Blog : Way to go Bernie

3303 posts
6/2/2015 1:38 pm

Way to go Bernie - Part four

From: Peter Dreier and Pierre Clavel

Pomerleau voted for Sanders in his three successful bids for re-election. And Sanders frequently called Pomerleau to ask his advice. They stayed in close contact, even after Sanders was elected to Congress.

Pomerleau expressed his pleasure that for the past 35 years Sanders has never missed one of his annual Christmas parties for underprivileged . He also praised Sanders for being a stalwart supporter of America’s military veterans.

“If more rich people were like me,” Pomerleau said, “Bernie would feel better about the wealthy.”

* * *

“When Bernie first got elected, the local media said he was anti-business,” recalled Bruce Seifer, an architect of Sanders’s economic development efforts. “They called us the ‘Sanderistas.’”

After Sanders’s re-election victory in 1983, business groups concluded they could not defeat him and thus had to work with him. But many businesspeople also saw that Sanders shared their interest in “development”—what he saw as “good development”—while opposing projects that would hurt middle and working class neighborhoods or victimize low-wage workers.

“Bernie was never anti-growth, anti-development, or anti-business,” explained Monte. “He just wanted businesses to be responsible toward their employees and the community. He wanted local entrepreneurs to thrive. He wanted people to have good jobs that pay a living wage. If you could deal with that, you could deal with Bernie and Bernie would deal with you.”

The Sanders administration provided new firms with seed funding, offered technical assistance, helped businesses form trade associations (including the South End Arts and Business Association and the Vermont Convention Bureau), focused attention on helping women become entrepreneurs, funded training programs to give women access to nontraditional jobs, and lobbied the state government to promote business growth.

When Sanders took office, Burlington had no supermarket in the downtown area. The major grocery chains told city officials that they would invest in a new store only if they could build a mega-market that residents believed was too large. Instead, the Sanders administration put its hopes in the local Onion River Cooperative. With 2,000 members in its former location, some thought it was a risky venture. It turned out to be a good investment, and under Sanders’s successor it became City Market, a thriving enterprise with more than 9,000 members.

Under Sanders, Burlington became a magnet for attracting and incubating locally owned businesses, many of which expanded into large enterprises. Burton, the nation’s largest snowboard company, has its headquarters (as well as a snowboard museum) in Burlington. The city assisted Seventh Generation, a green cleaning products firm, when it started in 1988. Today, with its downtown waterfront headquarters in a LEED-certified building and over $300 million in annual sales, it is one of Burlington’s largest employers.