by Bryan Marovich, for The Newport Dispatch

NEWPORT— Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amanda Janoo met with Newport city leaders Monday to hear their plans for rebuilding downtown, as she brought her campaign to a packed town hall at the Gateway Center.

Before the forum, Janoo sat down with Mayor Rick Ufford-Chase and other local leaders to hear about the city’s long-term plans, including downtown housing and the future of “the pit.”

The pit, formally the Newport Development Block, is a vacant lot off Main Street that was cleared more than a decade ago for a redevelopment project that collapsed amid the EB-5 investor fraud scandal. The Northeastern Vermont Development Association has since completed its $1.1 million purchase of the site, paid for largely with a $1 million Rural Industry Development Program grant from the Vermont Department of Economic Development, with NVDA covering the rest of the cost.

“It was a really great meeting, being able to meet with a lot of the local leaders and learning more about their long-term vision and plan for Newport,” Janoo told Newport Dispatch after the meeting.

What stood out most, she said, was how the city has enlisted local volunteers to take on its priorities, from finances to water and sewer lines.

The approach is meant “to really harness the collective wisdom, expertise and passion that already exists here to help Newport to achieve pretty ambitious goals quickly,” Janoo said.

City leaders have said housing will be the centerpiece of whatever is built there. The next step is a Phase II environmental assessment to determine whether the soil needs cleanup, while NVDA and the city work to find a developer and advance plans in line with Newport’s 2024 master plan.

“Acquiring the development block was a team effort, but now the real work begins to create something that adds value and vitality to downtown Newport,” NVDA Executive Director David Snedeker said when the sale closed.

The pit is itself a legacy of outside money gone wrong. Asked what homegrown development would look like for a place like Newport, Janoo pointed to a problem city leaders raised during their meeting, the difficulty of finding a Vermont developer that can take on a housing project of the size the city has in mind.

“Finding a developer in Vermont that would be able to do the kind of size housing project that they’re envisioning, like 60 to 80 units, is quite challenging,” she said. As a result, she said, communities often end up turning to developers from out of state.

That, Janoo said, raises the question of how the state can “support our existing contractors, support that type of business development so we can meet that need locally.” Doing so, she said, would keep “those dollars and those jobs” in Vermont “as we collectively build and strengthen our communities from the bottom up.”

Asked what the state would do under her administration to help get that housing built, Janoo said municipalities and businesses she has heard from across Vermont share a common challenge, which is the need for steady direction from the state.

What is needed, she said, is “a long-term consistent sort of strategy and approach” at the state level “that allows for the type of planning that’s necessary to make this happen.”

Janoo said everybody in the state should be working to support local communities as much as they can and to “streamline as much of the red tape and bureaucracy that can be challenging along the way.”

Monday’s 5 to 6:30 p.m. town hall focused on housing, health care and education in Newport and across the Northeast Kingdom. It is one of a series of town hall-style meetings Janoo is holding around the state, and her campaign urged people to bring their neighbors, their friends and people they disagree with.

Janoo, an economist raised in Strafford who now lives in Burlington, narrowly won the Democratic primary Aug. 11. She faces Republican Gov. Phil Scott in the Nov. 3 general election.

She said her campaign is focused on “protecting the things we love about Vermont and ensuring that we’re producing the things that we need in this moment.”