To the editor: Vermont’s citizen legislature, a place where most citizens cannot afford to serve

To the relief of many, the Vermont Legislature has adjourned. Once again, school reform consumed the session and ran into overtime. Redistricting, tax bills patched with one-time money, the reach of Act 250 – these are the same fights carried over from last year.

For all the effort, the result remains unclear. Will this year’s education law deliver lasting tax relief? Will the partial repeal of Act 181 keep our working lands workable? Will buying down tax rates with one-time money make Vermont affordable? Like Act 181, today’s laws may yet become tomorrow’s repeals.

It is easy to blame those in Montpelier for the déjà vu. It’s harder to appreciate how the deck is stacked against them. Legislators do not lack effort or love of Vermont. The real obstacle is the system they work in.

Consider the pay. Legislators earn about $18,000. Per year. The session runs January through May, but the work continues after the gavel falls. Between sessions there are constituent emails and calls, town meetings and events, policies to study and draft for the year ahead. Serving well is a year-round job, often full-time.
$18,000 is less than most Vermonters can live on. It’s less than many working families pay for childcare. It is less than a small business owner gives up by stepping away for five months. Which raises  the question: Who can serve?

Most Vermonters cannot. Not if you work a regular shift. Not if you are raising young children, running a business or living paycheck-to-paycheck. What remains is a representative body that’s not very representative. The State House door is open only to those who can manage to walk through it. A determined few still can, but at a real cost to their families and livelihoods.

This barrier is the unintended consequence of an ancient design. When a rugged assembly of frontiersmen and farmers gathered in Windsor in 1777 to found the Vermont Republic, they built a citizen legislature: ordinary people who left their farms in winter, governed for a season and returned in time to plant.

Nearly 250 years later, that remains the model. But the world has changed. An 18th century farmer could slip away after the harvest was in. Today,  the work that sustains Vermont rarely pauses. Meanwhile, state law has grown more technical, interconnected, and consequential.

Even as the stakes have risen, the ranks of those who can participate have thinned. Our most democratic institution has quietly become one of our least representative. This is about more than fairness; it’s about whether the laws actually work. Who speaks for the farmer, the nurse, the small business owner or the parent of young children? Most citizens cannot serve in our
citizen legislature, so their stories and experience aren’t in the room where decisions are made.

The consequences are real and immediate. This year, the Legislature reversed two of its own recent measures:

1. It abandoned forced school mergers, settling on voluntary consolidation after local officials and parents pushed back.
2. And it repealed parts of Act 181 after towns and landowners made clear how poorly it fit.

Neither was an act of bad faith or failure of effort. Both were the predictable result of rules written for places where the rule-writers don’t live or work.

Vermont built this system, and Vermont can improve it. While there is no simple fix, the path is clear. We must reduce the barriers to service, so the opportunity to shape our laws is not limited to those who can afford it. Even then, some voices will remain outside the room. Those who can serve under the current system bear a particular responsibility: to open the door and seek out those who will live with a law before it’s enacted, not after.

Vermont does not lack capable citizens. It lacks the range of lived experience that good laws require. With more seats opening this year than usual, Vermonters have a rare chance to change that. The promise made in Windsor was that those who made the laws would be the ones who lived with them.

We can keep that promise – and get better laws – when the farmer, the nurse, the contractor and the young parent can be among those who write them.

Sincerely,
Benjamin Brickner
Pomfret

Benjamin Brickner is a parent, practicing attorney, chair of the Pomfret Selectboard, and candidate for state Senate in the Windsor District.