BRATTLEBORO-Sparks did not fly when the sitting lieutenant governor and a former lieutenant governor came to Brattleboro on Sept. 10 to debate each other for a job they both want: lieutenant governor.
Current Lt. Gov. John Rodgers, 61, a Republican, and former Lt. Gov. Molly Gray, 42, a Democrat, met at American Legion Post 5 for a luncheon hosted by the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation (BDCC) and the Brattleboro Regional Chamber of Commerce (BRCC) as part of the Windham Leadership Series.
The afternoon was less a debate and more a matter of alternating 90-second stump speeches on topics such as housing, healthcare, affordability, and the economy.
“They’ll address their remarks to me in the audience rather than to each other,” the moderator, BRCC Executive Director Rachel Shields Ebersole, told the 35 or so people in the audience. “I will alternate who answers which question first. This is a friendly conversation. We’re not expecting there to be rebuttals needed.”
The official duties of the lieutenant governor are presiding over the Senate, casting the deciding vote in case of a tie, and serving on the Committee on Committees, which match legislators to their committee appointments.
The lieutenant governor also would step into the governorship should something happen to the governor. The last time a lieutenant governor became governor was on Aug. 14, 1991, when Democrat Howard Dean succeeded to the office following the death of Republican Gov. Richard A. Snelling.
Gray’s life
As she has done on other occasions, Gray introduced herself to a Brattleboro audience by reminding them that she comes from a Brattleboro family.
“I grew up in Orange County, up the river, but in fact my grandfather used to run Brattleboro Tire,” Gray said. “My mom went to Brattleboro Union High School. My dad grew up in Putney. My grandfather was a handyman at the Putney School.
“So every time I’m back down in this area, I feel a little bit closer to my past and close to a place that feels really deeply important to me,” she said.
Gray called herself the “proud product” of Vermont’s education system, from Newbury Elementary School through Vermont Law and Graduate School.
“I’m a mom,” she continued. “I’m a caregiver to a mom who has multiple sclerosis. For me, I’m part of that generation that’s choosing to be in Vermont despite it being extremely, extremely hard. The generation that went away and came back and is giving it everything that we’ve got.”
Gray served as Vermont’s 83rd lieutenant governor from 2021 to 2023. During her term, she developed a statewide agenda focused on Vermont’s recovery from the pandemic, and she advocated for broadband, workers’ rights, pensions, paid family and medical leave, and childcare, among other issues.
Then she ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2024 but lost in the Democratic primary to Becca Balint, who won the general election.
For the past two years, she served as the executive director of the Vermont Afghan Alliance, helping Afghan allies obtain housing, employment, driver’s licenses, immigration, legal services, and other assistance. She left that job late last year when she began her campaign.
She previously served as Vermont assistant attorney general and worked on international humanitarian and human rights issues, including with an international committee of the Red Cross.
Rodgers’ life
“I was instilled with my civic duty very early in life,” Rodgers said when it was his turn to introduce himself.
“My parents and grandparents always took part. I started going to Town Meetings as a young man and always voted. And when I saw that the delinquent taxes in our town were several years in the arrears, I decided to run for that position.”
He said he did so because “it was terrible for the delinquent taxpayers because they were paying interest and penalties that were accruing at an unsustainable rate. But it was also bad for the town because they didn’t have the money they needed to operate.”
“So I took that job over and created new policies and payment plans to get everybody up to date,” Rodgers said.
Then he was recruited by then-Speaker of the House Michael Obuchowski of Bellows Falls to run for the Legislature. He ran as a Democrat and served eight years in the House of Representatives and eight years in the Senate.
He then left the Legislature and changed parties. In 2024, he ran for lieutenant governor as a Republican and won.
In 2022, the Democratic Party had a supermajority in the Legislature and was able to override Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s vetoes on party-line votes.
“In 2023, when the Democrats in the Legislature had a supermajority, property taxes went up 13%,” Rodgers said. “They went up 14% in 2024. The Democrats raised $100 million in new payroll taxes and tried to tax heating oils hundreds of millions of dollars.”
At the same time, he said, “they passed very restrictive land use policies, which made it harder for people who work the land to make a living on their property.”
“At that point, I said I can no longer be a Democrat because they have forgotten the working class of the state of Vermont,” Rodgers said.
Though he frames his candidacy with references to that Democratic supermajority, in 2024, Republicans gained enough seats to remove the advantage and sustain Scott’s vetoes with their party-line votes.
Rodgers said he grew up on the family dairy farm in Glover, where he still lives.
“I started my own business in my 20s,” he said. “I worked in construction, agriculture, and forestry my whole life. I’ve worked in manufacturing. I know that without those people working the land, Vermont is not going to be the beautiful state that it is. And they have to be able to make a living to stay on those farms and fields.”
Rodgers said he had been able to work “across the aisle” in the Legislature and that he is the only Republican in the state to call out the current federal administration when it has, in his opinion, taken the wrong road.
“I’m the only Republican in the entire country that spoke out,” Rodgers said. “I not only called out the bad policies of the Trump administration, but also called out the Republicans in Congress who are failing to do their job and stand up to the president when we have bad policies.”
Rodgers currently serves on the executive board of the National Lieutenant Governors Association and the Republican Lieutenant Governors Association.
He and his wife, Brenda, a registered nurse, have been married for more than three decades. They have two sons, are grandparents, and continue to live and work on the family farm.
A lost generation
As a tradesman, Rodgers started out his remarks by suggesting that Vermont may have lost an entire generation.
“When I go out on a job, most of the people on the job are my age, not my kids’ age,” he said. “We’ve missed a whole generation of tradespeople and manufacturing and advanced manufacturing.”
He credited state technical education centers with “doing a great job.”
“A lot of businesses are actually doing apprenticeships, and there are a couple of new private trade academies set up by business because they are so desperate for employees,” Rodgers said. “We have to make sure our kids are getting the job training so that they can make enough money to see the American dream work out here.”
One of the things he would focus on, he said, would be providing trade school educations.
“What we need to do is make sure we continue to build capacity,” Rodgers said. “A lot of kids who want technical education can’t get the programming they need because there’s a backlog, there is a waiting list.”
He said he’s been “developing a network of industry leaders, people who are willing to put apprenticeship programs together, connecting them with our technical centers to build the workforce that Vermont needs.”
“At the same time, that will help address our demographics problem,” Rodgers said.
It is difficult for people to live in Vermont, he noted, pointing out that the state is the third-highest-taxed in the U.S.
“We’re considered the state with the least economic opportunity in the country,” he said.
Also hampering growth is Act 250, Rodgers claimed. It needs to be more timely, predictable, and affordable, he said.
“And it is none of those things right now,” said Rodgers.
Gray agreed with him.
Ebersole asked Rodgers, “You mentioned high property taxes, workforce development, and enabling people to stay on their working lands as some of your priorities. So, given the levers available to you as lieutenant governor, how would you use those specific tools to address those priorities?”
Rodgers replied that he meets with the governor and his leadership team every week during the legislative session.
“So I’m working on priorities with his leadership team,” he said. “I have relationships with people in both the House and the Senate from all parties that I work on legislation with. Literally, the drafting of some pieces that made it to the governor’s desk this year started in in my office.
“That is what you can do if you have the experience on the committees, the relationships with the people, and know how to get things done,” Rodgets continued. “I’ve drafted many pieces of legislation and amendments that have become law that have helped Vermonters, and that’s where the experience of over 30 years in elected office comes into importance.”
In answer to the same question, Gray said one of the most important jobs a lieutenant governor has is sitting on the Committee on Committees.
“It’s the ability of the lieutenant governor to help figure out where we have the skill and talent and get those folks on the right committees,” she said. “We’re going to have a new president pro tem next year in the Senate, a new speaker of the House, and many, many, many new elected officials.”
That means making sure that “if someone’s got experience on housing, that they’re on the housing committee. Making sure if someone’s got experience addressing healthcare, that they’re on the Health Care Committee.”
Gray said that while she served as lieutenant governor she also met regularly with the governor and legislative leaders.
“But for me, the uniqueness of the office is that you get to go around the state seeing the cool things that are happening,” she said.
In Brattleboro, Gray said, that coolness includes the Next Generation Brattleboro initiative or the Police Department’s BRAT team, “or some of the awesome things that are happening through the workforce pipelines here.”
“You get to bring that back to Montpelier and say, ‘Can we scale this statewide?’” she said.
Doing business in Vermont
Right now, Vermont has a reputation of being a difficult place in which to live and work. High property taxes, high health insurance premiums, a crumbling healthcare system, and a shortage of affordable housing are just some of the problems that have made “affordability” a buzzword in this year’s election.
According to Gray, the healthcare and housing challenges have to be addressed in unison and with extreme urgency.
“I’ve put forward a five-part housing plan,” Gray said. It starts with making sure every municipality in the state can access Vermont’s Community and Housing Infrastructure Program (CHIP) money for water and sewer infrastructure “and have the technical assistance available to do that.”
The $2 billion financing initiative helps communities build public infrastructure for new housing without raising local property taxes.
“We need to have a statewide model zoning code to combat the regulatory lack of predictability that towns are going through,” Gray said.
She cited the Agency of Commerce and Community Development’s 802 Homes model, “the pre-permitted, pre-approved designs that we’re practicing here in the state and starting to deploy.”
The pilot program was launched in Essex Junction, Hartford, and Manchester. “We need to take that statewide,” Gray said.
She also suggested creating what she called a “Vermont housing corporation.”
Under this model, “we work with [the Community College of Vermont] and our state universities and our career and technical education centers to employ the next generation of plumbers, electricians, builders to be able to meet our housing goals, and that’s how we make Vermont a better place for business,” Gray said.
Rodgers addressed the question by blaming the Democrats for having “the highest healthcare costs in the country and the third-highest overall tax.”
He also mentioned that Vermont is a runner-up for having the oldest population of any state in the union.
“We need to change that” if we want our children to remain in Vermont, Rodgers said.
Strategies for addressing healthcare
Gray said she is a supporter of universal primary care, which “brings care back to our communities,” she said.
“If we invest in a healthcare workforce, it keeps people out of hospitals,” she continued. “It brings down administrative costs. It incentivizes your health as a human right, not as a vacuum or vehicle for profit, which unfortunately our system is largely set up that way right now.”
Health insurance in Vermont is expensive because we have increasingly fewer people paying into insurance premium pools, she said.
“Which is why workforce growth and tax base growth is so extremely important,” Gray said. “Part of it is because of our hospital costs.”
She said the Hartford Police told her this year that the department gets the most calls not for people who have slipped and fallen, but for those who need a ride to the emergency room for basic preventative care.
“That’s a huge cost for the community,” Gray said.
Rodgers’ plan is to move teachers into the state employee health insurance pool.
“It is an excellent healthcare system,” he said. “That would begin to reduce the cost by building a bigger pool. Then we create a pool where businesses and individuals can actually buy into that same pool.”
Another imperative, Rodgers said, is to reduce the cost of the middlemen: the pharmacy benefit managers.
“We can’t allow middlemen to drive up the cost of pharmaceuticals,” he said. “They’re already outrageously expensive.”
But the bottom line, he said, “goes back to the failure of our federal government.”
“It’s not just this administration, but many administrations,” Rodgers said. “We spend enough tax dollars to provide healthcare for every man, woman, and child in the country.”
‘We are all in this together’
At the end of the debate, Ebersole thanked Gray and Rodgers for coming to Brattleboro to discuss the issues in front of the business community, and she thanked the members of the community who showed up to listen.
“We didn’t get a lot of time to go super deep on a number of issues,” Ebersole acknowledged.
“This campaign is about not only building the coalition to win. It’s about building the coalition to do some really, really important work. So I don’t care what your politics are, I don’t care whether you’re a seventh generation or a fourth generation or a four-day year-old Vermonter,” she said. “We are all in this together.”
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.