WILMINGTON-Ryan McLaren sat at the counter of the Cup and Saucer diner just north of Wilmington village, and said his current run for lieutenant governor may well have been inspired by the ski accident that left him a paraplegic.
The catastrophic crash at Vermont’s Mad River Glen in 2017 that has left him with only limited use of his legs, likely permanently, changed his outlook on life to the extent that his long-running pursuit of social change has now led him to run for the state’s second-highest office.
“It’s taught me a lot about how you live in the world,” he said, as a pair of crutches leaned against the wall. “You wake up in a hospital bed and your legs don’t work, you get to choose. You can either hold the covers over your eyes and hope for a miracle or stay there, stuck, and complain about all the things you lost.
“But I don’t want to live that way. You get up and build the future you want. Vermont is stuck, it’s a bit like laying in bed hoping something will happen to fix it for us.”
McLaren, one of three hopefuls vying for the Democratic nomination, said he’s the most experienced candidate in the race, which will be decided in the primary on August 11. The successful candidate will face the incumbent and sole Republican nominee, John Rodgers, in the November 3 general election. The other Democrats are Molly Gray and Esther Charlestin.
Even if he prevails in the primary, McLaren is under no illusions that he will be a shoo-in for the lieutenant-governor’s job, given that he said no Republican incumbent for any state position has been defeated in more than 30 years.
But if he wins the general election, he’s confident he will be able to work with Republican Gov. Phil Scott despite their ideological differences. Scott said on May 28 that he will run for a sixth two-year term.
“What matters most is that we both want (what’s in) the best interest of Vermonters, and we care about making this place livable. We might disagree on how to get there but I think we have the same motives, the same values, and that’s what’s most important,” he said.
The 40-year-old worked five years for Democratic former Gov. Peter Shumlin, who held office from 2011 to 2017, and then for the last 10 years as a liaison between Sen. Peter Welch and the Vermonters who elected him. His wife is an attorney, and he has two young daughters, ages 6 and 2.
Among his achievements, he said, was securing federal funding for a mobile-home community in Brattleboro to rebuild its water system; $5.5 million for a federal housing project in Middlebury, and $1 million for a childcare facility in Craftsbury that expanded its number of places from 10 to 40 as a result.
His work on the interface between lawmakers and electors has underlined Vermont’s serious shortage of housing, its runaway healthcare costs, and an education system that’s struggling to adjust to declining student numbers.
Those issues form the core of McLaren’s populist message: that ordinary Vermonters face an increasing struggle to afford housing, healthcare, gasoline, and even food, and that he has ideas that will at least begin to make the state a more sustainable place to live.
McLaren said he’s qualified to address the current concerns of working people because that’s his background. Growing up in a 900 square-foot house in Essex Junction – a town he still lives in – with two siblings and two working parents who didn’t have college degrees, McLaren said he knows what it’s like to be broke but that he benefited from a supportive family and a good public school.
“What motivates me is a desire to arrest the slide that we’re feeling with working-class people like my parents,” he said. “What they feel most is this persistent cost pressure like, ‘How can I afford to stay in my home? How can I afford healthcare, groceries, gas?’”
One solution, McLaren said, is to take the general fund money that has been used, for the last four years, to reduce property tax increases, and redirect that funding instead to provide $25,000 in education tax relief for every new home that’s permitted by a town. The idea would begin to address a severe shortage of housing while easing the property tax burden that riles Vermonters and deters badly needed young people from moving to the state.
McLaren said that if the state had used the $280 million it has spent on property tax ‘buy-downs’ over the last four years on the program he proposes, it would have stimulated the construction of some 7,000 homes.
And there is support in the Legislature for the idea, according to McLaren. “Whether or not I succeed, this idea has been met with genuine interest,” he said. “We’re just kicking the can down the road. We’re on year four of buying ourselves time to answer a question we refuse to answer, like how are we going to make this place sustainable and livable for working people?”
McLaren also branded as “dysfunctional” the healthcare system that handed him a $10,000 bill for an ambulance ride across the street to a hospital in Burlington when he had his ski accident. The true solution to such extreme bills would be the national establishment of a single-payer health system like those in Europe or Canada, he said.
But unless or until that happens, Vermont can help curb soaring healthcare costs by improving the quality and quantity of primary care so that it emphasizes prevention rather than the more costly cure.
Vermont should be creating economic conditions that attract young residents to live here full-time, McLaren said. But he said owners of second homes that stand empty for much of the year should have to pay more taxes than they do now.
“I’m a big supporter of a ‘pied-a-terre’ tax proposed by (Mayor Zohran) Mamdani in New York,” he said. “If you own a luxury home that you don’t live in, you should pay more for that. We don’t price in the cost of vacancy. When a community is left empty for three-quarters of the year, there’s a cost to that.”
He welcomed the Legislature’s recent vote to partially repeal the Act 181 land-use law, saying it shows the Legislature can be responsive to public demands. “So much of politics isn’t policy-specific; it’s emotional. It took a virtual uprising that we haven’t seen for a very long time,” he said, referring to public pressure for reform to the law.
And he likened his proposed solutions to Vermont’s most serious problems to his own efforts to recover from the ski accident.
“It’s hard and painful and slow, but we’ve just got to have the confidence to go and do it,” he said. “I have the life of my dreams — I got two amazing girls, a wife, a family; work in a place I love — and I had to go build it after I got hurt. Everything changed after that.”
A version of this story appeared in The Deerfield Valley News, The Commons’ sister newspaper.
This News item by Jon Hurdle originally appeared in The Deerfield Valley News and was republished in The Commons with permission.