Feeling overridden? Join House candidates at a town hall event
June 28, 2024 | By Elizabeth Brown UPDATE: The candidate forum in Huntington on July 11 has been cancelled due to flood recovery. The event may be rescheduled for later this month.
The retired couple who spent their whole career saving up to stay here and realizing they can’t pay their property taxes.
The single utilities professional from Ohio who backs out of a job they accepted because she can’t find affordable housing.
The manager at a high-end resort, serving wealthy tourists, headed back to Wisconsin because he can’t make ends meet here.
The IT professional packing up his family of five to head south where they aren’t choosing between his wife staying home with three young children or working because it is impossible to live here anymore without two full-time working parents.
The HR manager for a state university off to South Carolina to make enough to take care of her family and live in a house that costs half as much.
I can keep going, but we hear these stories. Every. Single. Day. As do you, because they are your stories. Our stories.
I started following the legislature more closely this biennium than in years past. I had faithfully assumed, like you perhaps, that we were being fairly and sensibly governed. Then I started digging into the issues and the bills, including the education-funding train wreck, a mess ten years in the making. In January, I looked at my husband, having lost any remaining faith, and said, “Either I get involved, or we leave.”
Lawmakers have a social contract with us to provide sensible solutions, to provide accountability, and more than anything else, make sure we are not faced with the choice, or lack thereof, of having to surrender our home.
We are all asking: How is it that our state legislators are not seeing and hearing our pleas for reason? Or are they choosing not to? The recent veto session painfully illuminated the fact that those voting “Yea” to override the governor’s vetoes are not listening to you and me.
We must be reasonable about what we are fiscally capable of now, not after yet another study committee. It is not until we stabilize and grow our communal and fiscal strength – ensuring our sustainability – that we will be better equipped to extend the kindness and connections we all care about and only then can we responsibly broaden our environmental and social responsibility reach.
I made the decision: I am staying and fighting for what we love. I care too much to run away. And so, I am standing before you, as a Democratic primary candidate for the House of Representatives, asking for your support and your trust.
Running for office was not an easy decision for me nor my family. However, having expressed to my children that when you see something going terribly wrong and you have the capabilities and capacity to help, you must step up.
I have arranged for a meeting space for us to gather, to have our voices heard, to share ideas. Please join me.
We see what happens when we are governed without accountability. You do have a choice on August 13. We don’t have to accept the status quo, but I cannot do this alone. I need you, my fellow citizens of Waterbury, Huntington, Buels Gore and Bolton. We can fix this.
Please join me and our neighbors upstairs at the Huntington Town Library on July 11 at 7 p.m. (Stop by Beaudry’s before and say hi to Mike and Linda!) and, again, at the Main Street fire station in Waterbury on July 17 at 7 p.m.
I have extended an invite to all Washington-Chittenden House candidates and they have accepted, saying they plan to attend.
Your voice matters. Your vote matters. And the Democratic primary matters this year. Vote now by absentee ballot or in person on August 13. Looking forward to seeing you at the town hall events.
Elizabeth Brown
Elizabeth Brown is a Democratic candidate for the Washington-Chittenden House district of the Vermont House of Representatives. She also serves as a Waterbury representative on the Harwood Unified Union School Board.