After months of inaction that led to a mass unsheltering of close to 1,500 vulnerable Vermonters, the Scott administration today took a step toward addressing the crisis. A step so insultingly small that the governor might as well have slapped a homeless person across the face.

The administration opened two shelters with space for 17 families. That’s 17 out of close to 1,000 unsheltered since mid-September, when new caps on state-paid motel vouchers took effect. For those unprepared for a bit of higher math, that works out to 1.7% of the need. Want another appalling statistic or two? According to the state, 343 children have been unsheltered since mid-September. These shelters will house maybe a couple dozen or so kids. The rest can go hang.

Actually, as of the orchestrated press tour on Friday morning, only one shelter (in WIlliston) had opened for business. Hasty preparations were still underway at the Waterbury Armory and reporters were not allowed to enter, according to VTDigger. The Waterbury space reportedly features partitioned areas for families, with the partitions not reaching the ceiling. The Williston facility looked a bit more inviting.

In fact, it looked downright palatial compared to the administration’s previous effort to stand up a token array of shelter space last spring. Those shelters were so bad that hardly anyone took advantage of them. Visual reminder of the Montpelier shelter, located in a disused and flood-damaged building about a half mile from the Statehouse:

Yeah, WIlliston is definitely a cut above that disgrace. It offers separate, lockable, sparsely furnished quarters for the lucky few families that will gain admission, with secure storage, a play area with donated toys, shared kitchen, laundry and bathroom facilities, and on-site staff consisting partly of state employees and otherwise contracted workers from an out-of-state firm that specializes in caring for refugees and disaster victims. (I guess the state couldn’t convince the already-overtaxed helping agencies to provide staffing.)

Or, in this case, victims of a state-induced disaster caused by deliberate policy choices.

I can’t see this as anything better than a political fig leaf to cover the administration’s embarrassment in the days before an election. They aren’t addressing the problem, not at all; they just want to be seen as addressing the problem. And given the extensive press coverage this effort has received, I have to say it’s working, at least in part.

Which is a shame, because this is not a serious attempt at crisis response. It’s a Potemkin Village of state policy: a façade designed to conceal the moral wreckage our “moderate” “nice guy” governor has wrought.

It would be instructive to know how much is being spent on these shelters. I’m sure it will be far more than the cost of simply housing these select few families in motel rooms. But the governor has been trying to kill the voucher program for years, and the last thing he wants is any expansion whatsoever. Even as hundreds and hundreds of vulnerable Vermonters are left without shelter as the days grow shorter and the weather more inhospitable.

Screw the homeless, the governor needs a win.