Vermont Sen. Anthony Pollina, P/D-Washington, one of Vermont’s best-known progressive politicians, has announced he is not running for re-election this year.
“This was never meant to be a lifetime appointment or a lifetime career move and I think when it feels more like work than it does like excitement — it’s an indication that it’s time to move on,” he said in an interview Thursday. “I think it’s important to have new voices coming up into the Senate.”
Pollina will have been a member of the state Senate for 12 years when his term ends in January. But he has been a fixture in progressive Vermont politics since the 1980s.
The former Bernie Sanders staffer was executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, one of the state’s most influential progressive advocacy groups, in the 1990s, and also helmed Equal Time Radio on Waterbury’s WDEV. He also unsuccessfully ran for Congress against then-U.S. Rep. Jim Jeffords, R-Vt., in 1984, and twice ran — again unsuccessfully — for governor, in 2000 and 2008, as a third-party candidate.
Josh Wronski, the executive director of the Vermont Progressive Party, called Pollina one of the party’s most significant leaders.
“He was one of our first kind of serious statewide contenders for the lieutenant governor’s race after we became a major party. He was the first Progressive/Democrat to get elected to the Vermont State Senate,” Wronski said. “So he’s really been breaking new ground for Progressives his entire career.”
Pollina, 70, said he’s probably done running for elected office, but said he’ll likely stay involved in politics in some capacity.
“There’s a part of me that felt like I had more power as an advocate than I do sometimes as a Senator, because you’re more free to focus on the issues that are really most important to you,” he said.
Pollina said he was most proud of legislation that allowed more Vermonters with developmental disabilities to get insurance coverage, as well as a bill — which crossed the finish line this year — that finally binds all three branches of government to a single code of ethics.
But he said he remained frustrated that little systemic change had been accomplished during his time in the General Assembly.
Pollina has long championed such reforms as universal health care, free public college and an income-tax based system for paying for K-12 schooling. But the more ambitious legislation Pollina has sponsored over the years have rarely gotten more than courtesy hearings from his colleagues.
“It’s hard to make systemic changes. And basically that change has to come from outside the Senate and outside the Legislature, by empowering citizens to create a systemic change,” he said.
In Vermont’s newly redrawn Senate map, Pollina’s three-seat district includes all of Washington County, Braintree, Orange and Stowe.
One of Pollina’s seat-mates, Sen. Andrew Perchlik, a Democrat/Progressive, confirmed to VTDigger that he would be running for re-election. The other incumbent, Sen. Ann Cummings, a Democrat, could not be reached immediately on Thursday. Jeremy Hansen, a former Progressive candidate for the Vermont House and a Norwich University computer science professor, threw his hat in the ring earlier this month.
