Two Essex citizens are vying to represent their city and three other communities in the state Senate, but they have taken opposing positions on divisive local issues.
The single-member Chittenden North Senate district, which includes a portion of Essex Town, all of Milton and Westford in Chittenden County, and all of Fairfax in Franklin County, is being contested by Irene Wrenner and Brian Shelden in the Democratic primary.
The victor of the election on August 9 will compete against Rep. Leland Morgan, a Republican who has served as the representative of Milton and the five towns in Grand Isle County in the House since 2019.
The campaign will be widely followed because the new district represents the best opportunity in the area for Republicans to pick up a Senate seat.
This is because the six-member, overwhelmingly Democratic Chittenden district was split up during reapportionment this year.
In lengthy discussions about municipal government, Shelden and Wrenner have both taken the lead.
The issue of whether or not to merge the governments of Essex Town and what was then the Village of Essex Junction divided them.
The village became a separate city on July 1 because that merger never materialized.
The winner, who served on the Essex Town Selectboard from 2007 to 2019, claimed that she first supported the idea of uniting the town and village governments but later changed her mind because she believed it would be unjust to those who lived outside the village.
In 2019, she sang a rendition of “Locomotive Breath” by Jethro Tull with an Essex-themed theme at a select board meeting, garnering attention for her support on the subject.
The phrase “Slow this merger train down” appeared in Wrenner’s performance.
Shelden, who chairs the Essex Democrats and served as chairman of the town’s Economic Development Commission, ran a political action committee named “One Essex” for years to promote a merger.
A single, cohesive community had “always made more sense,” he claimed in an interview.
The two candidates’ disagreements were not limited to their discussion of the merger.
In 2020, Wrenner and another neighbourhood resident, Ken Signorello, successfully lobbied for a vote by the general public to replace the Essex Selectboard’s current five at-large members with six members, three of whom would come from the village and three from the town outside the village.
They argued that this arrangement would stop one side from having excessive dominance over the other.
Shelden founded “Don’t Gerrymander Essex” to fight against the “three-plus-three” scheme. He asserted that a select board of six people would be “a prescription for gridlock” at the time since it would set the hamlet against the rest of the municipality.
By a large margin, voters backed the plan. However, it was never implemented since the Legislature, which must approve modifications to the charter, did not take any action on the proposal.
Besides Essex
Both candidates acknowledged that, despite their years of involvement in politics in Essex, they had to spend time canvassing the three other towns that make up the new Senate district to support their campaigns. This included visiting homes, speaking with local officials, and attending meetings.
Milton, Westford, and Fairfax are home to more than 80% of the district’s residents.
When it comes to statewide concerns, Wrenner and Shelden seem to agree the most. In a June televised event, the two contenders had comparable responses to inquiries about everything from gun control to the environment.
They both argued that the state should do more to aid medical professionals during the epidemic and insisted that “health care is a human right.”
Shelden emphasized during the discussion the significance of housing for district people. To facilitate the construction of new housing around the state, he declared he would support Act 250 revisions.
Protecting the rights of “our most vulnerable residents,” according to Winner, would be one of her objectives as a state senator.
Her support for reconsidering H.728—a bill that Republican Gov. Phil Scott rejected last month and which would have initiated a feasibility study on building an overdose prevention site—is based on Vermont’s record number of deaths from opioid overdoses in 2017 as the justification for her position.
Because she had held political office, unlike Shelden, Wrenner said that she is better qualified to serve in the legislature. She said that during her twelve years on the Essex Selectboard, she never missed a meeting.
“As a voter, I just want the folks in the Senate to have some grasp of policymaking and budgeting from the inside of government, whether municipal or state,” she added. That’s only a benchmark I established in my head,
In a competitive Democratic primary, Shelden’s bid for the Vermont House in 2020 was unsuccessful.
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He made an unsuccessful write-in campaign earlier this year to fill a vacant seat on the Essex Selectboard for a single year. Ethan Lawrence, the sole candidate, had been charged with making “bullying” remarks online and disseminating false information about Covid-19.
Shelden claims that although he hasn’t been elected to a position of authority, he has gained political experience by canvassing for a successful redistricting attempt in Texas and by knocking on doors for politicians there as well as in Ohio and Virginia.
In addition, he believes that his years of business expertise in the software development industry, which entails listening to “both sides and working out what the best route is going forward,” will make him a more effective legislator.
