding systems, and treating preventable illnesses after they become expensive crises. By making primary and preventive care universally available, paying providers directly instead of through fee-for-service insurance billing, and investing in community-based care, Vermont can reduce avoidable emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and the long-term costs of chronic disease with estimated cost savings of 300 million a year for the state.
This approach allows every public dollar to accomplish more: improving health, reducing waste, strengthening local healthcare, and laying the financial foundation for a true universal healthcare system.
Together, we can build a healthcare system where every Vermonter has a trusted healthcare team close to home and never has to choose between getting the care they need and paying the bills.
This plan will make it easier for families to see a doctor before small problems become serious illnesses, help older Vermonters remain healthy and independent in their communities, improve access to mental healthcare, strengthen independent rural clinics and pharmacies, reduce pressure on emergency rooms and hospitals, and allow healthcare professionals to spend more time caring for patients instead of navigating insurance paperwork.
By rebuilding small-town medicine, expanding successful Community Nurse programs, and making primary and preventive care free for every Vermonter, we’ll create healthier communities, lower long-term healthcare costs, strengthen Vermont’s resilience, and restore the trusted local healthcare relationships that have always been at the heart of our communities.
Just as importantly, we’ll demonstrate that healthcare works best when it’s organized around keeping people healthy—not maximizing profits—and take the first practical step toward a universal healthcare system that guarantees high-quality care for every Vermonter.
For generations, Vermont has aspired to a form of democracy rooted in community, where neighbors come together to deliberate, solve problems, and shape the future of the places they call home. That tradition reminds us that democracy is strongest when people meaningful opportunities to listen to one another, work through disagreements, and help shape the decisions that affect their lives.
Our challenge today is to build on those strengths while ensuring that every Vermonter can participate fully. Democracy should be accessible to everyone, regardless of disability, age, language, work schedule, caregiving responsibilities, transportation, or where they live.
Today, our democracy faces two interconnected crises.
Across America, wealth and power have become increasingly concentrated in Washington, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and a handful of multinational corporations. Decisions affecting our lives are increasingly made farther away from the people who live with the consequences. At the same time, rising authoritarianism, political polarization, mass surveillance, and growing distrust in public institutions are weakening faith in democracy itself.
Here in Vermont, many people also feel they no longer have a meaningful voice in the decisions that shape their communities. Too often, agencies work in silos, public investment is organized around bureaucracies instead of outcomes, and communities are invited to comment only after major decisions have already been made instead of helping shape them from the beginning.
We can choose a different path.
The promise of our federal system was that states would serve as laboratories of democracy and bulwarks against authoritarianism. Vermont has an opportunity to demonstrate that the answer isn’t less democracy, it’s better democracy: democracy that is more accessible, more deliberative, more participatory, and more empowering.
Across Vermont, people with very different perspectives are asking for a greater voice in the decisions that affect their lives. Whether communities are asking for a greater voice over education, land-use planning, economic development, or Vermont’s long-term future, there is a growing recognition that people don’t just want different policies, they want a different relationship with government. While these movements don’t agree on every issue, they reflect a shared belief that the people most affected by decisions should have a meaningful role in making them.
Communities across the United States and around the world are already demonstrating what this can look like. Wales adopted a Future Generations Act requiring the government to work toward long-term goals identified through public engagement. Ireland used Citizens’ Assemblies to break political deadlock on some of its most challenging issues. Following the financial crisis, cities across Spain expanded participatory budgeting to rebuild public trust by giving residents a direct voice in how scarce public resources were invested. Washington and other states are adapting deliberative democracy to strengthen public decision-making. Vermont doesn’t need to copy these models, but we can learn from them while building on our own democratic tradition and becoming a leader in new forms of governance and democracy that challenge the rise of Fascism and centralized control.
Together, we can build a Vermont where democracy isn’t simply about choosing leaders every few years. It becomes a way of governing that gives every Vermonter a meaningful voice, helps communities solve problems together, strengthens trust across differences, and ensures government is truly of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Most of these reforms improve how the government works rather than creating entirely new programs. By coordinating existing public investments around shared wellbeing goals, strengthening local decision-making, improving collaboration between agencies, and reducing duplication, Vermont can build a more democratic, transparent, and effective government while making better use of existing resources.
Many of the investments proposed throughout this platform, including Community Schools, universal primary care, community wealth building, and local food and energy systems, also strengthen democracy by giving communities greater capacity to solve problems together and reducing dependence on distant political and economic institutions.
Democracy is strongest when people have both the opportunity and the power to shape the future of their communities.
This plan will give Vermonters a stronger voice in public decisions, ensure our government is more transparent and accountable, strengthen trust in public institutions, and ensure communities have the resources and power they need to solve more problems locally. By planning for future generations, measuring what truly matters, and putting more decision-making power into the hands of the people, we can build a government that is more responsive, more resilient, and truly governed by the people and for the people.
Just as importantly, it will help Vermont demonstrate that democracy can be more than a system for choosing leaders. It can become a way of governing that empowers people, strengthens communities, and ensures that every generation inherits a state that is more free, more resilient, and more democratic than the one before it.
Vermont is already showing the country what’s possible. Through initiatives like Farm to Plate Initiative, Farm to School, Universal School Meals, Crop Cash, Farm Share, Vermonters Feeding Vermonters, our food hubs, cooperatives, and the extraordinary work of farmers across the state, we’ve become a national leader in local food systems. Over the last decade, Farm to Plate helped double local food consumption, through a networked, integrated supply chain approach. Proving that when we invest in local agriculture, we strengthen our economy, our communities, and our resilience.
Now it’s time to build on that success.
Today, too much of our food system is controlled by a handful of multinational corporations that dominate food processing, distribution, manufacturing, and retail. That concentration of power leaves farmers with less bargaining power, sends billions of food dollars out of Vermont every year, and makes our communities more vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. At the same time, industrial food production and weak national standards around chemicals and contaminants have contributed to growing concerns about the quality of the food we eat and its impact on our health.
Healthy food is one of the most powerful forms of preventive healthcare. By investing in local and regional food production, regenerative agriculture, and stronger food standards where Vermont has the authority to act, we can improve public health, strengthen our farm economy, keep more wealth circulating locally, and ensure every Vermonter has access to safe, healthy food.
A resilient Vermont is one that has the capacity to feed itself.
We’ll build on successful investments like Farm to Plate by directing more public purchasing toward Vermont farms and food producers, strengthening state agricultural partnerships, expanding cooperatives, and investing in food infrastructure that creates lasting economic returns.
Our broader Community Wealth Building strategy will keep more of the food dollar circulating in Vermont by supporting local processing, distribution, manufacturing, and cooperative businesses instead of relying on distant corporations. As more food is grown, processed, purchased, and consumed locally, we strengthen our farm economy, create good-paying jobs, improve public health, and reduce our dependence on fragile national supply chains.
Food is one of life’s greatest joys. It’s how we celebrate, care for one another, share our cultures, and build community. Every Vermonter deserves access to fresh, healthy, delicious food, and every farmer deserves the opportunity to make a good living producing it.
By investing in local food systems, we’ll make nutritious food more affordable and accessible, improve public health, and reduce diet-related disease by making healthy food the easy choice. We’ll strengthen our rural communities by creating good-paying jobs across the food economy, keeping more food dollars circulating locally, and ensuring family farms can thrive for generations.
Just as importantly, agriculture has the power to heal our landscapes. By supporting regenerative farming, healthy soils, clean water, and biodiversity, we can leave Vermont’s land healthier than we found it while strengthening our resilience to climate change.
Together, we can build a Vermont where healthy food nourishes our people, farming sustains our communities, and our land continues to flourish for generations to come.
