by Dave Soulia, for FYIVT.com
Vermont voters will choose a new state auditor on November 3, filling the seat Doug Hoffer has held since 2013. On the ballot: Democrat Tim Ashe of Burlington, the current deputy auditor and former Senate president pro tempore, and Republican Ivar Kronick of Poultney, a former city councilor in Pittsfield, MA.
What the Auditor Does
The office’s stated mission is to hold state government accountable for how it spends taxpayer money and to identify waste, fraud and abuse.
Financial audits check whether the books are accurate, including the federal single audit covering billions in federal funds for SNAP, unemployment insurance and child care. Performance audits ask whether a program does what it was funded to do. The office cannot compel an agency to act; it publishes findings and tracks whether agencies follow them.
Why It Matters
Vermont reports about 8.2 million metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions a year, roughly 820,000 of them from the electric sector. As FYIVT has reported, that figure exists because Vermont utilities sell the renewable energy certificates from in-state generation, mostly to Massachusetts. Once sold, Vermont must report its electricity as if it came from the regional grid’s fossil-fuel mix. Keep the certificates and the number drops to near zero.
Every target under the 2020 Global Warming Solutions Act is measured against that reported number. Vermont also buys certificates from other states to satisfy its own Renewable Energy Standard.
The auditor’s performance-audit list from 2021 through 2026 shows no audit of the greenhouse-gas inventory, the certificate sales, the Renewable Energy Standard, the Climate Council, Efficiency Vermont, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative or the Clean Heat Standard. The office’s energy work in that span was procedural: a 2023 audit of the Public Utility Commission’s case-timeliness statistics, a 2025 audit of Department of Public Service complaint handling, and a January 2026 audit of the state’s own energy plan that found Buildings and General Services overstated savings by $1,666,511. The same period produced six audits of municipal tax-increment-financing districts. A 2023 review of Efficiency Vermont was commissioned by the Public Utility Commission, not the auditor.
Tim Ashe
Ashe served on the Burlington City Council from 2004 to 2008 and in the Vermont Senate from 2009 to January 2021 as a Democrat-Progressive, chairing Senate Finance from 2013 to 2016 and serving as president pro tempore for his final four years.
On September 22, 2020, he voted with the 22-8 Senate majority to override Gov. Phil Scott’s veto of the Global Warming Solutions Act. Scott’s veto objected to an unelected Climate Council and to letting citizens sue the state over missed targets. That council’s plan later produced the Clean Heat Standard.
In February 2020 he led the 24-6 override of Scott’s veto of a minimum-wage increase to $12.55 an hour. The same session the Senate passed a $29 million paid family leave program funded by a mandatory payroll tax; Scott’s veto survived the House by one vote.
In January 2019, Ashe told Vermont Public he doubted a state carbon tax would change behavior, saying “all you’ve done now is increase the cost of living for rural Vermonters.” In the same interview he favored expanding the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade system for power plants, to heating oil and gasoline. That October he called the Transportation and Climate Initiative, cap-and-trade for motor fuels, “so promising.”
Ashe left the Senate to run for lieutenant governor and lost the August 2020 Democratic primary to Molly Gray, 46 percent to 35. Hoffer hired him as deputy auditor in April 2021. On January 7, 2026, Ashe presented the office’s consumer-complaint audit to the House Energy and Digital Committee. Five years as deputy make the office’s record his in both directions: the six TIF audits, the complaint-handling report and the $1,666,511 BGS finding on one side, and the greenhouse-gas inventory the office never examined on the other.
At the October 2 forum, Ashe said he helped write the office’s current mission statement. His priorities are health care prices, housing programs, rural vitality and budget resilience.
Ivar Kronick
Kronick is the point person for independent financial audits at an international manufacturing firm in Manchester, Vermont, and previously ran his own business for 15 years. At the October 2 Town Meeting TV forum: “I understand what audits are about and how they’re conducted.”
He was elected to the City Council in Pittsfield, MA, from Ward 2 in November 2021 and served on its Finance Committee, reviewing a city budget that ran about $189 million in fiscal 2023 and $206 million the following year. The council is nonpartisan.
He spent his term in a four-vote minority on an 11-member council and became known for the charter objection, which lets one councilor halt a vote until the next meeting. In June 2022 he and a colleague used it on the final fiscal 2023 budget vote, forcing a default to the mayor’s original spending plan. Mayor Linda Tyer called it “manufactured chaos.” The council president called it “very reckless.” His position: the council was approving money it had not reviewed.
On June 27, 2023 (Item 11, beginning at 24:32), three days before the fiscal year closed, the mayor asked the council to transfer $620,000 in free cash for snow removal and to skip Finance Committee review. Kronick objected. The council president warned the cost would land on the November tax rate. He held. “She brings absolutely no substantiation to the request itself. There’s no receipt,” he said, citing a $700,000 wastewater line that spent $1.5 million undocumented. “Failure to plan on the part of the mayor does not form a crisis for the city council.” At the special meeting his objection forced three days later (open-mic period, from about 1:50), he told the chamber free cash belonged to taxpayers and demanded, “Show the bills.”
The city’s charter review committee later proposed requiring three councilors to invoke an objection. Kronick had announced in May 2023 that he would not seek a second term, writing that “the ideal term is one only.” He was not a candidate for anything when he made the June objections.
At the forum he cited the state’s own audit findings from memory: qualified federal opinions on SNAP, unemployment insurance, child care and clean water, and a $25 million grant booked without competitive procurement records. “We booked it, but we can’t show it,” he said. He would shift the office toward financial audits of high-dollar programs, away from performance reviews he called “policy papers,” and expand SNAP eligibility sampling from 60 cases to 200. He made the same case at length on Renee McGuinness’s Hot Off the Press on September 28, from about the 22-minute mark.
The Record
No audit of the state’s greenhouse-gas inventory or renewable energy certificate accounting has been performed. One candidate helped pass the law whose targets depend on that number, then spent five years in the office that never examined it. The other built a one-term record on refusing to approve spending without documentation. Voters have both histories in front of them.