With All Due Respect to the Junior Member from Addison, That’s 14 Minutes the Senate Will Never Get Back

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I’m beginning to think of Sen. Steven Heffernan as the Mr. Magoo of the Vermont Statehouse, especially since I learned on Wikipedia that Magoo was originally intended to be “a mean-spirited reactionary.” That would have been an interesting choice in 1949 when the Red Scare was raging, but the character was recast as an amiable bungler before the first cartoon was made. Heffernan manages to encompass both the “mean-spirited reactionary” bit with the daft digressions of the Magoo so familiar to us children of the Sixties.

The reactionary was on display in Heffernan’s May 15 musings about having sex with dogs. He pivoted to his Magoo persona on Tuesday, and baffled his fellow solons with a lengthy objection to a bill that no one seemed able to follow and he was at a loss to explain.

At issue was H.710, one of those bills that causes deep slumber in anyone besides fanboys of lawmakin’ trivia. The title itself makes you think Mr. Sandman is sprinkling fairy dust on your eyelids: “An act relating to defining electricity generating facilities.” What it would do is allow multiple renewable energy generators located contiguously to be defined as a single plant. Say, if there are three solar arrays sited next to each other, they could be considered a single facility under state law.

The bill passed the House on a 108-30 vote. The Senate Natural Resources & Energy Committee rewrote the bill and approved it unanimously. Senate Appropriations also gave unanimous consent. It was on the Senate’s Tuesday agenda, and that’s when Heffernan offered an amendment to delay the bill’s effective date by two years. He explained himself in a long, discursive statement that he appeared to be reading for the very first time, so halting and unsteady was his delivery.

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Now, THAT’S How You Overhaul a Big, Complicated, Consequential System

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Transformational change is something to be approached carefully, diligently, thoughtfully. Every facet should be fully explored, every interest considered. Unforeseen effects should be searched for and dealt with before the transformation is put into effect.

Or, you can do it the way Our Political Betters are handling fundamental reform of Vermont’s public education system: Quickly, behind closed doors, and rushed through the Legislature before you can blink twice.

Because, I guess, it worked so well with last year’s Act 73. You know, the last-minute measure that triggered widespread anger and consternation among the voting public because they rightly felt blindsided? Yeah, we’re trying that again. Because definition of insanity.

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Return of the Broken Gavel

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Well, I didn’t expect to be recycling this cheeseball graphic so soon, but here we are with House leadership violating one of the fundamental rules of running a legislative body. Last time it was letting the minority Republicans win something for the first time in (per Rep. Mark Higley) 18 years. This time it’s depending on Republican votes to pass a major bill because a solid majority of Democrats wanted to change it.

Whatever the merits of the bill in question, this is another case of leadership malpractice. If you can’t convince your members to go your way, then run to the front of the pack and at least pretend you’re leading.

The bill, S.208, passed the Senate as a ban on police personnel — local, state, federal — wearing masks or otherwise concealing their identities, and requiring the wearing of visible identification. The House Judiciary Committee removed federal police from the bill because a court decision struck down a similar California law, and Judiciary felt that S.208 would suffer the same fate.

But when the bill went to the full House, it became clear that most Democrats preferred the Senate version. House leadership repeatedly postponed a floor vote as it sought a way forward for the House Judiciary version. Apparently they gave up, because the vote finally happened on Wednesday. A proposed amendment to restore the Senate version came before the House, and more than two-thirds of voting Democrats bucked leadership and voted for the amendment.

Now, that’s embarrassing.

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Steven Heffernan is a Sad Excuse for a Man, and a Worse Excuse for a Senator

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Addison County Sen. Steven Heffernan, seen here being endorsed by our allegedly “moderate” governor, has done it again. He’s outed himself as a bigot, and is now trying to avoid the political damage that should result. Last time it was bravely ducking out of the Senate chamber when the roll was called for PR.4, which would add an equal protection clause to the state constitution. This time, he’s trying to explain why he’s not an ignorant bigot after making remarks on the Senate floor that were clearly both ignorant and bigoted.

And I do hope somebody asks Phil Scott if he has any second thoughts about the quality of his endorsements. Because Heffernan has revealed himself as an archconservative far away from our political mainstream in general and the politics of normally blue Addison County in particular.

The remarks in question were delivered on the Senate floor last Friday, May 15, and went unreported in the media until top Democrats started raising holy hell about them. Even now there’s been absolutely minimal coverage — an outrageous state of affairs when compared with the brouhaha over much milder remarks made by former senator Sam Douglass. Heffernan’s statements in the official record were far more toxic than anything posted by Douglass on Young Republican message boards.

The only story I’ve seen was tucked at the bottom of VTDigger’s “Daily Briefing” column for today, Wednesday May 20. The piece included Heffernan’s lame effort to explain himself, which beggars credulity. There’s been zero reporting from Seven Days or Vermont Public or even The Addison Independent as of this writing.

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Lest We Forget: The 15 Who Didn’t Support PR.4

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This November, we’ll all get a chance to vote on adding an equal protection clause to the Vermont constitution, something our state sorely needs — especially in a time when the federal administration is actively fighting equal protections. The equal protection amendment known as PR.4 has now cleared every hurdle in the marathon course required of constitutional amendments — passage through the Legislature in two successive biennia, which takes a minimum of three years to accomplish.

The final vote came last week in the House, and the tally was 128 in favor and 14 against. The corresponding vote in the Senate was 29-0 — with Republican Sen. Steven Heffernan taking the coward’s way out and ducking into the restroom when it was time to cast his vote.

I’m not making that up. It comes straight from VTDigger’s Shaun Robinson, who reported that Heffernan “got up from his seat right before the roll call vote was taken… because his stomach was feeling ‘agitated’.”

It’s a convenient and time-dishonored way to avoid going on the record. Heffernan barely bothered to devise a convincing cover story, telling Robinson “My pizza hit at the right time, I guess,” and acknowledging that the timing was “convenient.”

Especially when you’re a conservative lawmaker about to seek re-election in the blue precincts of Addison County, right?

Well, He Just Made the List — of Republicans whose records deserve closer scrutiny in this election season. The List also includes the nine Republicans who voted against a bill to establish a state vaccine registry. And since no one in the media thought it worthwhile to name the opponents of PR.4, well, I’m happy to oblige.

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The Reformer Steps Into an Ethical Quagmire

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There are certain words in our language that need to be replaced occasionally because of context. Think “used car” becoming “previously owned vehicle,” or “garbage man” becoming “sanitation engineer,” or “undertaker” morphing into “mortician” and then “funeral director” and probably “bereavement facilitator” next. Or the various, now-unspoken descriptors for racial and ethnic groups and people with disabilities.

And in this age of grasping for revenue in the news business, we have “advertorial” becoming “sponsored content” and now, apparently, “content revenue.”

So I gather from a recent Brattleboro Reformer story about the hiring of longtime radio personality Peter “Fish” Case as “director of content revenue” for the paper’s parent company Vermont News & Media — the outfit owned by not-at-all-fishy Belarusian currency trader Paul Belogour.

We’ll get back to the whole “content revenue” thing and how it might affect the journalism on offer at Belogour’s three papers, The Reformer, The Bennington Banner, and The Manchester Journal. But there’s a more immediate question about the ethics of Case’s hiring that goes absolutely unmentioned in The Reformer‘s story about the hire. (The piece carries no byline, which means it wasn’t written by a reporter or editor. It’s a glorified press release, is what it is. There’s a little red flag off the top.)

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House Leadership Suffered an Embarrassing Defeat Last Week, Not That Our Media Took Much Notice

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A former House speaker once told me that they never brought a bill to a floor vote unless they were certain of the outcome. Otherwise they’d put it off while they nailed down the necessary votes.

Last Wednesday, Speaker Jill Krowinski fell afoul of that maxim. Or ignored it, or didn’t care.

The full House was considering Act 181 dismemberment reform, which turned out to be a lengthy floor debate with plenty of amendments. And something happened that only rarely happens: the minority Republicans won a couple of votes. They actually had an impact on the process.

“In all of my 18 years, I can’t remember that happening,” Republican Rep. Mark Higley told the Vermont Daily Chronicle — the only media outlet to report on Wednesday’s events as a noteworthy, standalone story. Which is a depressing statement on the health of our media ecosystem, but we’ll get to that later.

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VTDigger Makes a Good Hire, I Think

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This truly is the Golden Age of cheeseball graphics, isn’t it? Although this one is perilously close to the line between “crafted by a top-shelf management consultant” and “xkcd cartoon.”

Anyway, to the matter at hand: the Vermont Journalism Trust hiring Brendan Kinney as its new CEO. Let’s stipulate off the top that I don’t know Kinney, have never met him, and have spoken to no one about him. This is me standing outside the forest, unencumbered and/or disempowered by inside information.

It seems like a great move in many important ways. But I do have some caveats, and some thoughs on how the announcement was covered.

Judging solely by resumé, Kinney has a lot going for him. He’s been a top executive at Vermont Public for a long time — before and after the merger of Vermont Public TV and Vermont Public Radio. (Not everyone survived that transition.) He was in charge of development, a.k.a. fundraising, for one of the most successful nonprofit organizations in Vermont. He knows the landscape and the audience as well as anyone, he knows what works and what doesn’t in terms of audience engagement in these parts.

And public media is the model for the nascent world of nonprofit journalism. For decades, public media have been raising enough money to build strong, vibrant enterprises. The new wave of nonprofit outlets is playing catchup, and could do far worse than emulate the development successes of public media

So, Kinney’s a home run, right?

Possibly. But I do have questions.

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The Legislature’s Definition of “Conflict of Interest” Is Remarkably Indulgent

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Another day, another cheeseball graphic from the Internet. But in the case of the Vermont Legislature, there’s something a little bit off with this picture. It’d be more accurate if the red “X” was removed, because its conflict of interest rules are more designed to enable conflict than prevent it. And the standard, as flaccid as it is, seems to be applied with stunning inconsistency.

Exhibit A: The very good story co-authored by Carly Berlin and Liam Elder-Connors and published by VTDigger and Vermont Public, about the clear and obvious conflict of interest involving Republican Rep. Debbie Dolgin.

Dolgin’s husband Steve is a hard-nosed landlord from St. Johnsbury who has actively lobbied the Legislature to make it easier for landlords to evict tenants. Dolgin herself now sits on the House Committee on General and Housing, whose remit includes landlord/tenant law. In committee deliberations, she has openly advocated for her husband’s interests.

This isn’t a problem, I guess, because the House’s conflict standards are as loose as a pair of panties in the mind of Fifties illustrator Art Frahm.

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“This Is, Frankly, Embarrassing”

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This cheeseball graphic uncomfortably represents Vermont’s commitment to ethics in our political process. It’s sad, it’s perfunctory, it’s just plain awful.

The title quotation neatly, depressingly, encapsulates our recent history with ethics enforcement. If Our Political Betters were capable of embarrassment, and if they are they hide it very well, the Statehouse would be full of beet-red faces.

The quotation came from Deputy Secretary of State Lauren Hibbert, speaking last month to a House committee that had just acknowledged, in a bill on the cusp of becoming law, that Vermont can’t afford ethical standards in our politics.

But hey, at least the Legislature is consistent. They’ve never had the stomach for any real ethics regime. They just want to make it seem like they care. The result: an ethics commission that’s woefully under-resourced, has no investigative or enforcement powers, and does all its business in secret.

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