BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — A Vermont town has acted on the notion that young voters offer hope for the future, giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote next week in local elections. Those who turn 18 by the November general election will be permitted to vote in the state’s presidential primaries on Super Tuesday.
That means some voters in Brattleboro, population 7,500, could have a hand in choosing major party nominees who are more than 60 years older than they are: Democratic President Joe Biden, 81, and Republican front-runner Donald Trump, 77.
The change to the town’s charter required legislative approval, and Republican Gov. Phil Scott twice rejected the measures. Last year the Democratic-controlled Legislature overrode the governor’s veto, giving more Brattleboro teenagers the green light to vote and run for Brattleboro’s primary governing body, and to be chosen as representatives to an annual town meeting where many local issues are decided.
Lawmakers stopped short of giving 16 and 17-year-olds the ability to serve on the local school board, which was originally part of the measure town residents approved back in 2019.
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Some communities in Maryland have lowered the voting age to 16 for municipal elections. The city council in Newark, New Jersey, approved a measure in January to allow that age group to vote in school board races. Two cities in California lowered the voting age to 16 for school board seats, but those changes have not gone into effect.
Silas Brubaker, a 17-year-old senior at Brattleboro Union High School, plans to do research before making his voting decisions on Tuesday in local races. He said he’s qualified “because I know what’s going on in the world.”
“I’m not too young or too naïve to know what’s happening and to know what I want to be happening,” Brubaker said. “And when those things conflict, it feels very unfair and wrong for me not to be able to do anything in an official sense. Like I can go to protests, I can speak my mind, but I can’t do anything in a legal sense and now I can, so that’s exciting.”
Brattleboro Union High School students register to vote during a voter drive at the school, Feb. 14, 2024, in Brattleboro, Vt. Sixteen and 17-year-olds in Brattleboro will get to vote in local elections and if they’re 18 by the November general election they can cast ballots in the Super Tuesday presidential primary. Credit: AP/Lisa Rathke
The effort to lower the voting age started years ago. Rio Daims worked on the youth vote campaign in 2018 when she was 16. Now she’s a 22-year-old college student studying political communication.
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“It’s exciting, but I also just really, really hope that there are other excited teenagers who are making the moves to get the word around,” she said, “because unless they’re told, they’re not going to assume this is a possibility.”
Daims’ father, Kurt Daims, director of Brattleboro Common Sense, was director of the youth voting campaign starting in 2013 but doesn’t feel “it’s a full victory” because young voters were excluded from serving on the school board.
Senior Django Grace, who helped organize a voter drive at the high school, said turnout dropped during the pandemic and civic engagement has plummeted. Bringing younger voters into the process can only help.
A sign is posted at Brattleboro Union High School suggesting students register to vote during a voter drive at the school, Feb. 14, 2024, in Brattleboro, Vt. 16 and 17-year-olds in Brattleboro will get to vote in local elections and if they’re 18 by the November general election they can cast ballots in the Super Tuesday presidential primary. Credit: AP/Lisa Rathke
“Giving us the vote allows us to apply whatever we’re learning in class,” said Grace, who just turned 18 and is running to be a town meeting representative. ”It makes it relevant.”
To date, at least 37 teens have registered, according to the town clerk’s office. Many signed up during the voter drive at the school on Feb. 14, which senior Eva Gould also helped pull together.
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“This is the future and these are the people who are going to be voting in our elections and are going to be running in our elections as well,” Gould said. “They know a lot more than a lot of people do, honestly.”
A person holds a giant penny at a mock funeral for the coin, which was discontinued in 2025, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
What good is a penny at this point? Penny candy is a thing of the past, and a modern-day penny-pincher wouldn’t get very far if this were their get-rich strategy.
(This newsletter, though, costs you less than a penny. Chip in if you can.)
U.S. mints no longer make pennies, a decision that saves taxpayers an estimated $56 million annually. When the U.S. Treasury Department announced the country would stop minting them, it marked the end of an era — sorta.
Though those pesky copper-colored coins remain in circulation, some businesses, both in Vermont and nationwide, have begun experiencing penny shortages.
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Enter H.837. The bill outlines a plan that could allow retailers to phase out the penny by rounding up or down cash transactions to the nearest nickel.
Other states, including Arizona and Indiana, have passed rounding legislation, and a handful of others are considering it. As written, Vermont’s bill wouldn’t require rounding, a similar approach favored in other jurisdictions.
Some Vermont businesses have already adopted rounding. But lobbyists for Vermont businesses say some of their members fear the practice — without explicit state blessing — could open a business up to a lawsuit over alleged unfair and deceptive practices.
Worried or not, rounding will likely become more necessary as pennies get harder to find, Maggie Lenz, a lobbyist for the Vermont Retail and Grocers Association, told the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday. She encouraged the state to create a rounding framework, but discouraged lawmakers from making such a program mandatory.
Rep. Tony Micklus, R-Milton, agreed that rounding should be optional, but said the state should mandate a specific rounding framework for the businesses that choose to round.
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H.837’s approach, which would round down totals ending in 1,2,6 and 7 cents, and round up totals ending in 3, 4, 8 and 9 cents, would seem to be the fairest to consumers and businesses, those who testified agreed.
But the change is likely not net neutral. Zachary Tomanelli, a consumer protection advocate for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, cited a Federal Reserve study that indicated rounding could cost consumers $6 million annually nationwide. That’s because businesses price goods in ways that tend to lead to rounding up.
He called the cost modest and said he generally supported the bill.
Despite H.837 not making it past the crossover deadlines, there’s still hope that pennies might make it into Vermont’s currency cemetery. Rep. Michael Marcotte, R-Coventry, the commerce committee’s chair, said his committee could stick the rounding legislation in the Senate’s economic development bill.
That said, you might not want to ditch your pennies quite yet.
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In the know
Here are some numbers for you: Between 2012 and 2022, Vermont’s primary care workforce declined by 13%. In that same time period, the specialist workforce grew by 23%. That’s according to testimony Jessa Barnard, with the Vermont Medical Society, gave to lawmakers in the House Health Care Committee Tuesday. She said the numbers are reflective of a trend in medicine nationwide, attributed to the fact that primary care docs often make less but pay the same high cost for medical school as their peers in more specialized roles.
In Vermont, Barnard said that this widening gap is leading to a particularly acute shortage. According to a report her organization put out in 2022, the state needs 115 primary care providers to meet the national benchmark for our population size. That figure includes OBGYNs, pediatricians and family medicine docs. By 2030, as our state’s population grows even older, the Vermont Medical Society expects the state to need 370 more primary care physicians to meet the national benchmark.
— Olivia Gieger
Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, spoke with members of the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee Tuesday afternoon about S.327, an economic development bill that supports a number of public resources for business owners across the state.
The bill has had a tough go of it so far.
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Clarkson handed out copies of what she referred to as “the actual bill,” which meant the package voted out by her own Senate Economic Development Committee before being “pretty much fully gutted” on its way through the Senate Appropriations Committee.
In a tight budget year, she said, this bill’s focus was on “supporting what works really well” for Vermont businesses. For Clarkson, that means continuing to invest in the initiatives like the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive program, a set of grants to help businesses expand in the state, which is scheduled to end in January. The Senate, she pointed out, has voted to extend the program for several years in a row, most recently through S.327.
“I am charging the House with doing the same thing,” she said.
Clarkson is also in favor of deepening the state’s relationships with outside investors by funding state delegates abroad. Vermont, she argued, should have more well-placed representation in areas like Québec — which this bill would provide for — and in the future Taiwan, which recently pledged to invest heavily in U.S. tech industries.
“We need somebody whose hand is up saying ‘yes, over here!’” Clarkson said.
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House commerce members met informally with a delegation from Taipei later Tuesday.
— Theo Wells-Spackman
On the move
The Senate advanced a bill Tuesday that would allow parents in Essex County to pay tuition to send pre-K students to New Hampshire schools.
In Vermont’s most rural county, families struggle to access pre-K programs, at least on this side of the border.
But S.214, legislation originally proposed by Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, would allow for a handful of families near the New Hampshire border in Essex County to tuition their pre-K-aged children to New Hampshire schools, Sen. Steve Heffernan, R-Addison, said on the Senate floor.
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Kindergarten through grade 12 are already able to tuition to New Hampshire schools.
The Senate will need to vote on the bill once more before sending it to the House.
Vermont and the federal government faced off Monday over the state’s first-in-the nation law aimed at forcing polluters to pay for the effects of climate change with the Trump administration warning it would spur “the type of chaos that the Constitution is designed to prevent.”
The hearing before Judge Mary Kay Lanthier of the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont comes as the administration has unleashed a broad assault on state-based climate efforts, including suing to invalidate the Vermont law establishing a “climate superfund” to recoup money from the oil and gas industry.
The Biden appointee did not tip her hand, pressing attorneys for the state and the federal government over whether the state is within its rights or stepping on federal authority. The administration is challenging a similar law in New York, and a ruling against Vermont would likely jeopardize that law and chill efforts in other states to adopt climate superfunds.
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Vermont argued the law — “a modest action” — was passed by state lawmakers in 2024 to help raise money to deal with climate change.
RUTLAND, Vt. (WCAX) – Attorneys defended Vermont’s landmark climate superfund law on Monday, as it faces a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration.
Vermont lawmakers passed the Climate Superfund Act in 2024 after devastating flooding in 2023 and other extreme weather events.
The law requires certain large fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate-related damage linked to their emissions between 1995 and 2024.
It is being challenged by the federal government, along with the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and attorneys general from 24 Republican-led states.
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They argue Vermont is overstepping and that climate policy should be handled at the federal level.
Attorneys for Vermont and environmental groups asked a federal judge in Rutland to dismiss those challenges, arguing the state has the right to hold companies accountable.
“It was an intense and technical day of legal arguments over whether the Climate Superfund Act passes muster under federal law, and whether it is appropriate under our Constitution and other doctrines, and is going to survive this series of lawsuits that have been filed against it,” said Christophe Courchesne of the Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Vermont was the first state to pass a law like this. New York followed, and more than 10 other states are considering similar measures.
This case could help decide whether those laws move forward.
