Sen. Phil Scott happens to share a birthday with President Barack Obama and NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon. It’s fitting for someone who’s as well known in the Statehouse warrens as he is on the tarmac at Thunder Road. Though Scott is a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, his record on issues and his history of bipartisanship make him difficult to categorize in the pat language of politics. But if you scratch down to the bedrock of his beliefs, one thing becomes clear: He thinks it’s time for Vermont to return to its roots of Yankee ingenuity and independence, to become a place where self-reliance is more often augmented by neighborliness than government.
Given Scott’s family and personal history, it’s no surprise he feels this way. His father — known as Scotty —was a tank driver in the D-Day invasion. He lost both of his legs when his tank ran over a landmine. Scotty spent two years recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and then returned to Vermont and had a cabin built for himself on Lake Elmore. He regularly called in his grocery orders at the Lake Elmore General Store and ended up marrying the girl who delivered them to him. They had three boys and settled in Barre. Scotty, a truck driver before World War II, worked for the highway department the rest of his life, issuing permits for oversized trucks.
Though Phil Scott, 52, grew up with a father in a wheelchair, he says he never thought of his dad’s disability as abnormal, or as an impediment to a regular childhood. Scotty took his kids camping, set up fishing trips and played catch with them. That sort of perseverance and can-do ethic, if it wasn’t already in Scott’s DNA, was passed on to him through his father’s example.
But Scotty didn’t see his kids reach adulthood — he died when Phil was 11 years old.
Luckily, the boy’s extended family stepped in to help raise the brothers. An uncle taught him how to hunt and bought him his first shotgun. Another uncle taught him to ride snowmobiles, which begat Scott’s passion for motor sports. An aunt had a farm in Elmore and introduced him to the agrarian lifestyle. He’d spend the weekends with relatives, and so learned how to pack his bags and, to a certain degree, take care of himself. “I guess I was pretty independent from a young age,” he recalls.
After graduating from Spaulding High School, Scott attended the University of Vermont, with plans to become a shop teacher. After he got his diploma at UVM, he opened up a motorcycle shop in Morrisville, and delivered fuel oil, and worked as a plumber, welder and carpenter to make ends meet. Eventually, the motorcycle operation became successful enough for an expansion on property owned by Howard Manosh. Scott obtained a local zoning permit and was nearly finished with construction of the new building when he received a cease-and-desist order from the regional Act 250 commission. “I had no idea what an Act 250 permit was,” he says, “or why you had to have one.”
Up until that point, Scott had only a minor interest in politics. But the Act 250 order changed that. He spent a year getting the permit, but by the time he received it, he had been offered a job with his uncle’s firm, DuBois Construction, Inc. So he scrapped the bike shop plan and joined DuBois, later becoming a co-owner of the business. He eventually settled in Berlin with his wife and two children.
With his day-to-day involvement with state permits on job sites, he “started to complain more and more about what they were doing to me in Montpelier,” he says. “Finally, I just looked myself in the mirror and thought, maybe I should be part of the solution.”
By that time — the late 1990s — Scott had already made a name for himself as a gifted car racer at Thunder Road. His name recognition helped him win his first race for state Senate. “But it didn’t keep me there,” he says. “You have to prove yourself, and I’ve never been afraid to work.”
His first term in the Senate, he sat on the Land Use Permitting Process Interim Committee. It took a year and a half to get changes to Act 250 through both the House and the Senate, and the final bill was a result of substantial compromises on both sides. Scott thinks land use permitting still needs the legislature’s attention. “Act 250 is fine, in a way,” he says, “but it’s all the other permits that are needed as well. There are so many — local, state, federal — and they don’t all work together, and sometimes there’s a lot of duplication.”
Scott’s personal experiences have informed his votes in the Senate on other issues. One example is physician-assisted suicide. At first, he says, he was in favor of giving people the right to make the choice to die. But after hearing the impassioned pleas from those opposed to physician-assisted suicide, and considering his father’s experience in Walter Reed, where he came very close to dying from hepatitis, Scott changed his mind. “Had he been given that choice then,” he says of his father, “he might have given up. And I wouldn’t be here, and my kids wouldn’t be here.” He explains that the gravely ill don’t always know what they want, and that “we can’t play God.”
In his 10 years in the Senate, Scott has served on the Natural Resources Committee, the Institutions Committee (he’s the chair) and the Transportation Committee (he’s the vice-chair). Given that the Senate will lose Peter Shumlin, Doug Racine, Sue Bartlett, and Ed Flanagan this year, Scott thinks that his experience in the chamber and his knowledge of the players make him the most qualified candidate for lieutenant governor.
The statutory salary for lieutenant governor is $63,701. The primary duties are to preside over the Senate and fill in in the governor’s absence. Scott plans to use the position to promote the importance of self-responsibility.
“We think of ourselves as being independent,” he says, “that we have Yankee ingenuity, and I think we’ve lost that.”
What this means, from an energy perspective, is that Scott wants to reduce the state’s reliance on foreign oil. He’s a supporter of nuclear energy from Vermont Yankee, and he believes Vermont should have a broad portfolio of wind, solar and biomass generation.
In the realm of health care, self-responsibility translates into prevention coupled with health savings accounts, which he describes as “one tool that can work.”
More broadly, Scott is in favor of volunteerism as a substitute for government. He cites the Wheels for Warmth program he started, which provides 10,000 used tires to Vermonters in need, as an example of the potential of private fundraising. “We did all this without any government help,” he says. “We did it ourselves. I think Vermonters have always wanted to help their neighbors, but they don’t always know how.”
Scott has been endorsed by politicians from both sides of the aisle. Heidi Scheuermann, a Republican representative from Stowe, supports Scott because “he’s a different kind of politician,” she says. “He’s just there to get the job done.” She notes that he doesn’t have an overriding political ideology, but works hard, is humble and has a style that can bridge partisan gaps. What Scheuermann hopes is that Scott makes the budget and education spending his first priorities in office. “We’re going to need to make some tough decisions,” she says, “and institute a tax code that encourages job growth. And we can’t dismantle schools while facing huge tax increases.”
Republican Sen. Bill Doyle knew Scott before he joined the Senate, and echoes Scheuermann’s thoughts on his effectiveness as a legislator. “If there’s a job that has to be done,” he says, “he’ll sweep the room or anything else that it takes.” For Doyle, the most important issue in the next few years is job growth, which he says can happen through workforce training, cell-phone service and broadband Internet, and education. “He knows everyone already,” Doyle says, “so he can hit the ground running.”
One of the most well-known relationships in the Senate is that between Scott and Dick Mazza, a Democrat from Colchester. They’ve worked closely together for all of Scott’s 10 years in the Senate, and now serve together on the Transportation and Institutions Committees. In a break from party loyalty, Mazza is supporting Scott’s bid for lieutenant governor, mostly because Mazza believes Scott “is able to get along with both parties,” he says. “Vermonters want to hear about people getting along to work through issues.”
Such comity will be especially important in the upcoming legislative session, Mazza explains, because there will be new chairs of the Appropriations and Health and Welfare Committees. The former committee will be tasked with solving the state’s budget crisis, while the latter will tackle the thorny area of health care reform and Vermont’s role in the new federal system. Mazza’s impression is that many senators would like to see Scott become the lieutenant governor because “no one else has as much experience,” he says.
Scott’s friendship with Mazza is one reason why Scott says he’s “very hard to categorize.” Yet another is his personal interests. He notes that he’s in construction, races stock cars, and hunts, which might put him firmly in a Republican, pro-business box. But on the other hand, he rides his bike 4,000 miles a summer, hikes regularly and snowshoes in the winter, giving him an appreciation of nature more in line with liberals.
“I grew up here. I love Vermont,” he says. “I appreciate that we aren’t overdeveloped, and I don’t want us to be. I think there’s got to be balance.” The question is whether Vermonters feel comfortable with Scott’s idea of balance. The voters will decide soon.
