Former Vermont Gov. Thomas P. Salmon, a Democrat who led the state from 1973-1977, has died.
Salmon was from Rockingham, in Windham County. When he won his first of two gubernatorial terms, in 1972, it was considered a major upset.
Former Governor Jim Douglas, a Republican, served his first year in the Vermont Legislature during Salmon’s first gubernatorial term. Salmon's 1972 election came as “a big surprise. After a fractious Republican primary, a lot of Republicans who supported Jim Jeffords stayed home or voted for Tom," Douglas recalled.
He remembers Salmon fondly today, though of course they didn't agree on everything. Salmon wanted to raise the sales tax, for example, but Douglas and other Republicans shot that proposal down. Still, Douglas said the 1970s were a more collegial time in state government. “It was a different era in that sense, and I wish we could learn a lesson from those days," Douglas said.
In a 1989 interview with journalist Chris Graff, Salmon recalled how he slowed down the land boom with the motto "Vermont is not for sale." He initiated property tax relief and steered the state through the energy crisis.
Salmon ran an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1976. A young Peter Shumlin took time off from college to volunteer for that campaign. Shumlin, who went on to become Vermont's governor himself in 2011, said he was deeply influenced by Salmon's prescient understanding of environmentalism in the face of climate change.
"His legacy in Vermont was to begin to make politically acceptable the notion that the environment was the foundation of Vermont," Shumlin said on Vermont Edition, "that that was our success, that was our economic base, that if we messed that one up, we messed everything up."
After leaving office, Salmon served as president of the University of Vermont and as chair of the board of Green Mountain Power.
"Tom Salmon didn't run for governor because he wanted to be a great man," Shumlin said. "He ran for governor because he saw things that he thought could be fixed, could be better, could be made to work, and he wanted to fix them."
VTDigger was first to report the news of Salmon's death Tuesday. He was 92 and living at a Brattleboro convalescent home.
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