The Connecticut River Valley resident will go up against incumbent Democrats Jim Masland and Tim Briglin in the Aug. 9 primary.
Clark says he is forcing a primary in his district because he wants to empower a group of Vermonters he says have had a hard time getting their voice heard at the Statehouse — millennials.
Q: Brexit has left many young Britons feeling frustrated because they believe the older generation made a decision that they will have to live with. Is this a reflection of how young people feel, too?
NC: Yes, I’ll tell you a little story. I went to the Curtis Awards (David W. Curtis Leadership Awards) a few weeks ago, and Mena Turner was there (the deputy secretary of Housing and Urban Development) and he said “If only milennials would have voted in this primary it would have gone so differently.” That stuck in my head. I started to think of every issue [that way]. If only millennials could vote on climate change we would tackle it so much quicker, if only millennials could vote on wealth inequality, or healthcare, or education. If you look at the numbers by generation, millennials vote a lot more progressively. It is not that they should be the only ones allowed to vote but they will be the ones around the longest dealing with these problems, they are the ones that don’t get their issues represented well and they end up getting the short end of the stick.
Q: Why did you decide to run for the House?
NC: Because I noticed that young adults were either leaving the state or staying here and struggling to thrive, that was the first thing that caught my attention.
Q: What do native Vermonters face if they want to stay in Vermont?
NC: There are a lot of big obstacles to staying here. We have a housing shortage, we have a rural state and that means we depend a lot on cars at a time when we are trying to become more sustainable and we have some of the highest college tuitions in the nation for our state colleges. So there are a lot of affordability issues for Vermonters trying to stay in the state.
Q: What about jobs?
NC: There are a lot of service jobs available and a lot of specialized jobs. If you can telecommute and if you have good Internet service then you can find something, but there aren’t a lot of jobs in the middle with opportunity for career growth. There are a lot of small businesses and some large business but it is hard to build a life here. It is easier if you have built a life somewhere else and then you come here to live and telecommute for work. It is easy to find a service job but not so easy to start out here and build here and do very well.
Q: Why have you stayed in Vermont?
NC: I left two days after I graduated from Hanover High and I bounced back and forth a lot over the years. I traveled in California and Massachusetts and the more I saw of the world the more I noticed that there is no place on Earth like Vermont. I worked very, very hard to come back to Norwich specifically. Vermonters understand humor — in California they don’t understand sarcasm, from what I can tell! In Vermont, you can walk into the woods and you won’t find a rattlesnake, we don’t have vines growing up all the trees like they do in North Carolina. Vermont has the best of everything and what it is lacking you can make up for by traveling to nearby cities like Burlington or Boston. I’m in love with the state.
Q: Do you own a house or land in Vermont?
NC: My mom did and she passed away. The house is in my sister’s name but it informally belongs to me and my siblings. I have been paying property taxes for the property in Norwich so I get that process, but we need to have a voice for the people that can’t afford to buy a house.
Q: Do you think it matters?
NC: There are an enormous amount of Vermonters that do not own property or have to pay property taxes. I saw a study that said you are less likely to own a house in Vermont if you have a college degree because you are paying off student loans. Vermont has a citizen Legislature, they are not just professional politicians. It is supposed to represent all the demographics, and if we don’t have people in the Legislature that don’t own houses when so many people are renting then their voice is lost. It is very hard to find affordable rentals – that is a huge issue, too.
Q: In a recent letter on the Norwich list serve you took issue with Rep. Jim Masland’s quote in a Seven Days article about you and several other millennials that have decided to run for seats in the Legislature. He said: “When you dig into it, it’s not that we’re not doing anything,” Masland said. “The problems are far more complex than they appear to a twentysomething.”
NC: In addition to my reaction that you read, I’d say that the issues are complex, but that doesn’t mean someone in their 20s doesn’t understand them, or that they don’t care, or that it doesn’t effect them. To say that they are too complex for someone in their 20s to grasp, to me, it is mindboggling that a representative would indicate that a whole age bracket doesn’t have the mental capacity to deal with the issues we are all facing. There is wisdom with age, but it doesn’t mean if you are young you can’t be intelligent or insightful.
Q: Do you believe your opponents represent the status quo?
NC: I think they are both good Democrats in terms of how they vote. I think there is a shift in the Democratic party to the left and a lot of it has to do with Bernie. I know Jim has been in the Legislature since 1998 and that length of experience comes with some opinions or ideas about how things are done that might now be outdated. We need new eyes, and I’m not convinced they are ready for the changing political landscape. I think they want to keep things the way they have been, and we can’t do that if we are going to solve a lot of these issues.
Q: What issues do you want to address if you become a legislator?
NC: There are so many and they are all interconnected. One of the problems is we have been tackling issues piecemeal instead of seeing the bigger picture. Our budget is taken up with health care and unless we can lower health care costs we will have a hard time finding funding for any issues we care about. One of the issues I care about is early childhood education we should be taking care of the youngest in our society, it also lowers the costs of education, healthcare and reduces crime rates.
Climate change is at the top of my list, but we need money to invest in renewable energy and that comes back to our budget and healthcare. The cost of education is another — people go out-of-state to go to college and then they don’t come back, and they aren’t paying taxes there are so many things that go into that puzzle.
We need a holistic approach to these problems to understand how they go together. We need to understand how it is effecting people in the state. The decision to leave Vermont is a real one that a lot of people make and a lot of their leaving has to do with policy decisions we make.
One of my sisters wants to move back to Vermont and our stance on vaccinations is a reason. Our stance on vaccinations is a policy that we pushed through and it encourages people to move back.
There are so many issues, it would depend a lot for me on the committee I end up on. But there are things specifically that I can help whether it is health care, the climate or college tuition, things that will encourage people to stay here and will grow our tax base.
Q: Is there anything that I didn’t ask about that you would like to add?
NC: Yes, I think voter turnout is important. I think when people show up to vote Democrats, Progressives, Liberals, anyone on the list they win. But when people don’t show up to vote conservatives and Republicans win. For me, aside from climate change the biggest issue is to make sure young people care enough about their local government to show up and vote, regardless of who gets elected. If we have high voter turnout, Vermont will keep progressing forward.
One of the big reasons that I decided to run for office and force a primary is that I knew it would increase voter turnout and to me that is incredibly important.
