Not much of a subtitle, sorry. More of a restatement of this weekly feature’s origin: Our media landscape may be vastly reduced from its former glory days, but there’s still some good stuff being produced that’s worth your time. This week’s haul…
Quite Literally Ripped from the Headlines. You won’t often find a summer theater company cited in this space, but one of the Weston Playhouse’s 2025 offerings is “A Distinct Society,” a new play set in the Haskell Free Library that centers around its unique straddle-the-border location. From the description: “When an Iranian father and his daughter, separated by the international border, start using the library as a meeting place, the denizens of this quiet sanctuary find their lives suddenly full of excitement and consequence.” Presumably the play was written before the recent crackdown at Haskell, but it seems all the more relevant right now. Excitement and consequence indeed. Performances from August 20-31.
Burlington Dems Get Fast and Loose with the Chats. For the second week in a row, Seven Days enters the honor roll for the kind of story that made its reputation: A public records request that uncovered extensive texts among Democratic members of City Council during 2024 meetings, including a lot of chatty, gossipy stuff and more than a few close brushes with open meetings law. The Dems, who have a working majority on Council, would often discuss tactics amongst themselves while taking part in a public meeting. Council President Ben Traverse says texting is “simply part of modern government,” but he also told his fellow Dems to cool their jets after Seven Days filed its public records request. Technically they’re not violating the law because there were only six Democrats on the 12-member Council but Independent Mark Barlow is a Dem in all but name, so if the letter of the law hasn’t been violated, the spirit of the law has gotten a damn good rogering.
Embezzlement in Hardwick? Really now. The Hardwick Gazette reports that a local woman embezzled thousands of dollars from three local nonprofit organizations. The victims included the East Hardwick Fire District (which has been reimbursed by the alleged thief), NEK Arts, and the Hardwick Downtown Partnership. The total involved was less than $20,000 all told, but you might expect that organizations in and around Hardwick would be a bit more careful after the infamous $1.6 million embezzlement case involving the Hardwick Electric Department. It’s been a while, but still. (Discloure: I serve on the board of Northeast Kingdom Public Journalism, which operates the Gazette. But I would have listed this story in any case.)
The Commons Strikes Twice. The Brattleboro-based weekly brings a solid story about the newly-elected Select Board having to start afresh on a city budget soundly rejected by the voters on March 22. The rejected budget would have meant a 22% property tax increase; the new board will have a couple months to find ways to cut spending without savaging city services.
The Commons also published a heart-rending piece about a local man fired from his federal job by the Trump administration. His wife is in the middle of a serious, costly health crisis, so the termination couldn’t have come at a worse, or more inhumane, moment. The good news: A GoFundMe campaign has raised $32,000. But tell me, why should a family’s financial future — not to mention literal life and death — depend on a successful fundraiser? Well, we know why: the current administration is a heartless monster.
Counting the Cost of Trump in Vermont. Speaking of local effects of Trump excesses, Windsor-based political activist Hudson Ranney has launched a new website, Defending Democracy VT, whose goal is to chronicle all the ways that the administration’s policies are affecting Vermont — and suggest ways to make your voice heard. Early entries include tariffs, border enforcement, disaster preparedness, and spending cuts. I look forward to following the site, although the easy part is setting it up. The hard part is keeping at it. Also a bit of free advice: Don’t overlook the effects on the LGBTQ+ community. People are scared.
Dartmouth Hires Top Trumper. This had been reported in the national political media, but Valley News stalwart Jim Kenyon brought the big guns to a March 28 piece about Dartmouth College hiring Trump-connected attorney Mark Rayner as its general counsel and senior vice president. (The Valley News is paywalled, but you can sign up to get a few articles a month for free.) Rayner is notorious for defending Trump’s denial that birthright citizenship is actually a thing — a view that puts him at odds with most of the legal community. Who knows what other spiders reside in that attic. Also, as Kenyon points out:
Raymer’s radical views are even more disturbing when considering that he oversees Dartmouth’s Office of Visa and Immigration Services, which has long been in the purview of the college’s top lawyer.
Great. Dartmouth’s reaction to the reporting on Rayner’s hire was a weaksauce statement that in his writings on birthright citizenship, Rayner simply “presented a scholarly legal argument contributing to the broader conversation on a widely discussed topic.”To which Kenyon accurately responded, “Hogwash.”
Good Idea, Bad Idea*. Finally, let’s dip into the opinion pages for one piece worth your attention and one that’s good for a laugh. Former state representative David Deen takes the Scott administration to task for its proposed retreat from climate action — in particular, its insistence that the Global Warming Solutions Act be stripped of a provision allowing the state to be sued if it fails to meet emissions reduction targets. As Deen relates, we would never have had the Lake Champlain cleanup — which the administration brags about at every opportunity — if it wasn’t for a lawsuit by the Conservation Law Foundation.
*Yes, that’s an Animaniacs shout-out.
On the other hand, we have conservative bloviator Rob Roper invoking a favorite right-wing talking point: That we only have a homelessness crisis because our social services are so generous they draw needy people here. This has been disproven, repeatedly, by the state’s own statistics, which show only a small percentage of motel voucher clients are from elsewhere. But Roper trumpets a single anecdotal account of a couple who moved to Vermont for its generous social safety net. And that’s it. Roper doesn’t try to cite any more evidence — because it doesn’t exist. He cites one example and spins it out to essay length. Nice work if you can get it.
That’s it for this week, folks. See you in seven days, same bat-time, same bat-channel.
The Vermont Political Observer. 
The Hardwick embezzlement story was a relatively good news story because in this case folks were looking at the books and caught the problem before it became Hardwick Electric sized.
My public service message: you can place all the personal trust you want in an individual; but your personal trust and the organization’s trust in that same person are very different beasts.
Much of the embezzlement from small local organizations occurs and worsens because neighbors and friends don’t want to look over their neighbors and friends shoulders. This often results in many months if not years losing money to this crime (and yes – no matter one’s intentions when starting down this path of stealing or borrowing from the organization, it is a crime).
Having folks specifically assigned by the organization to oversee the handling of billing and payments on a routine basis helps to eliminate the above. It replaces the personal trust with organizational trust.
Somehow stumbled across this blog today. Probably pointed at by a friend. I’m hooked and delighted. Also now afraid you’ll go away. Or hit the big time on substack- though that’s not bad. They need to know more about the little places and what we are doing. I am a random but regular commenter on various substacks and talk about Vermont a lot though I try to keep my precise location obscure. Quite a lot of what I have to say is related to the things you post about.
Vermont is a silo all its own. And many of the towns are their own silo too, and some are multiple silos- a neat trick that gets in the way. A lot of very nice people, living in silos with good intentions and clueless that they weren’t the first people to come up with an idea. Phil Scott among them, although I’ve grown cynical about his good intentions. I don’t think he thinks that deeply.
I’ve put myself on the line by joining the resistance. And realizing that there is a real possibility that it could become an actual resistance. Nor am I alone in that queasy uncertainty. But we still will be out there on April 5th.
Ok, that’s enough. I hope it’s ok that I used just part of my name. The email is real.
I posted this already on my Facebook page but I’ll post it here too. Regarding the Dems texting each other:
I keep thinking about this article. These Dems know better and got sloppy. In particular, what really got to me was McKnight making fun of the Progressive Mayor’s efforts to deal with public safety.
I watched the Democratic Mayor disappear during the pandemic completely. I was working at City Hall as City Hall Park exploded with overdoses and I never saw Miro anywhere. In fact, it wasn’t until I started taking photos of the people we had to step around to get into City Hall that I finally got anyone’s attention in the administration.
As far as I can tell, the Democrats never did anything to help the situation. At least Mulvaney-Stanak is trying.
“This has been disproven, repeatedly, by the state’s own statistics, which show only a small percentage of motel voucher clients are from elsewhere” Anybody who works with this population laughs at this untrue claim. The hotels (and jails) are full of people coming from Mass and NY. Asking the people who’s funds come from this problem is a conflict of interest.
Lets ask our local drug dealers for OD and usage stats too lol.
“THE STATE’S OWN STATISTICS.’ And the Scott administration has every reason to downplay and defect the seriousness of the situation.