STEVEN HEFFERNAN

Qualification: While I’m not a politician, I have served my state as a member of the Vermont Air National Guard for over 30 years, including two tours in Afghanistan. My service record to our country and state has helped shape who I am today, and has instilled in me a desire to serve our local communities as your next State Senator. My experience in the VTANG, my time as a small business owner and my lifelong involvement in our Addison County communities is what drives me every single day.

Education funding: In some Addison County communities, like Granville and Hancock, average property tax rates will rise by nearly 40%. Don’t take my word for it — that’s straight from the Vermont Department of Taxes and Vermont Public Radio. That’s unaffordable, unsustainable and unacceptable. It puts Vermonters in an impossible situation, like the single mom in Cornwall who has to decide between paying for everyday needs or her tax bill. Or the retired couple in Leicester who have to dip into their nest egg just to make ends meet.

Listen, we can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results. Our education financing system is broken. But some in Montpelier will make it seem like the choice is between high property taxes to fund education, or else we’ll have bad schools. That’s false. Because the more we hike property taxes, the more we drive working families out of Vermont. That shrinks our tax base and our student population.

First, I’d support capping the amount property taxes can go up from year to year. States across the country have these types of caps in place to provide relief for their taxpayers. If California can do it, so can Vermont.

But we also need to change the funding formula. Rep. Scott Beck, who is running for State Senate in the Northeast Kingdom, has proposed a great solution that would make education funding decisions more locally-driven, so that spending and taxes are less influenced by politicians in Montpelier and more influenced by parents in Middlebury, Monkton and our other local communities.

Vermonters deserve a Legislature that listens to their concerns about the cost of living. As your next State Senator, I’ll stand with Governor Scott as ready to build the strongest education system in the country at a price Vermonters can afford.

Housing: Vermonters — whether they’re members of our workforce or retirees — deserve to be able to live here with dignity. That starts with a roof over their head that they can afford. It frustrates me to no end when I go door-to-door and hear from folks in Middlebury who are forced to commute from Chittenden County because they cannot find an affordable place to live. They deserve better.

First, addressing our property tax crisis will help bring costs down. If Montpelier raises property taxes by double digits, you better bet that property owners are going to raise rents.

But the other key solution to solving our housing crisis is to make housing more available — to build more homes, while balancing our workforce’s needs with our natural resources. The Legislature has thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at our housing crisis in the last several years, with some marginal impact. But more needs to be done. Governor Scott is right: we desperately need to reform the permitting process to cut down on all the red tape that impedes new homes from being built.

We obviously need to preserve important environmental protections and local review. That’s part of what makes Vermont unique. But removing duplication between local and state review, fixing the appeals process, and expediting housing projects is a must-do to help reduce the cost of housing in Vermont.

Climate crisis: I don’t support the Clean Heat Standard. Earlier this year, Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore suggested that the Clean Heat Standard could raise home heating fuel costs by 70 cents per gallon. Sen. Chris Bray criticized her and said she shouldn’t preempt the “professional studies” that were in process. Well, last month the professional studies started to come out, and they say the Clean Heat Standard could cost from $1.70 to $4 more per gallon of heating fuel. That could double a Vermonters’ cost to heat their homes. It turns out that Secretary Moore’s warning was an underestimate.

But perhaps instead of chastising members of the Governor’s administration, our state senators should be partnering with them instead to find solutions. We need to look at additional investments in proven solutions like weatherization to improve energy efficiency. We should modify some of the state’s economic growth incentives to prioritize projects that are environmentally-focused. And we should lead by example by having state government improve its own emissions standards in its buildings and vehicles.

But what we cannot do is punish hardworking Vermonters with a hidden tax, especially when so many of our neighbors are on the edge of an affordability cliff.

Other priorities: The cost of health care in Vermont is something that seriously concerns me. Yet again, our state’s insurance companies are getting ready to raise premiums by double digits for the third year in a row.

Imagine a state where our friends and neighbors didn’t have to worry about how they were going to pay for their cancer treatments. Or a life-saving surgery. Or even just their monthly premiums.

I believe we can achieve those goals, but our health care system is broken right now.

However, we can take lessons from some neighboring states. New Hampshire has implemented tort reform and saved a substantial amount, according to the available research.

Other states have also implemented common-sense data cross checks in their Medicaid programs to keep fraudsters from taking away dollars meant for the truly needy.

Vermont is one of only a handful of states in the Northeast that doesn’t have a “reinsurance” program (reinsurance is way to minimize risk). After reinsurance was adopted in New Hampshire, every insurer in the state cut their premiums. In Rhode Island, premiums dropped too. And in Maine, the erratic heath care market stabilized following the reform.

Medical expenses are the number one cause of bankruptcy in America, and there’s more we can do to help protect Vermonters’ credit from being impaired by surprise medical bills. And we can hold middlemen in the pharmaceutical trade more accountable by restricting predatory pricing that hurts the most vulnerable Vermonters.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of solutions, but the point is we need to start the conversation about ways we can make health care more affordable in Vermont.