Ryan Palmer is the sheriff of Windsor County. In this episode of What class are you?, reporter Erica Heilman drives around the county with Sheriff Palmer and they talk about the challenges of being middle class in an increasingly expensive part of the state.
This interview was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We鈥檝e also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Erica Heilman: What class are you?
Ryan Palmer: What class am I? I would like to think I'm middle class or upper middle class, right? I mean, my base salary is almost $105,000 right? So I would think that that would qualify me as like a maybe a upper middle class, but when you look at how hard it is to survive in Vermont now, it doesn't always feel that way. I don't know what the middle class is in Vermont. It certainly doesn't feel like the middle class anymore.
Erica Heilman: When you say it's a struggle, what's a struggle in your family?
Ryan Palmer: Well, I think it's everything, right? It's everything. You want to buy a vehicle, I mean, a truck payment. It's nothing for a car payment, mine, I think, is almost $750 a month. So that's closer to the average car payment nowadays than it's not. You talk about property taxes. My property taxes last year were $10,500. You know, you're getting now鈥� the average Vermonter is paying almost a mortgage payment in just property taxes. Our overall school bill went up 19%. There is no universe where that is sustainable. I'm sure you didn't get a 19% raise at work this year. It's just not sustainable.
Health insurance, right? I have 100% health care coverage from the VA, so I don't really worry about health care coverage that much, but as a boss who's running this quasi governmental slash small business slash public service entity, we have to provide health insurance for employees. Or, I don't know if we have to, but we do. Well, health insurance is, you know, I think BlueCross BlueShield on average went up鈥� is going up somewhere in the neighborhood of 20%.
Erica Heilman: In Montpelier, are people in power in the state, are they viscerally aware of people who do not have enough?
Ryan Palmer: Listen, not to attack the Legislature, because I'm going to have to work with them very closely here in a couple months. But, we may have a citizen legislature, but a regular citizen can't be in our Legislature. They can't be a state rep and make a couple thousand bucks over whatever, four months, and then still do all those things that you need to do as an elected official year round to pay attention to your constituents and be involved in this and be involved in that, right? It doesn't pay. It pays welfare money.
Like, I don't think鈥� a regular person couldn't survive and pay their bills, they couldn't pay their car payment, and their job wouldn't allow them to do it. But somebody making 20, 25 bucks an hour in this state, they are not getting by. They are struggling. At least that's why I seen in my area. And I'm not saying they're destitute, but they sure as hell are not getting ahead. Like, I'm telling you the average middle class person is 鈥� and you start looking it up 鈥� savings accounts are very low. People are not necessarily saving. People certainly don't feel like they can retire in comfort here. How do you retire and live off social security, which a lot of Vermonters do, especially older folks?
It has become unsustainably expensive to live in this area.
