So, the Scott administration finally did the long-rumored thing. It signed a five-year, $2.3 million lease for commercial office space in Waterbury. Office space that’s only necessary because of Scott’s back-to-commute order that would overload the state-owned buildings in town.

Now, that $2.3 million is only part of the price tag for this deal. It costs real money to prepare office space for full-time occupancy. Will we ever get a full accounting of the cost? I wouldn’t bet on it.

The immediate beneficiaries of this deal are some good friends and political supporters of, ahem, Gov. Phil Scott. VTDigger’s Shaun Robinson got a lot of this story, but not all of it.

As Robinson reported, the lease involves 22,000 square feet of office space in the Pilgrim Park complex, the former headquarters of Green Mountain Coffee. It’s now owned by Malone Superior, LLC, a real estate firm co-owned by Wayne Lamberton, Patrick Malone, and Randy Lague. As Robinson reported, Malone Superior is located at the same address as Malone Properties, also owned by Patrick Malone. And as Robinson reported, Malone Properties donated “about $12,000” to Phil Scott’s gubernatorial campaigns in 2016, 2018 and 2020.

But there’s more, quite a bit more, that Robinson missed.

If you add up all the political contributions made by Malone Properties, Patrick Malone, and Wayne Lamberton, you get a total of $41,310. About four-fifths of that money went to the Scott campaign; the rest was given to other Republican candidates or committees including Lt. Gov. John Rodgers’ 2024 campaign ($1,000), former senator Joe Benning’s 2022 run for LG ($2,000), the late Don Turner’s unsuccessful bid for LG in 2018 ($2,500), state Rep. Ken Goslant ($2,000), and my favorite, former Republican wunderkind turned public school litterbox truther Paul Bean’s 2022 bid for state Senate ($1,000).

More detail than you needed. The point for our purposes is that the Malone enterprise has been a generous donor to Phil Scott, more generous than Digger discovered. And now it’s gotten a nice lease deal for its underoccupied Waterbury office complex, a consequence of Scott’s back-to-commute order. You scratch my back, I sign a rental agreement on yours.

Now, do I think this was old-fashioned, straight-up corruption? No, I don’t. Phil Scott isn’t that kind of venal. Also, two other points. First, Pilgrim Park is located near the state office complex, so it’s a natural fit — assuming you want to spend more money to force state employees back to the office. And second, the Malone et al. largesse to Scott mostly happened between 2016 and 2020, so if they were after payback, they had to wait a long time for it.

What I do think is that for most of his adult life, Scott has been a member of the class made comfortable through construction and real estate. These people are his friends. He’s comfortable in their company, and he sees the world the same way they do. Never forget that Scott launched his first run for governor at the annual conference of the Associated General Contractors of Vermont, an organization he once headed. It’s his comfort zone.

The Digger article describes Wayne Lamberton as “a close friend of Scott’s,” and includes a link to a 2022 Digger story that tells far more about the Lamberton-Scott connection than that bland little phrase. Lamberton was a vice president of DuBois Construction, which was co-owned by Scott and Don DuBois. When Scott became governor, there were ethical questions about the state’s chief executive owning a firm that frequently bid for state contracts. Eventually Scott had to kinda-sorta divest himself from DuBois.

But he did so in a roundabout way. He sold his share to the company for $2.5 million. But since DuBois didn’t have that kind of cash, he self-financed the sale in what can be fairly called sweetheart terms. DuBois was given 15 years to pay it off at an interest rate of only 3% — and what’s more, it only had to pay interest, not principal, for the first five years.

You wouldn’t get terms like that from any bank, now would you?

The “sale” allowed Scott to claim he had no direct interest in DuBois, but in truth his fortunes were absolutely tied up in the company and its continued success in winning state contracts. This is all in the past now; in 2022 DuBois was bought by Barrett Trucking and we think Scott’s loan was discharged. (When asked at the time if Scott would get an immediate payoff of his loan, Lamberton only said “Everything will be satisfied.” So Maybe Scott is out of the DuBois business. Or maybe not.)

This is a long way of saying that the fortunes of Phil Scott, Wayne Lamberton, Patrick Malone, and Malone Superior are tied together financially and socially in ways that are common, everyday practice for the moneyed class. (Scott may have that working man’s veneer, but c’mon, he’s worth at least two and a half mill and probably a lot more.)

Which brings me back to the fundamental question in all of this: Why did Scott really issue his back-to-commute order? The stated reasoning, per Vermont Public, invoked “employee engagement, team-building, [and] equity,” which sounds nice but there’s no evidence that the Scott administration gives a tinker’s cuss about any of those things. If it did, it wouldn’t employ feckless administrators like Miranda Gray, Jenney Samuelson, Nicholas Deml, Michael Harrington, or anyone who’s led the Scott-created Agency of Digital Services.

But wait, there was a fourth reason cited in that Vermont Public piece: “concerns about real estate.” Scott said he was worried that remote work could force the state “to do something about selling buildings and attempting to break leases.”

So, hm. He didn’t want to have to sell buildings or break leases — so he made a decision that’s causing the state to sign an expensive new lease? Wow.

To me, the real “concern about real estate” is about the toll remote work has taken on property owners like, well, Malone Superior. Its sister concern, Malone Properties, owns at least eight parcels in Montpelier, including three downtown buildings. The combo platter of remote work, less demand for office space, and reduced foot traffic has not been kind to the likes of Patrick Malone, who’s in the process of converting one of his Montpelier office buildings into “a hybrid of a hotel, bed-and-breakfast, and Airbnb,” presumably because he can’t rent it out to commercial tenants.

Yeah, hard times for those who can afford portfolios of real estate. And the more people who return to office work, the better it is for the market and its operators. People like Patrick Malone and Wayne Lamberton.

So no, I don’t think Phil Scott engineered the Pilgrim Park lease as a direct payback to his political backers. But I do think he sees the world through a property owner’s lens and wants to do what he can to boost commercial real estate. And to him, $2.3 million plus associated costs, from your pocket and mine, is a small price to pay for giving a helping hand to commercial landlords.