If you live in Hartford like I do, perhaps you’d like to know specifics about what I’d try to do with a seat on the town board. I’ve prepared this bullet-point document for those extra-curious folks. Please reach out with any comments or questions, to hey -at- brandonsmith -dot- com.

HOUSING

• The price of housing is too high here. It’s my number one issue. We’re both forcing out older folks and we’re prohibiting younger folks from coming. One way to address this is to address supply. I work for a house-building company, and I have all kinds of ideas for this, from helping carpentry/building companies establish panel production shops so they can increase the speed and cost-efficiency at which they can build, to working with big supply houses like Bethel Mills and LaValley to establish a line of basic building products, on which they accept a slightly smaller margin to help assist this crisis. But we must talk about the elephant in the room: prices have skyrocketed in large part because in the last 10-20 years, giant corporations have started buying homes and apartments. Families didn’t used to have to compete with companies with billion-dollar valuations; and we shouldn’t have to. I want to figure out how we as a community ban companies from buying single family housing here. Or if we can’t ban them, then create barriers to their entry that, as businesses, they won’t cross because they’re so high they know they won’t make money.
• Define “Hartford affordable” monthly rent as: whatever the minimum wage here is, times 2080 (hours in a full-time work year) divided by 12 (to convert to months), times .75 (roughly what we take home after deductions), times .33. This calculates ⅓ of the monthly takehome of someone on minimum wage. Use current powers of the town to incentivize charging affordable rates, and to disincentivize unaffordable rates (say, for any entity that has 3 or more unaffordable units, to protect retirees who rent a couple units.)

WAGES AND WORKER CONDITIONS

• Set minimum wage at $23, to move up $1 a year for the next two years, because effectively the state has abdicated its own role in setting minimum wage. (If you can get a job at Dunkin or any big box store for $19/hour, then a state minimum of $13 effectively means nothing.) Yes, I recognize that according to state law, towns in Vermont cannot set their own minimum wages. But I believe we have an argument to do so because the state has abdicated its own responsibility in this arena. They shouldn’t be able to defend an abdication. If we can find an attorney to represent the town pro bono on this, the scheme won’t use taxpayer money if the state chooses to sue rather than to update its number to one that means something.
• I propose we create a kind of marketing program, perhaps with some incentives attached, for when a business pays 100% of its workers the “living wage for a one-earner household with one dependent” according to MIT’s living wage calculator. (Currently $34.03 in Windsor County, about $70K/year pre-tax.) Make these businesses certify that they update wages to match the MIT number for this metric twice a year. Basically they would get some free marketing by the town; a special designation that they’ve made hard choices to do the right thing: 1. give a serious percentage of what workers generate back to those workers, and 2. charge enough to make this happen, which is to say, not subsidize the experience of the customer via the workers. The town could even give these businesses, as an incentive, something like a TIF: promising that its own taxes won’t increase because of this.
• Vermont mandates that a worker must accrue sick time at a certain rate. Hartford could do the same with general PTO. Start with firms of 7 employees or bigger and mandate accruing 7 days per year. After 2 years of implementation, it would expand to apply to firms 5 employees or bigger and start requiring accrual of 10 PTO days per year. This shall be in addition to the aforementioned VT sick days and any holidays an employer already provides as paid time off. I believe what the rest of the developed world believes: that if a business isn’t charging customers enough for this to be able to happen, then the business is effectively subsidizing the experience for the customer with revenue that should have been provided to the workers.
• Ensure that at least one town employee is trained on helping workers if they need guidance on filing for union elections at their job, or filing grievances with the National Labor Relations Board. That person should be given the bandwidth to field the enquiries of any resident who needs it; should maintain a small library of contacts where a worker could get in touch with someone in a union in their field; and should have an adequate budget for promotion of their services to all residents of the town.

BENEFITS TO RESIDENTS THAT AN ENTITY LIKE OUR TOWN GOVERNMENT COULD USE ITS HEFT TO IMPLEMENT (OR HELP IMPLEMENT)

• We could buy medical debt for Hartford residents at pennies on the dollar, and cancel it. Connecticut just did this for huge swaths of its residents, and given how much fewer people we have, there’s no reason we couldn’t, either. This one’s a no-brainer. It would mean more money in locals’ pockets that will likely be spent locally.
• I’ve heard plans are in the works to seriously update the Bugbee senior center. Those need fast-tracked. It’s not ADA compliant, and several local seniors have been trying to draw attention to this, calling it “a disgrace.” And rightly so, considering all the other things that have been updated in town in the 40 years since this building was updated last.
• Provide micro grant funding for low-income residents to obtain the services of an organization (there are many) that represents people in appeals to credit rating agencies, to get negative marks removed from credit scores. Especially for life’s necessities like health care or student loans. Better credit scores in Hartford will mean less useless money sent out of the community in interest on debt.
• Create a heating fuel buyers’ collective at the town level, where any resident can subscribe, and each year the town pre-negotiates, with fuel vendors, rates for each fuel below market rate (hopefully well below). Residents then buy their fuel through this program and save real money.
• Use the town’s ability to secure low-interest credit. Open up the ability for residents to use this line of credit for specific outlined purposes that pay dividends, so to speak, in people’s lives: heat pumps and/or solar systems for home owners, is an example. Or could be equipment needed for personal industry. Sets of power tools or woodworking equipment for people who would be builders. Gym membership or a piece of home workout equipment. Reliable personal transportation or repair to the same. An emergency health expense that can’t and won’t happen without a line of credit (Where insurance and the provider would deny treatment otherwise.)
• Heat pumps are such an incredible tool that perhaps they should be the subject of their own program. I would push for a selectboard-mandated goal of providing, via financing with a sliding scale based on income, heat pump heating and a simple mechanical ventilator (like a Lunos) to all residents who don’t already have it. The goal should be to accomplish this in the next 5 years. Cost of install, to each recipient, might be spread over 3 years. Renters can apply and landlords shouldn’t get a veto, because whether or not renters pay for their heat directly, they always pay for it somehow.
• Speaking of equipment to help people get into the trades: I’m interested in a pilot program, working with employers in the Upper Valley (and especially Hartford), where if a local high schooler goes to college or trade school and relocates here immediately following, they can be guaranteed a position at a pre-arranged, attractive rate of pay. That would also help them determine whether any debt for school is warranted, and whether they’d be able to pay it back.
• Speaking of libraries, we should engage the community for brainstorming on what other categories of things, beside books, we could add to the existing libraries. They’ve already started this, but we could expand it in earnest. I once ran a small business renting camping gear; that’s one idea. Another is tools, of course. The tool that you use once every year or two, that you’d otherwise rent from Home Depot, could be free at one of the local libraries. In due time we could establish a makerspace, where folks can come and use stationary tools they could never otherwise afford. I imagine we have enough folks willing to donate their equipment to an effort like this. It just takes a shared vision and dedication.

BUILDING COMMUNITY FOR OUR FUTURE

• Studies show that walkable communities are both healthier for residents and have better local economies, perhaps because people from non-walkable communities around them visit them for the “sense of place.” I’ve made a list below of the diversity of businesses and services that are really necessary, in a one-mile radius (20-minutes walking), for a community to be truly walkable. For all the little alcoves in Hartford that have a good start making this happen, the town should do what it can to fill out the rest of the list. That could mean active solicitation of the public, grants and low-cost small business loans, tax incentives, or other creative avenues to attract them. The list:
  • grocer
  • bank
  • school or schools for grades K-12
  • library
  • family doctor
  • dentist
  • cafe (and bakery if these things are separate)
  • pub
  • bookstore
  • clothing store
  • auto repair shop
  • casual restaurant like a pizza shop
  • venue for a small live music show (like with a small stage) if it’s not covered by other locations here
  • gas station
  • laundromat
  • drugstore or pharmacy
  • post office
  • child care operation(s)
  • hair cuttery
  • hardware store
  • space on the larger side for large social gatherings
  • and non-auto transit to other walkable areas (and in this case, the WRJ Amtrak stop and the Dartmouth Coach).
• Speaking of promoting walkable communities, walking and bicycling are symbiotic for the ends we’re seeking in walkabikity. So we want protected bike lanes on all arteries of these walkable communities, and protected bike lanes or paths networking each of these communities together. At some point we should consider establishing a rental scheme of electric bikes—whether helping a local small business get set up doing it, or barring that, establishing one as a town. I was an electric bike hater until I tried one. Changed my world.
• Let’s start down a road of police reform with an important one but one I think everyone can get behind: making it against town ordinance for an officer to lie about certain important things while they’re on duty, or acting in their official capacity. To be clear; the question of whether our officers ever have lied in these ways has no bearing here and is irrelevant; the only question that matters is whether the town allows them to going forward. No federal law, or to my knowledge Vermont state law, prohibits police from lying in the following ways, nor can their cases be dismissed because of it: They can lie about their ability to get a search warrant; can lie and say you will get a lighter sentence if you confess; can lie and claim that your fingerprints or DNA were on the evidence; can lie to you about an accomplice confessing; can lie about being an officer; can lie and say a conversation is off the record when it isn’t; can lie and say that a victim identified you in a photo; and can lie about whether they’ve lied to you previously. So let’s codify into ordinance the respectability, the increased trust from the community, that would come from prohibiting untruthfulness in these important ways.
• People I’ve spoken with at the Bugbee Center and elsewhere have various concerns about drug use and, separately but sometimes adjacent, unhoused populations. Currently these are real issues in our community: for each of us in one way or another, but especially for the deep, complex, lovable, humans who are experiencing these conditions. I know two things about this: 1. The current systems of our world produce these problems and Hartford’s current systems have not solved them. 2. These two problems have been effectively solved in other places, and the people who implemented those systems elsewhere *do* know how to solve them. What if I told you there are places around the world that have reduced their drug use—similar to ours today—by 97% over 5-6 years? If I told you that other places, with similar unhoused population to ours, have secured housing for those folks to the tune of 75-80%, over an even shorter timespan. If I told you this was possible, would you be willing to set aside what you believe the solutions are, and be open to whatever has actually worked elsewhere? (Part, though likely not all, of the funding could come from what we currently spend to deal with these issues.) I know I would support this in a heartbeat. I’m not fully briefed on what the systems to fix these issues entail, so I shouldn’t say I know what fixes them. You also probably don’t know how Portugal solved its drug problem and Finland solved its problem with houselessness. So like me, you probably shouldn’t claim you know a solution. But I’m curious about learning what it entails, from the people who have done it. I hope you’ll join me in being open to discovering what’s worked, and just doing that, no matter how it intersects with our prior beliefs. These situations are too important to do anything other than what’s been proven to work.