BRATTLEBORO-The woman responsible for comprehensive childcare in Vermont now wants to be the state’s next governor.
Gubernatorial candidate Aly Richards, 40, the longtime CEO of the nonprofit Let’s Grow Kids, will be facing another Democrat, Burlington resident Amanda Janoo, in the Democratic primary on Tuesday, Aug. 11.
The thought of a competitive primary does not faze Richards. If anything, it energizes her.
“It’s amazing that we have a primary,” she said. “We need more women putting themselves out there, fighting for what’s right.
“The truth is, we’ve got to be fighting,” Richards said of the competition between her and Janoo, the co-founder of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance of Vermont. “We have to believe that we can do better. It’s amazing that we have a friendly primary, and I think Amanda and I are going to show something really great here: two women putting themselves out there with good ideas, having a reasonable debate, putting a choice out for the voter, and not tearing each other down. I think that’s going to be a great model for unity and democracy.”
Richards was eager to explain how Let’s Grow Kids helped create and pass the 2023 Child Care Bill (Act 76), the first of its kind in the nation.
The bill, which passed the House and Senate with overwhelming support, entitles all children — from the ages of 3 to 5 and who are not yet in kindergarten — up to 10 free hours per week of publicly funded pre-K for 35 weeks of the academic year. It is paid for by a small payroll tax.
The bill was vetoed by Republican Gov. Phil Scott but became law after a veto override.
Speaking to The Commons a few weeks ago, outgoing Brattleboro Rep. Mollie Burke of District 8 talked about the success of the law.
“It gives more subsidies to people,” Burke said. “More people can afford childcare. It’s helped childcare workers get more pay, which has been a big issue, and it’s helped childcare centers open more spaces. It’s been an economic benefit. More people are able to go to work.
“This tax is leading to economic growth, better pay for childcare workers, and the ability of anybody who used to stay at home with a child and who can now go to work,” she continued.
Richards, 40, is married to James Pepper, the chair of the Vermont Cannabis Control Board — another growth industry in Vermont. The couple have identical twin boys who are 7½ years old.
“It’s funny, but I wrote a paper in eighth grade about why you should legalize marijuana,” Richards said. “I joke about this to my husband, who does this job from a pure policy perspective.”
‘Who am I kidding? The world is on fire.’
Vermont is becoming less and less affordable, and people who admired Richards’s work on childcare began urging her to run for governor.
She anticipates that she, should she win the Democratic Party nomination in the primary, will face Scott, who polls as the most popular governor in the United States. He is expected to announce if he will run for an unprecedented sixth term once the Legislature finishes its session.
People from the Let’s Grow Kids campaign said they wanted a candidate who could let them be “part of something bigger than ourselves” and who could give “a reason to hope” and someone who would fight for working families.
“I started getting those calls, along with some from business folks and from folks in the Legislature,” said Richards, adding that she “willfully ignored” the suggestions to run for all of 24 hours.
“And then I said to my husband, ‘Who am I kidding?’” she said. “The world is on fire, starting right here in Vermont. If I have an opportunity to put a positive vision forward for the state of Vermont, a place that I love, where I know we can do things because we still talk to each other, that I have to do it.’”
Then Scott gave his annual budget address to the Legislature. Richards listened to him and then read his speech carefully. She thought it was similar to most of Scott’s addresses over the last 10 years.
“It was a diagnosis of the problems, correctly,” Richards said. “We all agree on the problems. The question remains, ‘What are we going to do about it?’ He offers no solutions. He does a lot of finger wagging.”
She describes the governor as “very successful blaming things on the Legislature. That’s not delivering results. When you are blaming, you are not leading.”
For example, Richards said, “I am relentlessly focused on delivering results like childcare. We need a governor who cares about delivering results and doesn’t care about who makes the political win.”
In other words, she said, “we need to see the solutions for housing and healthcare. We need an executive branch who is going to have real plans and use the staff of the administration to energetically be out in communities helping to solve problems.”
Looking toward durable change
Scott has advanced one solution, in the arena of the ever-higher costs of public education. He asked the Legislature for a mandate to regroup all of Vermont’s school districts into five. His idea became immediately controversial; the Legislature appears to be looking to a voluntary unification instead of a mandated one.
“When I say solutions, I mean real workable strategic solutions,” Richards said. “There was this idea of five districts, and, elegantly, there were five listening sessions. That’s not real stakeholder engagement.”
Since Richards began campaigning, she has been hearing people agree that change is needed.
“For example, they’ll say, ‘This small school doesn’t have enough students in it,’” Richards said. “Or, ‘This elementary school is small, but it’s really highly functional. We don’t need to make a change here.’
“We just don’t want to be bullied,” she said. “We want to be part of the solution.”
Richards believes that “some data would be helpful. Maybe some modeling to say, ‘If we make the hard decision, it’s actually going to work in the way we want it to.’ And maybe a little bit of money as an incentive to repurpose a closed school as a community center, which we’ve seen happen in a couple of places really well.”
Scott never issued real plans for his proposal, Richards pointed out.
“He is leaving the Legislature to have to do the detail work, part-time and without staff,” Richards said. “It’s really a setup. It’s not fair, and the conversation is tearing our communities apart. So even if it’s correct, the change won’t be durable. The change will not be successful.”
Blaming the Legislature for the high cost of living in Vermont, as Scott did during the last election cycle, might be successful as an election-year scare tactic, but it does not come close to solving Vermont’s problems, Richards said.
“For 10 years, we have not had a vision or a plan that actually led to a result. Look at Scott’s veto of the childcare bill, right? We worked to solve this deeply entrenched crisis and overrode the governor’s veto with all the Dems, all the Progs, a handful of Republicans, a handful of independents, and the sole Libertarian in that building.”
She described the process as “a real Vermont conversation with a real solution that’s working.”
“That’s how you truly have a Vermont conversation,” she said. “Put the people most impacted in the driver’s seat and get real change. So that’s what we have to do for housing; that’s what we have to do for healthcare.”
Politics came early
Richards was raised in Vermont “because my parents thought Vermont was the best place to raise a family,” and she discovered her affinity of politics as a force for change very early.
“When I was in eighth grade, one student in a school could shadow their representative in the Legislature,” Richards said. “And I was asked. So I went to the State House to shadow my representative, Al Stevens, D-Newbury.”
She described Stevens, who died in 2005, as “an incredible guy.”
“He lost his seat because he voted for civil unions [in 2000], but this was right before that happened. They were doing a bill to decide if they would put a student representative on the state Board of Education. And I was shadowing him as an eighth grader, and that was my first experience in the State House, seeing how all this worked.
“Then Al pulled me aside and said, ‘Look, they’re debating this bill on the floor today. They’re definitely going to pass it. And you should be the student on the state Board of Education one day.’”
The bill did pass. And as it happened, current Brattleboro Selectboard member Issac Evans-Frantz was the first student ever appointed. But two terms later, when Richards was old enough to apply, she was appointed by then-Gov. Howard Dean and became the third student to sit on the state Board of Education. She was 15.
“It was because of my job shadowing that my whole brain opened up,” Richards said. “I saw myself at a table having some value to add to a conversation.”
As a part of the experience, Richards learned to handle media attention. The Valley News did a profile of her, and a columnist raged about her “not being old enough to even drive herself to a meeting, so how dare she be on the state Board of Education.” (“And don’t worry, by the time I’m actually a voting member, I’ll be able to drive myself to meetings and home again,” Richards responded in a letter to the editor.)
“I thought, ‘Wow, I’m getting my first mud-slinging experience at the ripe old age of 15,’” Richards said. “I thought, ’Well, maybe he’s right. What do I have to offer?’ But then I thought, ‘Oh, the adults have this under control.’ And I realized, ‘Oops, no, they don’t.’
“And that’s a dangerous thing to think,” she said. “A lot of them didn’t know anything about education.”
“So here I was as a student, and the most critical part of education is that interaction between the teacher and the student, and just my presence changed the conversation,” Richards continued. “Then I grew confidence and started piping in.’”
Growing up in the Upper Valley
Richards grew up in Vermont with a deep sense of community and the idea that “we can do anything when we put aside our differences and work together.”
Her father was a teacher at Oxbow High School in Bradford. He taught history and English. One year, Richards was in his classes. Then she left the state for college and worked on Barack Obama’s first campaign in 2008. She followed him to Washington but soon was discouraged that Vermont values did not translate into D.C. behavior.
“As much as I believed in Barack Obama’s leadership, people who don’t agree with each other don’t speak to each other in Washington, D.C.,” Richards said. “That was 2008. I know enough to know that change can’t happen that way. You must speak to each other. You have to have reasonable disagreement and debate. So I ran home to Vermont as fast as I could.”
Richards then started working for Gov. Peter Shumlin.
“I didn’t know him at all, but he was talking about climate change and early childhood education,” Richards said. “I started talking to lots of Vermonters, understanding what they cared about, and the problems were so overwhelming. Then I said to myself, ‘How are you, one human, going to fix this?’”
She decided to “go upstream to these root cause issues that you actually can change,” and discovered that early childhood education was key.
“That became my project for the governor,” Richards said. “We passed universal pre-K. We put all these pieces in place, and then it became my life, because I was recruited to run Let’s Grow Kids.”
Richards was CEO of Let’s Grow Kids for 10 years. During that time, she helped write, testify, defend, and ultimately pass the Child Care Act. Once the bill was passed, Let’s Grow Kids deliberately went out of business.
“I said, ‘Let’s put a deadline. Let’s hold ourselves accountable. Let’s hold our feet to the fire. Let’s create urgency, and do it,’” Richards said. “We passed the most significant childcare bill in the country with bipartisan support, and it is doing exactly what we hoped it would do.”
Running for governor
Affordability is going to define the next election, both across the country as well as in Vermont, Richards said.
“I’m relentlessly focused on outcomes,” Richards said, describing herself as “an optimistic pragmatist.”
“So, the day that the governor gave his budget address was so distressing because again — correct with the problems, very light on the solutions,” she said.
That same day, The New York Times came to Vermont and interviewed Richards for a story about her childcare work.
“They wanted to talk to someone who has actually done something in the United States to make life more affordable for humans,” Richards said. “And they did this beautiful four-minute video journalistic piece that just summarized our decade of effort. It was one of those moments where I said, ‘Well, darn it, I think I have to run.’”
Fixing root causes of problems
Housing and healthcare are Richards’s top two priorities, “because, like childcare, they are root causes that will truly help us rebuild the fabric of our communities,” she said.
Vermont has 11 hospitals that are deeply in financial trouble. Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, for example, is fighting a $14.5 million budget shortfall.
Richards wants to implement the plan offered in 2024 to the Green Mountain Care Board by hired consultant Oliver Wyman.
“Almost all of our hospitals are on the verge of bankruptcy,” Richards said. “This is an amazing place where the government must act. Two years ago we had a report that explained the situation perfectly. We have to coordinate the hospitals and decide who’s doing hips and who’s doing hearts. You decide the specialty, and you become a focus center. And then we decide what are the basic needs in every hospital, like access to an emergency room, basic healthcare needs. So we preserve all of that everywhere, and then we do the specialty services in different places.”
The governor must facilitate the conversation of regionalization and specialization, Richards said.
“There are anti-monopoly and antitrust laws that actually stop the hospitals from going into a room and doing it themselves,” she said. “It requires the government to do the work.”
In the two years since that report “they had a consultant, they fired the consultant, then they had a new consultant. I’m sorry, but this is an emergency. Get the best facilitator the world has ever seen, prioritize, get the hospitals in the room, do the sprint, specialize, do the regionalization.
“The lack of vision from the state on healthcare has set us back very, very badly for 10 years, and we need to regrow that planning arm in state government,” Richards said.
Untangling housing and affordability
On the issue of housing, one program that is working right now is the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development’s Community and Housing Infrastructure Program (CHIP), she said.
“It’s a new program and a great idea, democratizing financing instruments,” Richards said. “But many people don’t know how to navigate it. So, we build this great idea, and then the government doesn’t do the next most important step, which is technical assistance to allow people to actually use the tool we built.”
She also described “things happening in Brattleboro that are actually quite great bright spots.”
“I mean, Chloe Learey is working her tail off up there at Winston Prouty and making it work through every barrier,” Richards said of the nonprofit’s plans to build hundreds of housing units on the former campus of the Austine School for the Deaf. She also cited the redevelopment of the Brooks House after a devastating fire in 2011 as “another great example.”
Taxing second homes is an idea that needs a lot of discussion, and the Legislature is looking at it right now, she said.
“How do we use it well to put housing back in the primary residence market, and then use the revenue to actually give us some capital to do development?” Richards asked.
Numerous studies list an urgent need in the state for young people move to the state, join communities, and grow the economy. There is not a great deal of housing for them. Meanwhile, elders are stuck in large houses they no longer need because also, there is no place for them to go and scale down.
“You have aging Vermonters who are saying, ‘Please, how do we get out of our big drafty houses with 15 bedrooms, leave them for another family, and go to a turnkey condo where we can age?’” Richards said. “There’s a huge demand for that. Why aren’t we building that?”
For the candidate, “housing is one of these things where if you build the housing in the right way, for the communities, it actually balances our environment. You’re building a Grand List. Then our property taxes come down, and then you have more young people who can stay because there’s a home for them, and then our income taxes come down because there’s more payers.”
The current war with Iran is driving up prices everywhere.
“Everyone is saying, ‘We can’t survive this,’” Richards said. “It’s the most vulnerable Vermonters getting stuck at the pump, getting stuck at home with these crazy bills because they didn’t have the upfront capital to go to the pellet stove, to go to the heat pump. This is insanity.”
Vermont needs political will to solve the affordable energy problem.
“We need to have creative access to upfront capital for vulnerable Vermonters to make that one-time investment that will save them money the rest of their lives,” Richards said. “It can be done.
“And think about it,” she continued. “Allowing folks to move on to cheaper, cleaner energy is great for the planet. And it creates this energy independence for us in Vermont, so we are not the whims of whatever this president is going to do next.”
Richards is looking forward to the primary debates.
“I’m about transformative change,” she said. “I’m about delivering big ideas, showing the opportunity window, showing it’s possible. So I’m excited to have a lively debate in the primary. I think it’ll be good.”
And then, when she or Janoo gets to debate Scott prior to the general election, “I think we have a real conversation,” she said. “This is a moment in this country where we have an echo of hope and change.”
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.