Harvey Carter - Citizen
Harvey Carter - legislator, lawyer, preservationist and so much more.
Harvey Carter died last week. He had Alzheimers.
You know that feeling when you are in the presence of an electric mind? Brilliant, visionary? It comes so easy to them and you struggle to keep up. But you just want to be there to soak it up and enjoy the conversation?
That was Harvey Carter.
I’ll leave the details to the fine obit in VTDigger. Lawyer, legislator, preservationist. But the resume misses the true Harvey. I hope readers will correct any details I get wrong.
My experience with Harvey Carter began while covering the famous Pyramid Mall controversy in the 90s in Williston for the Burlington Free Press. Harvey was a lawyer representing a rag-tag and lovable group of opponents known as Citizens for Responsible Growth. They were led by Jerry Greenfield, Chico Lager, Yvette Pigeon and Dee Stefan and backed in stealth fashion by the late Paul Bruhn. The group was trying to protect their town from being overrun by a faceless mall developer.
They hired Harvey to oppose the proposal to build what is now Maple Tree Place in Williston. In the end, CRG lost. And the mall is a monstrous cultural and visual mistake we all must endure on the way to the airport.
Harvey was in solo practice at the time. So to get documents and information about the group’s strategy, I had to drive to his house on Shelburne Road. He had no copier or printer. So at his request I would sometimes schlep to the print shop in Burlington to make copies of his briefs. This was a monumental lapse in journalistic ethics. (Apologies to my then boss Sam Hemingway) But I didn’t have the courage to say no to Harvey Carter. And it was too exciting to spend more time in his orbit - listening.
I had come to the Free Press and the Pyramid Mall story from DC covering Congress, nuclear power and other big issues. For a few seconds, I looked down my nose at having to spend two nights a week for more than a year in the cafeteria of the Williston Central School, where the local Planning Commission and Act 250 panel conducted their work. This was not Dupont Circle or the Old Ebbitt Grill.
But that all washed away with the excitement of watching Harvey do his thing. Traffic, air pollution, historic preservation, conformance with the town plan. These were all issues Harvey used to battle the mall proposal. He even found a stand of Burr Oak trees on a hill behind the property - and dragged me there to see them up close. I look for them every time I drive up or down the Interstate and think of Harvey.
As I recall, the Planning Commission voted NO on the first go round. But in the end, the mall developers won their Act 250 permit and we are saddled with an eyesore that surely would rankle Harvey today. He might go so far as to say it was the beginning of the end of the Vermont he loved - small, local and rural.
I hope a journalist one day will write about the salad days of the Vermont Senate in the 80s, where Harvey served with a Dream Team of talent that passed a series of environmental bills radical for the time and signed by former Gov. Madeleine Kunin. Harvey served with greats like Phil Hoff, Art Gibb, Scudder Parker, Edgar May, Bob Gannett, Seth Bongartz, George Little and others.
These and others laid the ground work for the modern Vermont we enjoy today. They were the generation that spanned the hippie migration of the 60s and 70s to Civil Unions and marriage equality.
There was solid waste legislation that would close all the town dumps leaching into the ground water. Upland streams legislation prohibiting development above 2,500 feet or any “alteration of the aquatic biota.’’ The creation of the Vermont Housing Conservation Trust Fund, to this day the most far-reaching and powerful program in Vermont history to my mind.
Over in the House of Representatives were folks like Speaker Ralph Wright. And Harvey’s law partner from Bennington, Marshall Witten, was chair of the House Appropriations Committee.
Harvey would regale me with stories of Marshall and him flying home from the legislature in Montpelier to Bennington on dark and story nights, laughing all the way.
Frustrated at the slow pace of environmental change in the legislature one day in the 90s, I asked Harvey how he and his colleagues achieved so much over the opposition of business interests.
“We just ignored them,’’ he said. Not in your civics textbook. But I learned from Harvey that elections matter.
Fun fact - Harvey began political life as a Republican.
Harvey and Hoff broke politically with Kunin late in her tenure, thinking her too timid politically. Hoff even threatened to run against her. I think I wrote stories about it in the Free Press. I hope Gov. Kunin remembers Harvey for his brilliance and wit, not for the sometimes harsh words that were said. I’ll speculate that Harvey held no grudge.
We lost touch when Harvey moved to Massachusetts to support his wife Mary’s Ph.D studies at Cornell. They retuned to Vermont and built a sheep dairy in Corinth when our family lived on a small farm in Chelsea/Washington. Something about the rural life and politics connected us. Spending an afternoon with a bowl of pasta and Harvey at their sheep farm was a delight. He was older by then. The bow ties were replaced by dirty farm clothes and he was calmer, more at peace, but as always - brilliant.
Harvey once said to me that Vermont should pass a constitutional amendment requiring that any developer/business that removes a natural resource from the ground should be required to put it back.
That proposal has stayed with me for the last 25 years and came rushing back after news of Harvey’s death. I have spent all these years looking for the political and policy flaws in that proposal.
As usual, when it came to Harvey Carter, it was simple, brilliant - and right.
I’ll make every effort to be at any service held for Harvey Carter so I can spend more time with him.
RIP
