BELVILLE: He's got a very good record as far as the Vermont AFL-CIO is concerned.  When he was a member of the House he had a 100 percent COPE voting record.  We worked closely with him in his first run for lieutenant governor and endorsed him then.  We're very pleased with his performance as lieutenant governor.  And then after the tragic death of Richard Snelling, when he moved up to governor, he continued his strong support of our issues.  But, as I tell so many of our members, when you're governor, you're governor of all the people and you have to make some decisions sometimes that you're not going to agree with.  So whe push came to shove, he'd always come down on our side on the very important issues, but we did have some occasional differences, but they were very minor.

QUESTION: What would be two or three of the biggest issues that, looking at his tenure, that he's helped you out with?

BELVILLE: Well probably the most contentious was workers compensation.  Of course workers compensation is basically different in every state.  And, gosh must have been eight years ago or so there were double digit increases in what employers have to pay for their workers compensation premiums.  And it really wasn't a case of an increased number of accidents in Vermont or something, it was really attributable to a downturn in the economy and in the stock market which means that the insurers have to find their money other places, so they went back to premiums.  He appointed a committee to look into what we could do to change, and our one concern was: you can do pretty much what you want, but we want the benefit package to stay the same if not improve a little, and after quite a bit of work with the support of the governor we were able to come up with a program that seemed to reduce the cost for the time being at least, but also kept benefits intact.  And it was a pretty nasty fight but he was with us all the way.

Another one we had a bit of disagreement would have been paid family leave.  Vermont's probably the only state still I think that has a short term leave program, and we're really proud of that.  We had such a surplus in our UI fund at the time we thought that might be a good source for money to try a partial program on paid family leave that would allow low income people to have the same option of taking advantage of the law as people that are better off.  He would not agree to using the UI fund, and I think looking back now he was probably very wise in protecting that fund, because with the uncertainty in the economy now we may need all that money.  We didn't see it that way at the time , and it was quite a contentious issue, but he was willing to work for another source and of course that [did] materialize with the change in the Washington administration.