At their first debate, Vermont gubernatorial candidates point to state’s woes but disagree about who’s responsible

Vermont’s leading candidates for governor agreed at a VTDigger debate Thursday evening that Vermont is worse off today than it has been in the recent past. But they disagreed, in many ways, on who exactly was to blame.

For incumbent Republican Gov. Phil Scott, who is seeking his fifth term in the state’s highest office, the answer was a familiar one: the Legislature’s Democratic supermajority, with whom his relationship has become especially fractious in recent years.

“The Legislature has passed a record number of bad bills over the last six, seven years,” Scott said, at one point referring to legislative leaders as “insatiable.” He added, “They have no interest in working together. They just want to score political points.”

Meanwhile, Scott’s Democratic/Progressive challenger, former Middlebury Selectboard member Esther Charlestin, argued that the buck, in fact, stopped with him.

“I struggle with our head of state blaming part-time (legislators),” Charlestin said. “Blaming them for where we are, when you’ve been in office for eight years — I struggle with that.”

Thursday’s virtual debate was the first between Scott and Charlestin, the two leading gubernatorial candidates, of the 2024 election cycle. In fact, both candidates said it was the first time they had ever met each other face-to-face, albeit over Zoom.

At some points, it was a terse introduction for the pair, who come to the race with vastly different levels of experience in government and a substantial imbalance, in Scott’s favor, in campaign fundraising with just weeks to go before Election Day on Nov. 5.

One sharp exchange came when the debate’s moderators pressed Scott on his highly controversial move in April to appoint the state’s current education secretary, Zoie Saunders, in an interim capacity despite the Senate’s refusal just moments earlier to confirm Saunders’ appointment.

Asked to explain his decision, Scott instead took quick issue with the Senate’s vote. “I thought it was a political hit job, myself. The fix was in,” he said, arguing that many senators did not give Saunders’ qualifications a fair shake.

The governor declined to say whether he would renominate Saunders to the post when her term expires in February 2025, adding “I don’t even know” if Saunders herself would want to go through the process again.

When Charlestin was asked what she made of the governor’s appointment — which two state senators recently challenged in court, so far unsuccessfully — Charlestin said she did not agree with it. Those senators, she said, “did the right thing” by suing the administration.
Charlestin was adamant, too, that “as an educator myself,” she would not renominate Saunders.

The governor then quickly piped up: “Have you ever met her, Esther?”

“No,” Charlestin responded. “I haven’t had the pleasure.”

Both Scott and the debate moderators zeroed in on Charlestin’s lack of electoral experience beyond a selectboard seat, noting that most governors had previously served at the highest levels of state government. Charlestin currently co-chairs the Vermont Commission on Women and runs an educational consulting firm.

“How can you assure Vermonters that you have the experience to run an $8.6 billion enterprise with more than 8,000 employees?” VTDigger Statehouse bureau chief Sarah Mearhoff asked.

Though she conceded her experience “doesn’t seem like a lot,” Charlestin emphasized that she would surround herself with the right people. “I am an expert at finding those experts. The good news is, the governor has a cabinet, right?”

“Just wondering — how many employees do you have, Esther?” Scott asked during an earlier exchange as he prodded her to explain her management experience.

“Well, it depends,” Charlestin replied. “Right now, I am a consultant all by myself. And, I also run another company with four employees.”

In the same vein, moderators pressed Scott on why he thought he should run for governor a fifth time. Only former Democratic Gov. Howard Dean, the state’s longest-serving chief executive, won as many elections.

In response, Scott echoed an earlier comment he made that Vermont was not on the right track — particularly, he said, over the past two years. He pointed to a new law that increased fees for services provided by the state Department of Motor Vehicles by 20% and, without specifying, to “regressive taxes that hurt low-income Vermonters and middle-income Vermonters.”

“I just feel as though somebody had to step up, and I didn’t have a lot of faith in who was going to run next at this point in time,” he said.

Scott also did not rule out running for a potential sixth term when asked by the moderators. In another answer, he said that, despite having vetoed more bills than any other governor in state history during his four terms, “there probably should have been more vetoed than that.”

Both candidates also gave differing answers when posed a question from VTDigger reader Chris Leslie about what they would do to address the rising cost of education and its impact on property taxes.

Scott called for “more structural reform” to how education is funded in the state and said that legislators had rejected “dozens of proposals” his administration put forward since he was first elected to office. Part of the answer, he said, is consolidating schools and school districts, as well as using “natural attrition” to reduce school staff costs.

Charlestin, meanwhile, said the state should raise more money to support education by increasing taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents, arguing “that is an avenue that we haven’t explored to the fullest.”

Moderators asked both candidates how they would go about building the at least 24,000 housing units the state is projected to need over the next five years. Charlestin had earlier on identified housing, per a moderator’s question, as one policy goal she thought Scott’s administration had not done enough to address during his tenure.

“There’s regulatory barriers there that won’t allow new folks to come in and really build new construction,” Charlestin said. “And so my administration would focus on that, not only in the urban areas, but also in rural areas as well.”

Scott said he agreed with the need for more regulatory reform and noted his opposition to a law passed over his veto this year that revised Vermont’s signature land use law , Act 250. The legislation relaxes Act 250’s reach in existing development centers — meant to encourage compact housing development — while also laying the groundwork for extending Act 250’s protections in areas deemed ecologically sensitive.

But Scott reiterated his past criticism that the legislation was a pro-housing bill only in name — calling it instead “a conservation bill.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: At their first debate, Vermont gubernatorial candidates point to state’s woes but disagree about who’s responsible .