Interview with Gov. Howard Dean, July 10, 2002

Interview with Gov. Howard Dean
Gov. Dean spoke with DEMOCRACY IN ACTION early in the afternoon of July 10, 2002 in his office in the Pavilion Office Building overlooking the State House in Montpelier. That morning he had participated in a meeting of the state Emergency Board, during which he and several legislative leaders heard from two economists about Vermont's economic condition and received revenue estimates. The state faces a revenue shortfall of about $38 million in FY 2003, and it will be the job of the administration to prepare a package of proposed cuts by mid-August. At 12:15 Dean held his weekly press conference; he and Sen. Peter Shumlin (D-Putney), the majority leader in the Senate, announced tax credits for financial services companies and high tech businesses. Dean at this time had a very busy national travel schedule; the next day found him in Colorado campaigning for gubernatorial candidate Rollie Heath.

Dean appeared confident and focused during the interview. DEMOCRACY IN ACTION sought to fill in some biographical details of Dean's life before politics (PART I), touch on his political career and ascertain his views on leadership and politics (PART II), and raise a few issue questions (PART III). The opening question concerns the 1999 Champion land deal, the largest multi-state conservation project in U.S. history, through which 133,000 acres in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont were set aside, although the issue continued to be hotly debated in the General Assembly during 2002.

OPENING - Champion land deal.

QUESTION: The Champion deal. Could you run through that from beginning to end; when did that come on your radar screen and what steps did you take to facilitate that deal?

DEAN: Well actually Pat Noonan, who's president [chair] of The Conservation Fund...the guy who put it together, and I have been good friends for many, many years, and we knew this was going to come up some time and when it did he called me right away. And we went to the legislature and got $4.5 million and then a bunch of other foundation grants and Pat took the lead on that.

Q: Were you out there making calls or...?

DEAN: What we did is Pat and I sat down with a bunch of other people and realized the thing was enormous. We decided to do the whole thing with the New York piece, the New Hampshire piece, and the Vermont piece all at once, which was, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand acres, maybe 300,000 or something. And so he basically had to line up all three states. We lined up people from Congress--Pat Leahy was very helpful, and through a long complicated deal worked out that our share was going to be $4.5 million to buy the easements on the private land and that we would need some Fish and Wildlife money for [inaud.] some public land.

It was just a big complicated deal, but I've done a lot of those. We're doing 35 miles of the Connecticut River shoreline in two states at the end of this month. That took a whole lot of complicated deal making. We did the Deerfield Reservoir, which I think is 18,000 acres around this huge reservoir in southern Vermont.

The signature of my governorship a hundred years from now is going to be land conservation, because it's going to be the most lasting achievement and will last long after nobody even has any idea who I am or any of the legislators are. So Champion is the biggest and the most famous, and it got in the New York Times because it was the biggest purchase east of the Mississippi, but we've done a lot of those big ones.

OPENING PART I PART II PART III