Monthly Archives: March 2024

Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

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Yesterday evening I did what no member of the press corps has seemingly bothered to do: I visited the the Agency of Natural Resources Annex, d/b/a Winters Hall, one of the Scott administration’s four hastily-assembled temporary shelters.

And this is what’s inside all that steel and concrete: 20 cots, each with its own flimsy plastic-wrapped blanket.

And… well, that’s about all. (There used to be more cots, but some have been removed due to lack of usage.)

Oh, there are three porta-potties just outside the entrance. Because, I was told, the indoor facilities aren’t working. The building was flooded last July, and apparently the facilities have been offline since.

Credit to the Vermont National Guard for doing their best to prepare the space. The shelter was clean and orderly, though it remains disquietingly industrial. There was no sign of flood damage or mold, at least not in the section of the building being used as shelter. The Guard were helpful and polite during my visit. They were carrying out the mission: Responding to situations to the best of their ability with the resources they are given.

But c’mon, this is a disgrace. Don’t blame the Guard; blame the Scott administration. This was their idea.

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Touch a Name on the Wall

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The most important piece among all the missing pieces in press coverage of Gov. Phil Scott’s “manufactured crisis” of mass unhousing is the experience of those displaced people. VTDigger’s preview piece about “Just Getting By,” a new documentary about Vermonters living on the edge, gives these people far more of a voice than all the press coverage of the unhousing combined. And that’s a fucking disgrace on the part of Vermont’s media outlets.

Another missing presence: the on-the-ground service providers who were already up to their necks in helping the unhoused. The governor’s deliberate policy choices effectively rip at the fabric of the social safety net, and he tacitly expects these providers to catch anyone who falls through the holes.

So I paid a visit this morning to a place I’ve driven by about 8,000 times without ever noticing it. Not surprising, since it’s in a nondescript house tucked into a driveway off Barre Street in Montpelier. Another Way describes itself as “a sanctuary for those with psychiatric disabilities.” As you might expect, many of its clients are or have been homeless.

Some of those present had been kicked out of their state-paid motel rooms last Friday, including one couple who actually qualified for an extended motel stay but weren’t approved in time to avoid eviction. They plan to join Vermont Legal Aid’s lawsuit against the Scott administration.

You probably have expectations for what you’d experience if you walked into a house full of “those with psychiatric disabilities.” Well, go ahead and dump all those images out your earhole.

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If You Build It Terribly, They Won’t Come

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Whad’ya know. The Scott administration set up four crappy homeless shelters in a two-day period of time last week. The four were meant to fit up to 500 people, if they crammed in real tight. (Click here and scroll down to see a photo of the Burlington shelter, which at least was in a relatively modern building. Just imagine what the inside of the Berlin shelter, pictured above, looks like.)

Well, I’ve received what are apparently official figures from an unofficial source, and they indicate that the four shelters housed a grand total of 10 people on Saturday night.

Ten.

That’s seven in Burlington, two in Rutland, one in the Berlin shelter (a.k.a. Winters Hall), and a big fat zero in the southeast Vermont shelter, located in a disused office building formerly occupied by Entergy Nuclear.

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The Press Coverage of the Temporary Shelters Is Somehow Even Worse than I Thought

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The Gods of Time were very kind to Gov. Phil Scott when they arranged for March 15 to fall on a Friday this year. The 15th was the expiration date for the Adverse Weather Conditions emergency housing program, and that’s when the governor, in all his infinite wisdom and alleged niceness, deliberately unsheltered nearly 500 vulnerable Vermonters.

And partly because it happened on a Friday, the press coverage was scant and woefully incomplete. Almost to the point of moral bankruptcy.

It was bad enough that the coverage of Scott’s decision was slanted pretty strongly in his direction. But the lack of attention to the details of his slapped-together temporary shelter “system” may well let him off the hook entirely for an administrative failure of the worst kind

Friday afternoon is the beginning of the long, dark, largely journalism-free weekend. Staffing is minimal at best. Our biggest outlets (VTDigger, Seven Days, Vermont Public) may have a designated reporter who’s on call to cover big breaking news, and the bar is pretty high for that. The TV stations have smaller staffs but still maintain a weekend presence because they’ve got airtime to fill. But don’t expect their A-Team, such as it is. Any coverage from Friday afternoon to Monday will mainly focus on fires, crashes and crime.

With the background set, what did we get for shelter coverage from Friday evening, when the shelters opened, until now? Damn near next to nothing.

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Well, They Found Their Fourth Shelter, and Oh My God

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A little late night catch-up. You may recall that the Scott administration was having a little trouble finding a site for its fourth temporary shelter. They had been looking in Bennington but then, at the last minute, they switched their focus to Brattleboro.

Or, to be more precise, the greater Brattleboro area. Because the site they identified, late yesterday, according to the Brattleboro Reformer, is a building formerly used by Entergy Nuclear when it operated the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

Which closed, it says here, ten years ago.

Oh boy.

Just to be clear. They’re taking an office space that’s apparently been out of use for a decade, and they had one single day to set it up as a congregate shelter.

Tell me, is the Scott administration deliberately trying to make these shelters as dire as possible, or is it more of an Inspector Clouseau situation?

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The Press Coverage of the Shelter Situation Has Been Terrible. We All Need to Take Some Responsibility for That.

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The media coverage of this week’s Scott administration temporary shelter ClusterfuckTM has been dispiritingly spotty and incomplete. This has helped the admin play a little game of “Hey, look! A Squirrel!” with the press. Gov. Phil Scott came out swinging in his Wednesday press conference, bashing the Legislature for allegedly failing to address Act 250 reform when, in fact, the legislative process is a lengthy one and it’s way too early to declare victory or defeat. Since the environmental and development lobbies seem to be unified behind the effort, there is every reason to believe that significant reform will be enacted and Scott’s panic will prove unwarranted.

But all the whining and finger-pointing diverted press attention from the simultaneous rollout of the shelter plan, which involves kicking 500 vulnerable Vermonters out of state-paid motel rooms and into hastily-constructed temporary shelters that will (a) only be open at night and (b) will only be in operation for one week. Or less.

Starting tonight.

The press took a while to get in gear on the shelter issue. It’s a complicated situation, and most of the stories failed to get a full grasp of it. Some weren’t much better than water carriers for administration policy.

I was prepared to write a scathing critique of our press corps, and I will, but then I listened to a really good podcast this morning about the fallen state of journalism today. It made me realize that every one of us plays a part in the health of our media ecosystem, and that I should do something about it as well as complain about it.

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I Think We Should Call This “Winters Hall”

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This, my friends, is what the Scott administration thinks is an acceptable shelter space for dozens of our most vulnerable Vermonters. This is the Agency of Natural Resources Annex building, technically in Berlin but closer to Montpelier than anything. Starting tonight, if the administration has its way, this will be one of four nighttime-only temporary shelters meant to house a total of roughly 500 people being booted from their state-paid motel rooms. For no good reason. Bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, pitched in multisyllabic words intended to drain all the human emotion from the matter.

(Note: Vermont Legal Aid is going to court to try to block the mass exiting operation. I kind of doubt they’ll succeed; this plan is cruel, obnoxious and heartless, but it’s within the purview of state decision-making authority. But we can hope.

Otherwise, what are we looking at here?

I haven’t been inside the Annex, so I can’t witness to the quality of the decor. Probably not great; it’s been used for general storage by various state agencies, which have apparently been busily clearing out all the stuff that’s been sitting around. I can’t swear to the bathroom or shower facilities, although I have heard that the building contains two single-stall bathrooms. For dozens of people?)

Food service? Refrigeration? Privacy? Personal storage? Need we ask?

Did I mention it’s in the Winooski River flood plain and that it was flooded last summer?

Opens at 7:00 p.m. Closes for the day at 7:00 a.m. It’s about a half-hour walk from the Statehouse. (Bitter irony alert: It’s almost directly across the river from a tent encampment that’s been occupied by unhoused folk throughout the winter.) There is no bus service on this industrial roadway that probably gets more heavy-truck traffic than anything else. Perhaps some, or many, of the residents will find day shelter in the Statehouse’s welcoming cafeteria. They sure won’t gain access to the governor’s own offices in the closely-guarded, entry-by-pass-only Pavilion Building.

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In Re: Coyote V. Boulder

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You probably know what happens when a bunch of Trumpers walk into a courtroom seeking their twisted idea of justice. Unless a like-minded judge happens to occupy the bench, they get laughed out of court.

Well, it happened again today in a Windsor County courtroom. (Technically it happened in digital space; the hearing was conducted remotely via the Webex meeting app.) The Trumpers entered looking for redress, and wound up flattened under the Big Boulder O’ Justice.

The case involved an ongoing dispute between the leadership of the Windsor County Republican Committee and a band of die-hard Trump backers. This has mostly been reported in the pages of the Vermont Daily Chronicle because political journalism in the mainstream press is pretty much dead in Vermont. (I do wish the VDC would learn how to spell John MacGovern’s name, though.)

Close observers could have foreseen the outcome simply by looking at the forces arrayed on each side. The plaintiffs were represented by Deb Bucknam, a former Republican nominee for attorney general (she got her ass kicked by TJ Donovan in 2016) and a former officer of the state party, who now found herself suing that very institution. She really Perry Masoned the case, assembling at least 13 exhibits of evidence and stretching out the hearing to the point where the judge asked her if she could, you know, get to the point.

The defendants, Windsor County Republican Committee chair John MacGovern and VTGOP chair Paul Dame (and the state party itself), didn’t bother hiring lawyers. They didn’t assemble any evidence. MacGovern even admitted that he hadn’t read some of Bucknam’s exhibits, partly because she hadn’t provided some of them until mere hours before the hearing. In short, neither Dame nor MacGovern took the proceeding very seriously. And by God, they were right. The judge dismissed Bucknam’s case after deliberating for about 10 minutes.

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The Shelter Clusterfuck, Continued: Now With More Ridiculousness

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This is a follow-up to my previous post on the Scott administration’s plan to exit 500 homeless Vermonters from state-paid motel rooms on Friday and into temporary congregate night-only shelters.

Which seems slightly less devious but even more absurd with the news that the governor signed the Budget Adjustment Act on Wednesday afternoon. My proposition that he’d delayed signing so he’d have a pretext for exiting all those people was inaccurate.

But the signing raises new questions. The biggest of which is, why in Hell did he wait so long? The bill passed the Legislature on March 1. I’m sure it took a few days to reach his desk, but the language had been agreed to. There was no need to sit on the bill. And since he did, his officials were left without firm direction on how to extend, or not, voucher accommodation for those being housed under the Adverse Weather Condition program. It meant, according to Commissioner Chris Winters of the Department of Children and Families, that state officials had little to no contact with AWC clients until Wednesday.

The only previous communication had been a letter warning clients that they might have to exit their motels on March 15. That’s all.

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“A Manufactured Crisis”

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Gov. Phil Scott’s treatment of the emergency housing program has been a case study in mismanagement with more than a hint of deliberate cruelty. But today, his administration outdid itself.

Extra bonus: He is openly defying the will of the Legislature as expressed in clear language that his own officials agreed to.

Let’s address the on-the-ground reality stuff first, and then we’ll circle back to process.

On Friday, the Adverse Weather Conditions (AWC, pronounced like a raptor call) program expires for the season. As it stands, roughly 500 people now housed in state-paid motel rooms will lose their shelter. And so the state is patching together a handful of temporary congregate shelters (think cots, communal bathrooms, and no known provision for food) in four cities across the state: Bennington, Berlin, Burlington, and Rutland.

But wait, there’s more! The shelters are nighttime-only. They will be open from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. During the daytime? You’re on your own.

But wait, there’s even more! They are only going to operate for one week, more or less.

But that’s not all! The shelters will be staffed by hastily-trained National Guard personnel with security duty contracted to local law enforcement, whose officers will be armed.

A reminder that most of these people would qualify for extended motel stays due to disability status, old age, youth, or other criteria.

Were they trying to create the worst possible program? It sure seems that way.

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