Monthly Archives: November 2023

Our Sincere Best Wishes to the New Chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges

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From a quick look at her background, Elizabeth Mauch seems an odd choice to fill one of the hottest seats in all of Vermont. But fill it she will, as the new chancellor of the Vermont State Colleges.

It’s one hell of a big job, and she’ll have to hit the ground running.

Mauch’s first priority will be to continue cutting budgets. Mike Smith got things off to a strong start, but he almost certainly picked all the low-hanging fruit. It’s only going to get tougher from here.

Mauch will arrive in Vermont from perhaps the unlikeliest outpost of academia you could imagine: a small private college in a tiny town dead in the middle of Kansas, 200 miles west of Kansas City.

How small? Bethany College has a student body of… 800. That compares to a total enrollment of more than 11,000 in the VSC system. Bethany’s location, Lindsborg, has a population of… less than 4,000, most of Swedish descent. The hottest ticket in Lindsborg is the every-other-year Svensk Hyllningsfest, a two-day extravaganza that honors the community’s heritage with Swedish dancing, music, arts, crafts, a beer garden, and a big ol’ smorgasbord.

More culture shock? VSC is a public entity answerable to the people and political leaders of Vermont, while Bethany is a Christian institution owned and operated by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

To sum up, Mauch leads a small college on a campus that covers about six square blocks and fits into a neat org chart. In Vermont she’ll take charge of a sprawling, multi-campus empire whose constituent parts were recently forced to merge.

And her tenure at Bethany goes back a whole entire [checks notes] three years.

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Phil Scott Popularity Challenge Accepted

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Yep, it seems impossible, but the latest Morning Consult poll of gubernatorial popularity (Mississippi’s Tate Reeves bringing up the rear) shows that our very own Phil Scott actually improved his top-of-the-nation standing from his customary perch in the high 70s to… 84 percent. In a state where Democrats have a nearly 30-point edge over Republicans.

The poll was received with applause from Scott fans and many of those who draw paychecks from him. One of the gov’s top Democratic boosters, Ed Adrian, suggested I try to blog my way through this. Because, as what Dorothy Parker would call my Tonstant Weaders are aware, I’m not exactly on Team Phil.

For many reasons I find him an underwhelming leader. He’s not a creative thinker. He’s been in office for nearly seven years, and I can’t think of a single bold policy idea he’s put his weight behind. Well, he used to claim that he could reinvent state government and save tens of millions a year, but that was a complete bust. He took strong action that one time on gun legislation, following a credible threat of a mass shooting at a Vermont high school (which inspired one of the best columns I ever wrote, so don’t say I won’t give him credit where it’s due).

Otherwise his tenure has seen Vermont’s most intractable problems get worse: Housing, opioid addiction, workforce, demographics, climate instability, and more. He himself cites these issues at every turn. And yet his proposed solutions tend to be lukewarm. He nibbles at the margins instead of sinking his teeth into the issues.

So why is he so overwhelmingly popular?

Well, let’s start with this: Popularity is not a measure of quality. Bud Light is popular. Potato chips are popular. “The Macarena” was popular in its day. Indeed, I will argue that broad popularity requires a fundamental inoffensiveness. A song or foodstuff or bestselling book can’t be difficult or challenging. It has to be accessible, first and foremost. And boy oh boy, from an ideological perspective, Phil Scott is nothing but accessible.

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Hot-Take-a-Palooza

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For those of us who believe Twitter became a hellscape after Elon Musk walked in the door with a kitchen sink, the last few days have been a reminder of why the platform was already kind of a hellscape before that awful day. Specifically, what’s left of Vermont Twitter, which ain’t much, went absolutely to town with bad takes on the shooting of three Palestinian students Saturday night in Burlington.

The common theme: Commenters of all persuasions blew right past the human tragedy in their rush to hammer home their political talking points.

It began, predictably, with the chaos crowd, who seem to take great pleasure in promoting the idea that Burlington has become a cesspit of crime. Wow, three people shot near the UVM campus? Among the tall trees and stately mansions? Time to roll back criminal justice reform and give the BPD whatever it wants!

That sentiment expired as soon as the nationality of the victims became public knowledge. Palestinian collegians wearing keffiyehs? Hardly seemed like a random act.

And then came the cries of “hate crime.” That’s what it turned out to be (pending further revelations about the shooter), but at the time there was no concrete evidence to support the notion. It was all circumstantial. Powerful, but not definitive.

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Once Again, Phil Scott Ducks Accountability for Being a Republican

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The Vermont Republican Party held its biannual, or possibly biennual, convention on Saturday. (Above screenshot from the VTGOP’s own website, although they might get around to fixing it after they read this post.) They actually had kind of an impressive speaker lineup, including Reagan-era anti-tax activist Grover Norquist (who must have been wondering how the hell his career descended to the point where he was sharing breakfast with a few dozen graybeards in frickin’ Burlington), Scott Brown, who’s gotten an incredible amount of mileage out of one lucky victory thirteen years ago, and Georgia state Rep. Mesha Mainor, who switched her affiliation from Democratic to Republican after differing with her former party’s caucus on some high-profile issues.

All of which makes me think that there are some conservative deep pockets underwriting the travel schedules of far-right figures, because ain’t no way the VTGOP could have pulled this level of “star” power in the past. But anyway…

Speakers also included professional troll Scott Presler, a gay conservative dudebro who was touted as a get-out-the-vote activist. Not mentioned in your convention program: His stint as a lead organizer for an anti-Muslim hate group, his description of the January 6 “Stop the Steal” election denial gathering as “a civil rights protest,” and his promotion of false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Oh, and his version of GOTV includes the all-out promotion of “ballot harvesting,” a common conservative complaint about Democrats collecting and delivering ballots en masse. If you’re unfortunately enough to remember the film “2,000 Mules,” which focused on unsubstantiated claims that liberal activists were harvesting huge numbers of questionable ballots, well, Presler wants to take that idea up to 11: “”I don’t want 2,000 mules. I want 2 million mules,” he told a GOP voter training session in Pennsylvania.

I can’t tell you whether he brought the same message to the Waterfront Hilton, but it seems likely.

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The Last of His Kind

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A fond farewell to Ken Squier, member of the NASCAR Hall of Fame, owner of Thunder Road, and the last vestige of a lost species: the locally-oriented broadcaster. His passing made national headlines in broadcasting circles because of his place in the history of NASCAR broadcasting. Around these parts, Squier is best known for single-handedly keeping Waterbury-based WDEV Radio going for decades as an independent voice after the vast majority of his peers had sold their stations to big national corporations.

Squier was a solid Phil Scott Republican, but he did his best to keep his station open to all viewpoints because he firmly believed he was the steward of a public trust. I have nothing but respect for him and his life’s work.

There used to be WDEV equivalents in every community in America big enough to warrant an FCC license. Those stations were basically the public commons of the airwaves, virtual gathering places for their communities. It’s impossible to imagine the impact these stations had. We’ve got nothing like them anymore. And we have no idea what we’re missing.

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So Why Is the Scott Administration Encouraging Short-Term Rentals?

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Lately there’s been a big jump in the number of housing units being used as short-term rentals. You know, VRBO, AirBnB, those fine folks. According to a story co-produced by Vermont Public and VTDigger, “the number of homes listed on platforms like Airbnb and VRBO has grown rapidly over the last several years, following a brief pandemic downturn.”

September, in fact, saw an all-time high in units listed on short-term rental sites: 11,747, which is a 16% increase over September 2022.

Short-term rentals are not the sole cause of our dire housing shortage. If we totally eliminated the industry, we’d still have a housing crisis on our hands.

But it sure doesn’t help. And at a time when the Scott administration has committed itself to addressing the issue, why in holy Hell did they use public dollars to help underwrite a short-term rental conference this past weekend?

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Let’s Pump the Brakes on This Talk of “Chaos”

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We seem to be approaching yellow journalism territory in press coverage of crime in Burlington. Exhibit A is a headline from the usually reliable Seven Days positing a “Chaotic Night of Crime” in the Queen City.

“Chaotic Night of Crime”? Two men fatally shot in a house in the Old North End. A man robbed of drugs and shot in the foot. A pathetic arson attempt at police headquarters. Three incidents.

It was a bad night. But it was not a “Chaotic Night of Crime.”

In that article, Police Chief (and veteran of the New York Police Department) Jon Murad asserts that he couldn’t “remember a night like this” during his time in the Bronx and Manhattan North.

I’m sorry, that’s not credible. Burlington has problems, but it ain’t the Bronx. Exaggerating the state of things is not helping. It’s just pouring fuel on the fire, if you’ll pardon the analogy.

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It’s a Lot Easier When You’re 5,000 Miles Away

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This is gonna make some people mad, but…

There’s something facile, something simplistic, about antiwar protests like the one at U.S. Rep. Becca Balint’s fundraiser last week. Because given the current situation, calls for a cease-fire or a unilateral Israeli cessation of hostilities are unrealistic. It’s just not gonna happen.

It can’t happen, at least not right now. The single goal of Hamas is the destruction of Israel. Hamas impoverished its own people in order to build an infrastructure of war and terror. It launched an attack on Israel knowing it couldn’t win, knowing it would trigger a destructive counterattack on combatant and non-combatant Palestinians alike.

And Israel is supposed to do what now? Stand down? Give peace a chance?

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Time for Another Great Idea to Be Quietly Smothered

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It’s a good thing that Vermont’s left-leaning advocacy organizations are so inured to disappointment, because it’s about to happen again.

On Thursday, a coalition of groups announced they are banding together to promote a surtax on the wealthiest Vermonters. The Public Assets Institute estimates that a 3% surcharge on incomes over $500,000 would raise about $100 million to help meet Vermont’s needs, a substantial boost to the bottom line at a moment when we need serious public investment across a number of fronts.

Nice thought, but it ain’t gonna happen.

Gov. Phil Scott is against it. The Democratic Legislature has a long and storied history of aversion to broad-based tax increases for one or more of the following reasons: They’re afraid of being labeled as tax-and-spenders, which is a laugh because Republicans beat that drum constantly anyway; the fat cats who’d usually support Republicans are open to the Democrats because the VTGOP is so batshit; and/or their bloated caucuses include a substantial number of centrists who wouldn’t back a wealth tax.

This proposal might get a polite hearing in 2024, but that’s about all.

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The Progressives Have a Retention Problem

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Latest from the developing 2024 campaign in Burlington: Not one, but two Progressive city councilors will not seek re-election. The departures of Zoraya Hightower and Joe Magee will leave only two incumbent Progressives: Gene Bergman, elected in 2022*, and Melo Grant, elected last March.

Yep, the most tenured Progressive councilor will have been in office for only two years.

Not that they’ll lose a whole lot of seniority. Hightower is currently the senior Prog, and she’s only been in office since 2020. And that’s the thing: the Vermont Progressive Party has a severe retention issue — not only in Burlington, but in the Statehouse as well. The result is a party spinning its wheels and having to work very hard just to not lose any ground.

*Note: Bergman may have been elected fairly recently, but he’s been around Burlington politics for a long time and, in fact, served on what was then the Board of Aldermen in the late 80s to early 90s.

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