|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
By Michael Bielawski
Three candidates are running for a seat in the House Rutland/Bennington District, they are Republican Chris Pritchard of Pawlet, incumbent Rep. Robin Chesnut-Tangerman, P-Middletown Springs, and Republican Ronald W. Lacoste of Wells.
Either Pritchard or Lacoste will face Chesnut-Tangerman. Both GOP candidates are critical of the established super-majority, though they vary in rhetoric and experiences.
Two Republicans, one seat
Ronald Lacoste of Wells told the Rutland Herald at the end of July that he had a 27-year military career including just in 2008 he went to Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, and Syria. He said once getting back to Vermont he noticed changes in the wrong direction.
“It’s getting ridiculous,” he said. He suggested that he’s concerned that neither his children nor many other Vermont children will be able to start their own lives here if current spending keeps up. He also said of the state’s climate goals that they are “overambitious and unlikely to be realized, though they will be expensive.”
Lacoste answered some questions for VtDigger. He wrote that he would like to “reduce regulations that are not attractive and are costly for any industry to make a move to Vermont. I would give initial tax breaks to large companies bringing jobs/careers here, to sweeten the deal some.”
On getting school funding and taxes under control, he’d like to, “balance a budget that doesn’t bleed the residents every year with a new tax.”
Pritchard told the Herald at the end of July that he is “fine with many of the initiatives coming out of the Legislature” but he says Vermonters have to be able to afford the changes that are being implemented.
He told them he is “concerned about the spending and the impact that it’s having on people that have to work and live in this economy.”
Some of his experiences include more than three decades teaching a hunter safety course and having been involved in a UVM 4-H Club teaching kids. He spent his professional career with auto dealerships largely working in service, including 27 years with Hand Motors.
An incumbent Progressive and climate activist
Chestnut-Tangerman’s website indicates that he is a Progressive with ambitious energy policies intended to impact climate change, he supports higher minimum wages, and he sponsored a bill to ban pesticides intended to help bee populations. He calls climate change “the overarching and underlying issue of our lives.”
In 2020, he wrote that Scott’s popularity with the Vermont public “had little to do with policy and everything to do with his temperate and level-headed response to the coronavirus.”
During a highly partisan disagreement over vote tallies during a House election in 2017, Chestnut-Tangerman was able to take a peace-maker role and explain to observers some of the issues concerning election integrity.
“In the partisan bickering that followed, several details got lost, details that help the average person understand why this process was appropriate…” he wrote.
The author is a writer for the Vermont Daily Chronicle
Discover more from Vermont Daily Chronicle
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Categories: politics
You are overly kind and diplomatic to say Chestnut-Tangerman “has ambitious energy policies.” If you have read the Vermont Global Warming Solutions Act Passed (GWSA) by the radical majority in 2020 you will see it was written by those who have no common sense or reasoning ability. Chestnut-Tangerman was among the Yes Votes.
To get on board with the plan as laid out in the GWSA and to think it’s good, you would have to be an earth-worshiper with a god-complex who believes all the hype and doesn’t care about the lives of the majority of human beings living in Vermont.
It’s admirable to want to be a good steward of our planet and environment, but a good plan would have balance to also consider the costs and consequences to human lives, especially the poor among us. Meeting any of the requirements in the plan will be unlikely for most with the tax increases, high interest, and high inflation times we are in.
It seems this policy was written by the Lobbyists for the Woke Elitists and Special Interests. Did any of the Vermont Representatives and Senators who voted for the GWSA really think they were serving the best interest of their Vermont Constituents?
I Hope we can elect some fresh, common sense, reasonable minds to Vermont’s General Assembly in November. Those who will throw out the radical, unrealistic and expensive GWSA Plan and replace it with a realistic, considerate and affordable plan.
Please be thoughtful and consider who you are Voting for!
Always love Tom’s take on todays madness. Rate of change today is the greatest reason to limit early voting. Another, is the loss of the chance to meet your neighbors and remind ourselves of who we are.