NCLM Volume 71, Issue 1, 2021

SOUTHERN CITY QUARTER 1 2021 16 BEN BROWN NCLM Communications & Multimedia Strategist Time to Work Together: In Rep. Vernetta Alston’s Experience, Listening and Empathy Can Heal If we’ll be talking about 2020 for the rest of our lives, 2021 is sure to be part of the conversation. The hope: this is the year we make it out of the woods, even as the pandemic continues to post grave numbers. As a state lawmaker, Rep. Vernetta Alston of Durham knows, a lot rides on an effective legislative session, ideally one with positive interaction between federal, state, and local decision makers and between the political parties. Bringing experience as a past member of the nonpartisan Durham City Council, Alston, who lives in the city with her wife and two children and was appointed to her House seat in 2020, knows we can write uplift- ing chapters together. Southern City recently paid her a visit to learn more of her perspective. ˘˘˘ What do you see happening in the 2021 legislative long session? VA : Hopefully, some of the lessons that we’ve learned, not only over this last year or so, but in the past many years, is we’ll get a lot farther together when we listen and compromise, look beyond ourselves for the best of people in North Carolina. I hope there’s more of that in this coming long session. When we had the ceremonial opening day (in January), there was some hope- ful talk about coming together, working together, and I’m hoping that that won’t be too hard to do. I’m certainly coming in here first and foremost with the goal of representing my constituents’ goals, so to build relationships with everyone here, and hopefully do the most good work for the most people while serving. That’s kind of the theme, at least for me. In terms of substantive issues, there are a lot of things I care about. I came most recently from serving on the Durham City Council and care about a lot of things that are affecting our municipalities. Especially in this last year, with COVID and just the provision of ba- sic services and the additional crisis of ... infrastructure issues. I’m thinking about that, I’m thinking about transportation, and where transportation intersects with energy and sustainability. ... And also, more broadly, with municipalities, talking with some of your colleagues in the short session just in trying to fight for them to have the resources they need to respond to the pandemic. ... And that leads me to think, substantively, COVID is going to be at the forefront of our minds and it’s going to be a huge task, regardless of how much cooperation or funding we get from the federal gov- ernment, which hopefully will be substantial. Regardless of which I think we have a lot of work to do to help people try and maintain and not fall deeper into personal crisis and hopefully thrive and be healthy. That’s huge. ... I’m hopeful there’s some creative ways we can think about the housing crisis and there’s I think broader inter- est in the topic than what we’ve seen in the past nine, 10, 11 months, and the impact on housing stability and the public health concerns that can come with housing instability. You have a lot on your plate. You received a leadership role, didn’t you? VA : Yes, Rep. Terry Brown and I are serving as co-chairs of the House Democratic Freshman Caucus. We’re a group of now eight new legislators and we just got organized and started meeting, and definitely look forward to working with that group. I only hope that Representative Brown and I can kind of hope- fully shepherd us into a direction that hopefully adds value to the whole caucus over this next biennium. We keep track of who has municipal experience in the legisla- ture, where people come from all kinds of experience back- grounds. But municipal government, just having that level of government experience, is so valuable. How do you think it helps you as a legislator to have had that background with the Durham City Council? VA : Oh, in so many ways, some of which probably haven’t revealed themselves. I was appointed to this seat in April of last year, just in the belly of the official shutdowns of the pandemic. In late March, I was in a city council meeting speculating about how hard-hit our budget was going to be, how many spaces to put on buses between passengers—the nuts and bolts of munic- ipal governance. And the next week, I was here. Even in that moment I felt such a fire to fight for folks at the local level—now, the tools we have are limited, the funding is limited, but that experience immediately made me want to be a strong advocate for municipalities and all our county governments … We talk about housing, utility moratoriums, and all those things—and I think having that frontline perspective framed how I approached our policy making around the pandemic, but also in understanding ... I’m not an expert in much of anything, and I think we all have to be pretty nimble in the topics and subject matter we’re asked to think about. And it’s hard; hard to keep it all together. And I think having municipal experience and time where I was asked to think more specifically about pieces of our THE LEAGUE’S QUARTERLY LEGISLATOR Q&A. Photo credit: Ben Brown.