Well, we suspected that the Scott administration’s plan to create new shelter space would be cheap and bad. But they have outperformed expectations, and that’s not a good thing.

The full plan will be unveiled Tuesday morning before the House Appropriations Committee, but the outlines have now been reported by Vermont Public and VTDigger — oh wait, they each published the same report by the same reporter. Sigh. Our press pool isn’t shallow enough, and now our two leading nonprofit news organizations can’t even produce their own original work? Gaah.

But I digress. The plan, as outlined in the identical stories with identical titles, is just a horrific mess. Inadequate in all respects. It’s of a piece with the administration’s — and the Legislature’s — approach to homelessness: It seems to be aimed at covering official asses than in actually addressing the problem. And covering them with a teeny-tiny fig leaf at that.

It is to be hoped that the Democratic majority in the Legislature rejects this plan outright and devises a robust alternative. Housing advocacy groups are working on their own plan, which may be out by the time you read this.

According to Chris Winters, commissioner of the Department of Children and Families, the state “hopes” to set up temporary shelters in five communities with the highest rates of homelessness — Rutland, Burlington, Central Vermont, Bennington and Brattleboro

Hopes.

Winters has said that setting up temporary shelters by April 1, when the motel voucher program is scheduled to expire, would be exceedingly difficult. That is still the case.

And what is it he “hopes” to achieve?

“We would love to set up 40 to 50 beds in each of the five communities. That would be the goal,” he said.

Christ on a bicycle. That’s what, a couple hundred beds? Maybe 250 at most?

That’s a drop in the bucket. There are currently 681 households in the motel voucher program, despite the administration’s best efforts to ramp down the program by making It very difficult to remain eligible. The most recent state numbers don’t say how many people are in those 681 households, but as of the end of November there were 740 households comprising 1,280 individuals. including 354 children, so it’s safe to say there are well over 1,000 people in motel rooms.

And Winters “hopes” to shelter, at best, one-fourth of them?

This would, of course, provide absolutely nothing to the hundreds who have exited the voucher program to unknown fates, or the hundreds more who were dumped from the program last spring. We do’t know where they all went, but we know that the vast majority did not find stable, permanent housing.

The administration’s “hopes,” I suspect, are severely constrained by financial considerations. The Legislature is being asked for a mere $4 million for these temporary shelters.

What kind of shelters would they be? It’s unclear. The cheapest and most easily devised are congregate shelters, which are also the worst kind. They’re not conducive to stability or basic human dignity, they can be dangerous, and the evidence shows that people do better if they have non-congregate arrangements. Human Services Secretary Jenney Samuelson served up a morsel of cold comfort on that score, telling lawmakers Friday afternoon that “These are not shelters that look like your gymnasium floor with cots.”

Yeah, I bet not. These shelters wouldn’t be anywhere near as large as a gymnasium. The administration’s “hopes” fall significantly short of a “gymnasium floor with cots.”

But wait, there’s more!

These shelters would only be open from April 1 to July 1. After that, good luck!

Here’s another goodie. Because existing service providers are already stretched thin, the administration is considering bringing in “nontraditional vendors — potentially from out of state.”

I can think of one “nontraditional vendor… from out of state,” and its name is CoreCivic, the controversial for-profit prison operator and regular donor to Phil Scott’s campaign fund.

Hey, boys and girls, can you spell “shitshow”? I know you can.

Okay, so let’s say the administration’s “hopes” come to fruition and we provide three months of shelter for a couple hundred people and in the process, line the pockets of an obnoxious corporation? What happens on July 1?

“There’s going to be a cliff at some point,” Winters told Vermont Public/VTDigger.

He might want to find a different way of wording that. He is talking about people, after all.