Hi! I’m Brandon Smith.

You may have found yourself here because you heard I’m running for a seat on the Selectboard for Hartford, Vermont, where I’ve lived since the height of the pandemic. (Presumably you also know Hartford includes its villages: White River Junction, Wilder, Quechee, and West Hartford.) A few paragraphs down details how I would approach a Selectboard seat. But now, a little about me.

At the moment I work as a kind of project manager (“production coordinator”) at a local house-building company, Earthshare Construction. Before this I worked for a couple other New England building companies, and before that, for about 15 years, I did a combination of journalism and cooking in fancy restaurant kitchens—in Chicago and DC.

I’m the youngest-ever winner of the national award for independent journalism, and I still do the occasional reporting project. For a time I worked as a contract researcher for investigative units at Washington Post and ProPublica. In the first months of covid, I helped develop the Post’s methodology for tracking covid deaths more accurately than the heavily-minimized figures that politicians and the CDC were putting out. See more about me here, and examples of my journalistic work here.

Lately I’ve been building a woodworking shop in my garage. I enjoy a good sci-fi show, or a typewriter-typed letter to a friend. Email me any time—to express solidarity or concerns or, heaven forbid, to offer help with this campaign. I’m at hey -at- brandonsmith -dot- com.

How I’d approach a Selectboard seat

(P.S. – sorry about all the ads. I’ve used this site as a “blog” so infrequently over the years that it didn’t make sense to have a paid version of hosting; I’m looking into upgrading 😅)

1. Leveraging local law and policy as a tool to level the playing field for those without wealth.

It’s often said that “the law is a sword only the rich can wield.” Not enough policymakers are committed, as their first priority, to fighting for equal starting lines for all in the race of life. My ~15 years of justice & accountability journalism introduced me to humans of every persuasion, and also the law. (I’ve taught classes and workshops at more than 20 colleges & universities, sometimes on transparency law for attorneys’ continuing education credits.) People for whom owning things is their primary source of income (and I’m not talking about elderly retired folks) have been waging a kind of top-down class war on those who support themselves with their labor. The ownership class’ ability to influence policy has been outsized, due to their ability to fund candidates’ re-election efforts. These phenomena need an equal and opposite reaction, and I intend to help organize and support that. A 2019 Brookings Institution study described the American economy that’s hidden from popular view: 44% of Americans work in “low wage” jobs with median annual pay of $18K. This is a national and local disgrace. Let’s fix it together.

2. Creating a place where decent housing is priced properly for everyone.

We’re no longer cro-magnons; even in ancient times, civilization viewed housing as a human right. So let’s not regress to back before written history, shall we? What does it mean for a government to act on this principle of housing as a human right? I intend to help answer that. My full-time job is coordinating the production of an Upper Valley house builder, Earthshare Construction. I also help lead the local building science meetup group. At my urging, this group is starting a coalition of supply houses, builders, designers, lenders, and government hell-bent on curbing housing pressures. Barring an even more dramatic shift in how we think about housing, a home should cost a person or family no more than the old conservative rule of thumb: 33% of one’s monthly takehome pay. If someone is making $18/hour—which should be a bare minimum wage here, if not more—then that person is taking home about $2500 a month. So housing should be available at $825/month. How many $825 units does Hartford have open currently? How many of these have a second bedroom for a child if that person has one? These questions should be front and center for local, state, and federal policymakers. To the extent they’re not, these policymakers have lost their way.

3. Instituting more direct democracy.

I grew up in a town about the size of Hartford, my first 19 years living in an Ohio town of about 11,000 people. I’m sorry to say that the town council there behaved like so many, and didn’t really prioritize input from the folks they ostensibly served. I want to flip that on its head by seeking the opinions, stories, situations, of my neighbors here to a degree I’ve never seen before. And not just listening—but giving folks a new chance to generate and influence policy. To rectify situations lawmakers too often miss, because of class or other biases of life. I’ll cut my future colleagues some slack: each of us has only one background, not many. But policymakers should serve everyone. Did you know that many serve-more-people policies championed by Eisenhower—the Republican WWII general—would today be considered the “far left” in today’s national politics? That’s how far rightward the window of what’s politically acceptable has moved. Political science studies show that America would have policy better aligned with the will of the general public if we chose representatives by fully random means. Your kid’s janitor; the barista at Dunkin. Were these people in charge, we’d almost certainly see better outcomes for more humans. A more direct democracy would start to replicate that.

4. Implementing evidence-based solutions that’ve been tried elsewhere, like in other countries.

In 2015, a documentarian went around the world. His goal: to learn how countries that do a few important (mostly civic/public) things better than us do those things. In other words, we’re not the best in the world in many metrics… but for those who are, what are they doing right? To be honest, there’s no reason to keep doing something if someone has already proven another way works better. Similarly: no reason to keep doing something if randomized, controlled (or at least heavily peer-reviewed) research has proven that another way better accomplishes our collective goals. But here, a warning. One thing I learned in my years of reporting on political figures: too many of them get away with policy decisions claiming those decisions are for a given purpose when they don’t really work for that purpose. And yet they do accomplish something else; some other thing, which they can plausibly deny. Polite society isn’t (and most news outlets aren’t) in the business of questioning stated motivations, and few have the bandwidth to try to prove anything. But perhaps we should start asking “what if the effect was intended?” At any rate: I intend to use evidence-based, or otherwise proven, solutions to the most pressing problems of our community. And I’ll do that with no regard to my future political career. If ever there’s a decision that benefits the community but makes me no friends (or even makes me enemies) in high places, I’ll choose the community every time. Those political figures who decide to vote to “live to fight another day,” so they can “continue to do good” in the future, tend to use this logic to justify that same course of action again and again. Or they trade favors in hopes of getting thrown some crumbs later, “building seniority” in a system no one should want to build seniority in. I vow to not use this logic; to never sell out the community for another year, or even another day, in office.

5. Encouraging community.

Due to many causes—some accidental, some intentional—humans in “the west” are more atomized, more divorced from communities, than ever before. It’s not in our evolved nature to be this isolated. So our brains, and deeper selves, are confused; in fight or flight mode; and none of us is functioning at our best. Some have called this phenomenon an epidemic. Whatever it is, we have to combat it. We’re so much stronger together, in so many ways. While I’m no longer very religious—or neoconservative—I completed a minor in the Christian bible from a fairly conservative college. And I know that this, solidarity with one another, is what the story of the “multiplying” fish and bread is about. Somehow, mysteriously, we are so much more together than the sum of our parts. In the presence of others in full solidarity with them, we miraculously want for nothing. I believe people in power have an obligation to help individuals connect to one another. To actively resist any forces who would divide us to conquer us. Only in solidarity together can we understand what our fellow humans are going through. Perhaps you’ve heard the story about the older white lady accidentally texting a black teen from “the ‘hood.” Because they both had a sense of humor and an open mind, they became real friends, and now their families & chosen families spend every holiday season together. Whenever we allow ourselves this opportunity, we learn how much like one another we are. And somehow, we get more out of it than we put in.