My main concerns with the current Selectboard, and the main reasons I'm running, are their lack of community engagement and their unwillingness to participate in robust discussions on agenda topics. I've heard from many people both before my candidacy annoucement,and as I've talked with people on my door-knocking expeditions, that they don't feel like the Selectboard representatives reach out for public input as often as they should.

Yes, the Selectboard meetings are technically open to the public, but they're only once a month on a Thursday night. Even highly impactful meetings, like the ones on the budget, are posted online the same as normal meetings with 2-days notice with the same template. There's no earlier warning, and they don't even layout in plain text what the agenda items really entail. I believe a simple FPF, Facebook, or website posting with text such as, "The upcoming meeting is focused on topic X, and we'd like to hear your feedback beforehand," would be an immensely impactful way to hear from people outside of the "usual crowd" at these meetings.

The current Selectboard seems to show little willingness to engage in robust discussions. Meetings follow a predictable pattern: a topic is introduced by the chair and framed how it should be decided, some of the other members ask clarifying, or procedural, questions, a motion is made and seconded, and decisions are passed unanimously. This creates the appearance that outcomes are more-or-less predetermined. The problem isn't on any one issue, but the broader perceived apathy of the Selectboard. Even for small issues in our daily lives, most of us have disagreements with our neighbors, friends, and loved ones. But, the Selectboard seems to have gotten into a pattern where they believe maintaining civility and avoiding disagreement is valued more than debating the merits of the decisions themselves.

I'm not advocating for the Selectboard to become more hostile, but I do think that there's no governing body in the world that can make good decisions without robust debate and dissenting opinions. I'm of the firm belief that each agenda item should be thought about before the meeting, and reasonable discussions should be had on each topic during the meeting. If we combine that with the constant taking of feedback from the actual residents of this town, then I believe that our Selectboard would be a much more effective governing body.

All of the above have been general, conceptual, and procedural issues I see with the current Selectboard, and I am ready to dedicate myself to addressing these issues as a member of the Selectboard. But, I will lay out below specific policy stances I have so that you have a better idea of how I would operate on specific town-wide matters.

As detailed above, I think the public posts and messages from the Selectboard ought to be more detailed and invite feedback. But, in addition to that, I am proposing that the Selectboard starts to meet at least twice a month for its regular meetings. This will allow the Selectboard to accomplish a few things. It will open up the availablility of the Selectboard to more people generally, and it will also allow the Selectboard to more seriously engage in dialogue with the members of the public who have decided to attend each meeting. I believe, and this is my own belief not based on any hard facts, that the Selectboard meeting more frequently would relieve some internal pressure for them to hurry-up conversations in an effort to keep meetings to reasonable lengths. Also, after getting used to the new bi-weekly meeting structure, I am of the thought that having more meetings will allow the Selectboard to add more agenda to the roster each month instead of pushing items off to meetings further down the line.

As part of a door-knocking effort, I started in South and East Randolph. In talking with the people in the East Valley a few key issues came up repeatedly. Multiple people mentioned that they feel as if they are "unheard" by town government, and I think reaching out to them directly and doing some of the community outreach I've mentioned already may help with that. But, on top of that, we should seriously consider the town's role in fostering community in that general area. The number one thing that came up the most when talking to residents of that area is the East Valley Community Hall. This building is supposed to be the offices for the East Randolph Fire Department; it's supposed to be a commuity center functioning in a similar fashion to how Kimball, Chandler, and even the Town Offices function for residents in the Village and Randolph Center; and it's supposed to be a warming shelter for emergency use. But, it has been underfunded, mismanaged, and is now largely shuttered. Occasionally, with a special permit, it is still used for bingo nights, and the Fire Department uses the bathrooms in that building, but that's about it.

The biggest thing we could do to start building better relationships with the eastern part of our town would be to fix the issues with that buildings. However, I won't act as if I have all the answers as to the best way to make that happens. I've heard much feedback on the various different ways we could use that building, and it's land, to better serve the residents in the East Valley and it should be up to them what the town does. Some have advocated for simply fixing the building, since it is town owned afterall; others have said, due to the costs of fixing it, that we should raize the building and build something better on that plot; and a few people have said the town should give the building to the East Valley Community Group to let them fundraise, obtain grants, and fix the building independent of the town entirely.

The Selectboard should take a more active posture in trying to promote safe, walkable neighborhoods. Outside of general maintence, it seems that our Walk Bike Roll Randolph (WBRR) group has take up the helm as being the primary group in town thinking about issues of transportation that isn't focused on cars. Making a town that is more easily traveled on foot, or via bicycle, has numerous benefits that aren't necessarily visible or immediate, but are nonetheless profound and worth working towards. For one, there are obvious benefits to health that incentivising people to walk provides, but there are also benefits to a person's independence when they don't need to rely on cars to safely commute. If a person with mobility issues, or even a teenager who cannot drive, want to go to a store, or friend's house, say a quarter-mile away, they will be much more likely to do that on their own if we have safe sidewalks and crosswalks going to that destination than if a car is the safest way to get there. This applied to both some areas of the Village, but also to many decently dense areas of Randolph Center and East Randolph. The main strip in East Randolph currently has no sidewalks, and walking from the Fire Department to the Church north of 66 is not a fun task in the Winter with snow on the sides of the road and cars driving past, often over the 35mph limit. Trini Brassard is, as far as I know, the only member on the Selectboard to have pointed this out at a meeting talking about the expansion of sidewalks last month, and she'll be leaving come March.

As a final note, places where people walk and bike tend to be more business friendly as well. Many studies have been done that show that the speed at which people pass a buisiness directly impacts amount and frequencey of visitors to that business. Just adding more sidewalks and better bike infrastructure, around places like Floyds and Middle Branch Collaborative doesn't necessarily mean that those businesses suddenly become more viable, but it certainly helps them. The same applies to downtown. More people feeling safe and comfortable walking and biking in the Winter means more people buying pottery, grabbing a coffee, and spending time in the downtown in general.

Another town-wide issue that I have strong feelings on is the funding of our public buildings. I touched on this a bit when talking about the East Valley Community Hall specifically, but the way we fund and manage our public buildings is lackluster even inside of the Village. The best thing we could do to protect our buildings, and to ensure conversations on the operating costs and their mainentence costs stay seperate, is to establish reserve funds for each of them. Reserve funds act as savings accounts, but the establish reserve funds are managed by the town and are allowed to have specific guidance around their use. Establish reserve funds doesn't fix the issues currently with the buildings the town manages, like Kimball's leaky cupola or Chandler's leaky roof, but it starts building a pool of money that is at our disposal the next time these issues come up. The way we currently handle mainentence issues with our buildings leads to sudden expenses coming up that either need long fundraising cmapaigns, time taken to obtain money through grants, large chunks of money taken from town coffers, loans being taken out, or a combination of any of those options. Ironing out the details of funding takes a lot of time, and often leads to monies being secured after the cost of repair has already increased to higher amounts than the intial repair amount. Reserve funds solve that, which is why we already have a reserve fund set up for our Highway Department, and I'd like to see that structure established for basically everything the town owns that may require sudden, costly repairs at unknown future dates.

Housing is an issue everywhere in this state, and across the country. I acknowledge that a town like Randolph has limited options to affect the overall market effect on housing costs and housing supply, but there are a few things we should do to improve things here in town.

Vacant Housing

For one, the town should take an up-to-date and accurate inventory of all vacant housing and commercial buildings. With this list the Selectboard should encourage the town to explore every avenue to facilitate turning those properties into residential housing. There are many avenues to facilitate this goal, and I think taking significant public input to determine which option fits best for our town is the correct approach. While this constitutes a small minority of all housing, every unoccupied home makes a difference.

New Housing

The Town of Randolph has made progress in the area of building new housing in recent years, and I would be remiss if I did not mention that. However, the building of new homes and apartments is not at the pace required to keep up with the demand in the market. I would advocate for the Selectboard, in conjunction with the Planning Commission, to expand the amount of land in town that is available for development of higher-density housing. There is much land near residential areas that isn't currently zoned as residential that could be better served when used for housing, and that land could be developed without creating suburban, low-density, HOA managed "developments." The silver-lining of living in a time where housing prices are increasing at exponential rates, while few new homes are being built, is that people will generally go to where housing is due to a lack of other options. This means that towns that currently incentivise building housing are primed to reap many benefits, and can have direct control over the population growth of their town going into the future. Of course, the primary risk of simply incentivising new housing is that we do risk directly harming our rural and agricutural lands. We need to be intentional about what and where homes are built, but we shouldn't let our fears stop us from making progress in this area. Again, with robust community input I'm sure we can collectively make progress on this issue and be a model for other towns in the county.

Succession Planning & Employee Ownership

Our town is lucky enough have a wide variety of different businesses, from manufacuring centers like LED Dynamics and Vermont Glove, to a hardware store, to the numerous maple producing farms, stores to purchase daily goods like Shaws and Chefs Market, and even a drug store. I believe our current commercial and agricultural zoining is fairly adequate, and pretty comprehensive. We also have a downtown designation, which helps new businesses in the Village access revolving loans, tax credits, and a few other incentives that encourage them to stay in the downtown. But, and this is especially geared towards the service industries in town, what we lack is a program to help ensure our businesses survive past that initial funding boost. I would also advocate that the town set up a program to help business owners create succession plans. Succession plans of this type often include a focus on seeing if the employees of such a business would like to purchase the businesses, as opposed to it closing shop completely or trying to find outside buyers. There are many resources, especially in New England, that help facilitate employee ownership of the places in which they work. Many businesses operate much better when employee owned, with increased overall productivity, and the mental health benefits of employees having a higher stake in the place they work are numerous. This type of ownership allows for more permanence of businesses, especially ones with slim profit margins like resturants or ones impacted by temporary market downturns. I believe the town should directly focus on durable businesses like this by helping current business owners plan for potential exit strategies that involve giving thier employees the first option for purchase.

Grants Administrator

One current issue with our town is that the Economic Development Director is currently a one-man show, and they are routinely working as a pseudo Grants Administrator as part of their job. This leads to a few different issues. One is that they are taken away from their primary focus of supporting businesses both downtown and elseware. Another is that they don't have the capacity to work on more than a few grants at a time, which end up making a lot of the grants the town works on being focused on only town infrastructure and the downtown. I believe a clear solution to this is to have a dedicated Grants Adminstrator. Now, from my understanding, the town is currently considering creating a position where someone will be dedicated to working on grants, but they'll be a full time employee with other duties alongside that. I think this approach is slightly misguided, as "scope-creep" will end-up taking thier focus away from grant work. I would advocate for a dedicated, part-time Grants Administrator that would have a directive to not only help the town manage their grants and grant applications, but would also be focused on finding grants to help our businesses in the more rural areas of town.

Grants are almost a necessary thing to focus on for small towns today, and having someone soley dedicated to that task would be immensely helpful. Once the Economic Development Director is relieved of dealing with grants they would be able to better serve all businesses, not just the ones in our downtown and the ones that are customer facing. The Grants Administrator would also have the time to identify grants to help existing businesses, and identify grants to help establish new, durable business types in our rural areas like employee owned businesses, non-profits, and collectives.

This is a bit of a hot button issue, but my thoughts on this are short. Currently, our police force is overfunded for the area that it covers, which is largely just the business district of the Village. A large portion of the funding for our police is set aside for salaries of employees who we do not seem to be able to hire. I'd recommend budgeting only for the police force that we can hire, which seems to be around 3 officers at maximum. I'd also recommend reducing the hours our police work, while keeping one or two officers on call for when calls come in. A significant amount of police time is spend doing traffic easement, which could be accomplished by other methods, of which some would be achieved by working towards a more pedestrian and cyclist friendly town.

Knotweed

This is a pet issue, but I think it's important for people to know that it's something I'm passionate about and will advocate for. I think we seriously need to address the Japanese Knotweed issue plaguing our town, and address any other knoxious weeds spreading throughout Randolph. From an enviromental perspective, plants like Knotweed harm the natural enviroment we should be stewards of. They grow to create monocultures by out-competing native plants; they aren't beneficial to native pollinators or birds; and they reduce the germination of other plants in their vacinity. From a human perspective, they take over managed lands and lawns, they directly lower property values, and, in some cases, mortage companies will not lend to people trying to buy homes with it on the property. It would be prudent to try to erradicate this weed, and others of its ilk, in our town. The town must first ensure that mitigation efforts are taking place on all lands that they own, and after that I'd advocate for an education program to be set up, perhaps in conjunction with the Conservation Commision, to educate all homeowners on how to safely and effectively deal with this weed. In many case it can be erradicated with only a few years of concerted effort, and the target application of low-impact herbicides.