Monthly Archives: July 2023

From the Dept. of Utterly Predictable: Small Towns Dealing with Rise in Homelessness (UPDATED)

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This space, April 11, regarding the Legislature’s intent to end the motel voucher program:

Much of the impact will fall on municipalities. You’d think the Vermont League of Cities and Towns might declare an interest in preventing their members from taking it in the shorts. You’d think the mayors would be tramping to the Statehouse to beg the state to bear the responsibility instead of fobbing it off.

Well, the mayors did not, in fact, tramp to the Statehouse, nor did the very influential VLCT bring its considerable muscle to bear. Cue the consequences.

WCAX: “Smaller Vt. Towns Now Coping with Unhoused Population.” Comment from St. Johnsbury Town Manager Chad Whitehead: “This is happening across the entire state. I have talked with numerous town managers, and many population centers have been having this issue.”

The Journal Opinion: “For the second time this month, community members asked the Bradford Selectboard for help in addressing escalating homelessness in town.”

UPDATE. WCAX just ran a piece about downtown Burlington merchants “experiencing some challenges with foot traffic,” according to Colin Hilliard of the Burlington Business Association. One merchant reported “an increased population” of the unhoused on Church Street because of changes in the voucher program.

Yep, those merchants and their organizations should have been in there fighting for shelter, but they weren’t.

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Montpelier Is on the Edge of a Doom Loop

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Got a haircut this morning.

“Bully for you,” I hear you say. “Want a lollipop?”

Well, no. I bring it up because a classic barbershop conversation brought home a grim reality: Downtown Montpelier is in serious trouble and will never be the same. This, despite the robust community support for many businesses and the prospect of state and federal relief.

My barber plied her wares on Elm Street until July 10. After the flood, she quickly found new quarters on the Barre-Montpelier Road.

And she has no plans to move back, even though her business has “Elm Street” right in its name.

While I was in the chair, a familiar gent came in and sat down. Turned out he was the owner of Capitol Copy, a long-established downtown business we’ve patronized for years. He made it clear he had no plans to reopen, a decision he made easily and without regret. He also said he’d heard that another major downtown business was not going to reopen, in part because the landlord apparently had no plans to restore the property, which also contains two other businesses.

The press accounts of Montpelier’s recovery have tended to emphasize the positive: the robust community response, the doughty merchants rolling up their sleeves and getting down to work. But this encounter made me think that the real picture is much darker — that despite all the happy stories and successful fundraisers, Montpelier’s business district is in serious trouble.

In fact, the heart of downtown is in danger of emptying out unless serious changes are made in construction practices, zoning, planning, and land use — not only in Montpelier itself, but throughout central Vermont. It’s going to take some serious work to save Montpelier, not to mention all the other river-adjacent communities that don’t enjoy the same level of community support as our capital city.

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Anything for the Unhoused? Anything at All?

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The news is full of stories about the aftermath of the great flood. Our political leaders are fully engaged on the issues of flood relief. We hear about the plight of homeowners, renters, small businesses, and the various public and private efforts to help them in time of need. But there’s one group we hear little to nothing about.

It’s the people who had no home or shelter when the rains came on July 10.

The attitude among our leaders appears to be that after all, the unhoused had nothing before the flood, so did they really lose anything?

That may strike you as an unfair characterization, but it’s kind of baked into the disaster relief system. People and businesses get help based on tangible, reportable property losses. No property, no losses, right?

This includes the 750 or so households we sentenced to homelessness on June 1 when Gov. Phil Scott and Legislature tightened eligibility standards for the motel voucher program. The state made no particular effort to track those people after their forced exit. No one seems to know where they are or what their living conditions are like.

WCAX-TV just ran a story entitled “Where are evicted hotel-motel program recipients staying?” Unfortunately, it made no real effort to answer its own question. There were estimates from Burlington about the increase in the unhoused population since June 1, but nothing beyond the city limits.

And now we’ve added God knows how many more to their number. I’m sure God knows, but I don’t see any effort by our earthly leaders to track the newly unhoused. Have there been any efforts to expand shelters that were at or near capacity before the first drop of rain fell? Has anything been done for them besides handing out tents?

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Private Generosity Is a Wonderful Thing. It Has Its Limits.

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Scanning through the (literally) hundreds of flood-related GoFundMe campaigns is an exercise that inspires and deeply saddens at the same time. A search for “Vermont” on GoFundMe returns more than 500 matches, and the vast majority are flood-related.

That in itself is an indication of the scope of our disaster. The results of all those campaigns are evidence Vermonters’ generosity — and proof that generosity itself is not enough. Because while GoFundMe is a marvelous platform and every dollar raised will help someone in need, the returns are inconsistent and the need far outstrips the response. The meat and bone of recovery must be an organized public effort.

This has been shown by a study of GoFundMe campaigns launched during the early months of the Covid-19 epidemic. It found that “crowdfunding was most effective in areas with both high levels of education and high incomes.” In short, GoFundMe tends to “exacerbate inequalities and further benefit already privileged groups.”

I looked at several dozen of the flood-related campaigns. There were definite signs of social inequity; as of last night, a campaign intended to help the residents of the Berlin Mobile Home Park (profiled in a brilliant Seven Days cover story by Colin Flanders) had raised only $2,310 toward a goal of $145,000, which would be $5,000 for each household. Kind of explains why one resident told Flanders “”Nobody gives a fuck about a trailer park.”

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The VTGOP Is “Helping” Phil Scott Again

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Gov. Phil Scott is kinda busy these days with, among other things, talking to the Biden administration and our Democratic Congressional delegation about federal flood relief.

So naturally, Vermont Republican Party chair Paul Dame thought this was an ideal moment to flog the “Biden Crime Family” nonsense. Dame’s weekly commentary, delivered today to the select few on the VTGOP mailing list, is loaded with conditional assertions and misleading phraseology, all in service of the long-discredited narrative that Joe and Hunter Biden are international racketeers of the basest sort.

Good thing for the governor that nobody takes Paul Dame seriously outside his tiny band of true believers (who, unfortunately, occupy most of the leadership positions in the state party). Otherwise, Scott would have some ‘splainin’ to do the next time he picks up the phone to talk to administration officials.

Dame does his level best to whomp up some outrage from the steaming “Biden Crime Family” pile of Santorum. And fails. But his effort is yet another stain on the reputation of a once-respectable political organization — one that ruled Vermont for more than a century and produced remarkable figures like George Aiken, Bob Stafford, Dick Snelling, and Jim Jeffords.

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Malloy Deploys Him Some Word Salad

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You could be forgiven if you’re confused about whether Gerald Malloy’s Twitter feed is a maladroit attempt to articulate his views or a piece of anarchic performance art. Lately, the unsuccessful 2022 Republican candidate for U.S. Senate has been deploying a mish-mash of anodyne observations and conservative talking points with plenty of ALL CAPS thrown in for good measure.

We’ll run down some of the more entertaining examples, but first I must address the above Tweet, which prompted me to write this post. Malloy posits the late musician/composer/activist Clifford Thornton as an exemplar of THE AMERICAN DREAM, I guess? Based solely, it would seem, on the fact that Thornton titled his first album Freedom & Unity. I seriously doubt that Thornton had Vermont in mind when he made that record, and I suspect that if he knew he was being championed by Gerald Malloy, he’d be spinning in his grave.

The real Clifford Thornton was a practitioner of free jazz, the radical mix of cutting-edge art that cared not for melody or harmony or traditional structure. He was associated with avant-garde greats like Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and Anthony Braxton. A critic wrote that Freedom & Unity was “a natural extension of the music of Ornette Coleman.” There is precisely zero chance that Malloy has actually listened to any of Thornton’s music.

But that’s not the weird slash ironic part.

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This Is the Easy Part

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Gov. Phil Scott is getting positive reviews for standing tall in the public eye, projecting an aura of confidence and strength, displaying leadership in a time of crisis.

All good things, to be sure. But I remember in 2011 when his predecessor Peter Shumlin got the same kind of plaudits for his handling of Tropical Storm Irene. But it turned out that Shumlin was a much less skillful administrator in the absence of a crisis. From this I learned that crises are not the true test of a leader. You need definite skills in such moments, but they are not the same skills that make someone an effective manager in “normal” times or a visionary who can steer the ship of state in a positive direction.

Phil Scott’s true test will come after the immediate crisis, when he will have to learn the right lessons from the Flood of 2023 and craft policies to minimize the chances of similar disasters in the future. And to do so even if it means re-examining his own beliefs and preconceptions, something that hasn’t been his strong suit in the past.

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Have Our “Most Vulnerable” Become Our “Most Disposable”?

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The scene above is on Elm Street in Montpelier, one block over from Main. It’s a low-lying stretch running parallel to the North Branch of the WInooski River. And it’s one of thousands of similar city and town streets where poor and working class people live.

Or used to, anyway. Where they live now, I have no idea.

Vermont’s cities and towns were largely built along waterways, which were used as open sewers for industries of all kinds. That’s why your typical Vermont town has its back to the river. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near it.

So, of course, that’s where the poor and working class people lived while their bosses took the high ground. You didn’t see any mounds of trash, each one representing a ruined life, in front of the stately homes on College Street, now did you?

And still today, the poor and working class people live in low-lying areas prone to flooding because that’s where the affordable housing is. Those areas are more and more flood-prone as climate change bears its fangs. It’s a huge and largely unspoken climate justice issue that we have yet to address in any comprehensive or meaningful way.

In the meantime, how many of those people have just joined the ranks of the unhoused — just as Our Betters have shut down eligibility to the motel voucher program except in rare circumstances?

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This Is Our Monster

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The first draft of history is being written about The Great Flood of 2023 or whatever we’re going to call this one. It’s all about doughty Vermonters stepping up in the face of adversity, banding together as communities, helping each other working day and night, and generally being the very definition of noble, selfless Vermonters.

There’s a lot of truth in that narrative. But.

Well, two buts. First, I’m not sure how different we are from anywhere else hit by a devastating event. Did the people of the Hudson Valley turn their neighbors away? Did the emergency responders in New Hampshire clock out at 5:00 after putting in an eight-hour shift? I don’t think so.

Second, and this is the big one. The Great Flood of 2023 should be the bellwether event that forever lays to rest the polite fiction that Vermont is immune from the growing effects of climate change, that this lovely little theme park is uniquely blessed by God or the Gods or Mother Earth and if only we commit to preserving its every jot and tittle, the Vermont of our fond imaginings will go on forever.

Nope. The monster we have created is on the move, and it cares not for your precious Vermont exceptionalism.

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Oh Great, Here Comes the Next Energy Panic

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Hey everybody, meet BESS. Comely little lass, no?

BESS is short for Battery Energy Storage System. Inside those modular-home-lookin’ boxes are lots and lots of lithium-ion batteries. (The technology is changing; some newer BESSes have other kinds of batteries.) These installations store energy produced during off-peak times, often from wind or solar arrays, and save it for times of peak demand. They can also provide emergency power during outages.

These things, it says here, are poised to become key components of the electric power grid of tomorrow.

I hadn’t been formally introduced to BESS until I spent a few days in Long Lake, New York, a tiny town in the heart of the Adirondacks. While driving around town, I couldn’t help notice bright yellow signs along the roadside that said “Stop the Lithium Battery Farm” with a URL at the bottom. Following the link, I discovered that a group of local residents is trying to block the installation of a BESS.

Oh great, I thought. Another energy panic is upon us.

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