Friday afternoon brought us, courtesy of VTDigger, a fascinating story from down Bennington way, where local officials have basically waved the white flag over a proposed solar array north of town, planned by “solar developer and lawyer Thomas Melone.” Melone has been highly litigious in this matter, and numerous cases are pending before the courts. Apparently the town Parental Figures have decided to stop paying lawyers and let Melone have his way.
And you know what? In this case, the litigious plutocrat is the good guy.
I’ll sit back for a moment and let the brickbats fly.
Now, I don’t know the history of the case. But I sure as hell recognize a flaming outbreak of the NIMBYs when I see it, and this is a classic example. The opposition to this development goes to outrageous lengths to make its case. Reading this story made me wonder how in holy Hell we will ever get close to meeting our emissions reductions targets. Which, reminder, are established in state law.
First, the obligatory note about Famous Quotes. They’re all a lie, apparently.
This one is either an “Afghan Proverb” or it was said by Benjamin Hooks or John C. Maxwell or James M. Kouzas, take your choice. I’m just surprised it hasn’t been attributed to the Grand Champions of “I Didn’t Actually Say That”: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Yogi Berra.
Whoever said it, it applies here. The Democratic leadership of the House and Senate played a very dangerous game when they jammed through H.454, the “education reform” bill that’s all about squeezing the public education system and protecting the interests of Vermont’s big private schools. Yeah, they won. They got their grand bargain with Gov. Phil Scott. But at what cost?
It’s almost unheard of for a major bill to pass a legislative body with most of the majority lawmakers voting “No,” and that’s exactly what happened here. Virtually all the Republicans voted in lockstep with the governor, while most Democrats in the House and Senate spurned their leadership and rvoted against H.454.
There’s a reason such a maneuver is almost unheard of, and it’s expressed in my headline. “This broke the Democratic caucuses” is what one majority lawmaker told me, and added that House and Senate leaders “are isolated and insulated from their caucuses.”
Need I say that this is an unhealthy situation, and that it bodes ill for the 2026 session and the November elections? Need I add that leadership needs to put in some serious time mending fences? They should, but based on past performance I have little confidence that they will.
Belated weekly roundup of the best reportage in Vermont, postponed due to the education reform vote and related stuff. Reminder: Although this post is coming out on June 18, it only covers material posted/published/promulgated no later than the 15th.
Glenn Russell strikes again. The best part of VTDigger’s Friday story about Gov. Phil Scott and the Legislature coming together on an education reform bill? Glenn Russell’s photograph. Not reproducing it for copyright reasons, so click on the link and enjoy.
Mmm, that’s the good stuff. In a single image, Russell perfectly captures the House-Senate conference committee dynamics that led us down this prickly path. The three Senate conferees are pictured. Two of them, Sens. Seth Bongartz and Scott Beck, strike identical poses, leaning forward, peering intently over their pushed-down glasses, holding copies of draft legislation, looking more than a bit skeptical of their House counterparts. The third Senator, Ann Cummings, leans away from the table with an expression that says, quite clearly, “I want nothing to do with these jamokes.”
In case you haven’t been reading me lately, Democrat Bongartz and Republican Beck share a common background and purpose. Both have substantial ties to the private schools that hoover up public education dollars, and both repeatedly centered those private institutions in what was supposed to be a discussion of how to improve the public schools. To capture all that in a single image? Chef’s kiss.
My weekly roundup of the best of Vermont journalism will again be posted late, most likely Wednesday. The delay in posting is because of the Legislature holding its final vote on H.454, the education reform bill, on Monday. Had to leave the decks cleared for that. And before I can get to the best of Vermont journalism, I have to begin with a massive media fail that reflects our sadly depleted news ecosystem.
Last week, a House-Senate conference committee was meeting to try to hash out a compromise education reform bill. The six conferees (three Senate, three House) met multiple times. Every meeting was warned in advance and was open to the public. And we got virtually no coverage at all of their highly impactful deliberations.
Now, I know legislative hearings can be a big fat drag. You can spend hours on an uncomfortable chair, sharing a tiny room with too many people, and wind up with nothing at all to report.
But this wasn’t your average legislative hearing, not at all.
So the Legislature, in all its not-quote-infinite wisdom, has approved H.454, the sweeping “education reform” bill. In doing so, it pressed a gun firmly to its own neck. This bill threatens to backfire big-time if they don’t fix it next year, so in passing this bill they set themselves up for an even more contentious education debate — this time during an election year.
Yeah, no pressure.
As I’ve noted previously, the bill’s best feature is its raw unpalatability. To me, it’s virtually certain that H.454, in its current form, will never take effect. It’s political poison in so many ways that lawmakers will have no choice but to reopen this Costco-supersized can of worms next January.
Monday’s the big day, or so they tell us. The full House and Senate are scheduled to vote on the education reform Grand Bargain, which will never take effect in its current form even if it survives the big votes.
Still, major drama. The vote is not a sure thing by any means, despite the unified support of Gov. Phil Scott and Democratic and Republican legislative leadership. Many members of both parties realize the bill would negatively impact their local schools — districts in Democratic areas could see significant spending cuts, while rural Republican districts could see a wave of school closures and higher property taxes. The Democrats are also hearing it bigly from school officials and labor union constituencies.
Maybe legislative leadership can crack the whip firmly enough to scratch out a win, if only with the threat of a midsummer return to the Statehouse at the behest of Gov. Phil Scott. But as I wrote previously, leadership’s best argument is that they can all come back next year and overhaul the overhaul. In other words, hold your nose and vote for it, just so we can declare victory and get the hell out of here. Inspiring.
First of all, “Declare victory and go home” is apparently one of many “famous quotes” that were never said at all, or never said by the person credited with saying them. (Usually Winston Churchill. Or Albert Einstein. Or Yogi Berra. Peas in a pod.) Details below, if you want to stick around.
Second of all, the “handshakes across the table” picture is not nearly as dramatic or satisfying when it’s taken from the viewpoint of the center-table cameras used to transmit legislative hearings. But I wasn’t there for the Big Moment, so I had to make do.
Now to the business at hand. After weeks of wrangling and repeated brushes with failure, legislative leaders and the governor reached a grand bargain of sorts on reforming public education finance and governance. Sounds impressive, right? But maaaan, the articles about this achievement are chock full of caveats and red flags. The more you read, the less monumental it seems. Really, it looks like a way for all concerned to engage in the Statehouse’s favorite participatory sport, kicking the can down the road.
If you think that’s overly cynical, I give you the words of none other than Gov. Phil Scott, who endorsed the bill and promised to twist Republican arms to try to get it past the entire House and Senate, an outcome that’s far from assured. Here’s how the governor described what this bill would do:
I believe it will put us on a path to stabilize property tax pressure for working Vermonters, while also putting us on a path to much needed governance reform that will unlock more opportunities for our kids.
The Phrase That Pays is “on a path.” This isn’t the actual transformation of our education system. This puts us “on a path” to transformation.
In other words, this bill is never going to take effect in its present form — even if it does pass the Legislature on Monday. Scott also predicted a return to the education reform issue next year, and he doesn’t think it will be any easier than this year.
Need more evidence that Our Betters just wrote themselves a “Get Out of Jail Free” card? Start with the fact that the bill wouldn’t take effect until 2028, a full year later than the governor had wanted. That’s plenty of time for second thoughts and rewrites.
Besides that, the bill is loaded with escape hatches, “off ramps” (Vermont Public’s Lola Duffort), and “is replete with unknowns and contingencies, and requires years of phase-ins and -outs before it takes full effect” (VTDigger’s Ethan Weinstein).
Now, that’s lawmaking.
But to even get to the point where those off ramps and contingencies can be deployed, this bill has to survive a vote of the full House and Senate. The governor himself predicted that some Republicans and some Democrats would vote “no.” (Almost certainly some Progressives will as well, but I think Scott sees the Progs as a rounding error or something.) Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck, who played a crucial role on the Committee of Conference that produced this bill, plans to spend the weekend urging his fellow Republicans to vote “yes,” and predicted plenty of uncomfortable and difficult conversations. “The conversation will definitely start with a lot of ‘no’s,” he said.
Which makes all the sense in the world. This bill would impose significant tax increases on some districts, mainly Republican ones, and force significant spending cuts in other districts, mainly Democratic ones. It would also lead to widespread school closures, almost entirely in rural areas. Honestly, if I were a Republican lawmaker, I’d have a hard time voting “Yes” because it would clearly NOT be beneficial to my constituents. And if I were a Democratic lawmaker, I’d have a hard time voting “Yes” because the bill would almost certainly force cuts in the public education system.
You and I won’t be privy to those arm-twistings, but I’ll bet you a shiny new dime that one of the key arguments will be “Don’t worry, this bill will never take effect. We’ll fix it next year.”
Speaking of which, you know what would come in real handy? A fully-empowered Commission on the Future of Public Education, the august body created by the Legislature last year and tasked with presenting a reform plan by the end of 2025. Given the obvious fact that this bill is deeply flawed and probably designed to never take effect, it sure would be nice to have a robust report from the Commission on how to fix this mess.
But wait, the governor and Legislature sidelined the Commission in their rush to Get Something Done This Year, even if it’s not the Right Thing. It still exists, but it’s in a limbo state, with no clear vision of what it’s supposed to accomplish and no institutional backing. Or as VTDigger’s Corey McDonald put it this week:
Now, as education reform proceeds, with only minor input from the body, the future of the commission tasked with studying the future of public education in Vermont is, itself, uncertain.
Well, that’s unfortunate.
For all the wrangling and the weeks of overtime, for all the struggles that split the House and Senate and will certainly divide the Democratic and Republican caucuses on Monday, we are nowhere near consensus on education reform. The governor himself predicted that next year’s debate on education reform will be “just as challenging, if not more” than this year’s. Great.
But hey, the Committee of Conference got its magical handshake moment, and that’s the best they could have hoped for.
Postscript. “Declare victory and go home,” or some variation on that theme, is universally credited to Vermont U.S. Sen. George Aiken. The phrase was a half-serious attempt to bring an end to the Vietnam War.
Except that, well, apparently he never said it. That’s according to Vermont historical journalist Mark Bushnell, who found that Aiken’s actual words were far more circuitous than the punchy, pithy version that now adorns many a QuoteFancy image. Here’s Busnell’s quotation of Aiken from the Congressional Record:
“(T)he United States could well declare unilaterally that this stage of the Vietnam war is over — that we have ‘won’ in the sense that our Armed Forces are in control of most of the field and no potential enemy is in a position to establish its authority over South Vietnam.”
That thing about “in control of most of the field” was a damn lie, and I suspect Aiken knew it. At best, we controlled the big cities and our military outposts.
But that’s not all. Aiken didn’t actually want us to “go home.” He wanted us to take a step back from aggressive military engagement in favor of “intensive reconnaissance,” whatever the hell that means. One of the causes of our defeat in Vietnam was a lack of reliable intelligence: We were incapable of doing effective reconnaissance because of language and cultural barriers, and South Vietnam was a corrupt basket case incapable of much of anything. According to Bushnell, Aiken did not believe the U.S. could or should leave Vietnam.
So much for our favorite wise man. But hey, you know, he’d probably feel right at home in our current education reform debate.
I try to limit my use of bad language, I really do. But there are times, and this is one of them.
Gov. Phil Scott, alleged “nice guy” and “moderate” who has insisted that protecting Vermont’s most vulnerable is a pillar of administration policy, just went and did what we expected him to do all along: He vetoed H.91, the Legislature’s carefully crafted replacement for the motel voucher system Scott has been complaining about for years.
Our mainstream media outlets have been saying for weeks that Scott’s stance on H.91 was unclear. In doing so, they ignored the obvious signal from Human Services Secretary Jenney Samuelson that a veto was in the cards from jump street. Almost a month ago, Samuelson delivered a memo to legislative leaders expressing serious concerns about H.91. That should have been all the foreshadowing needed to conclude that we were inevitably going to end up where we are today, with Scott killing a good-faith effort by the Legislature to do the thing he and his administration should have done long ago: Propose a voucher replacement plan of his own.
This post is a bit later than usual* because it’s taken me a while to get my feet back under me after an exhausting but rewarding trip last week. I attended a conference organized by the Institute for Nonprofit News, one of several organizations dedicated to fostering a new wave of nonprofit journalism.
*I’m only including items published on or before Sunday, June 8 in hopes of returning to my usual schedule with the next installment.
It was intense, and I’m still processing what I learned. But my single biggest takeaway is that there’s an amazing amount of talent, energy and dedication in this relatively brand-new field. People all over the country are creating nonprofit news outlets at local, state, regional, and national levels, and coming up with novel strategies for achieving sustainability. (There are also a lot of organizations and foundations eager to promote and invest in this new, nonprofit model of journalism.) It’s not easy and success is not assured, but I was blown away by the quality of the people involved in this effort. Made me more optimistic about the project.
INN’s membership includes about 500 organizations. More than 400 people gathered in Minneapolis for three days of panel discussions, workshops, and one-on-one meetings with experts. I was there as a board member of the Hardwick Gazette, and I was determined to bring back as much information and as many ideas as possible. That meant taking full advantage of everything I could fit in. Let’s put it this way: I’d never been to Minneapolis before, and I still feel like I haven’t. Almost all my time was spent within a couple blocks of the conference hotel.
Coincidentally enough, this week’s edition of NYSV is heavy on content from Vermont’s own local outlets, many of which are now nonprofit. Some of the stories are about the local repercussions of state policy debates, while others are about the vagaries of small-town politics. These are services that only a grassroots outlet can perform, and Vermont is lucky to have as many small “papers” as we do.
It’s an extremely transparent attempt by the world’s biggest corporation to try to make itself seem all Vermonty: Cozy, human-scaled, not at all the most voracious shark in the ocean. Problem is, the flannel shirt still has a sales tag on the collar and the jeans and work boots are unsullied by exposure to dirt, mud, or physical labor.
I have to assume this is a PR blitz related to the ongoing controversy in Essex, where Amazon wants to build a 107,000-square-foot distribution facility in an industrial park, a proposal that has outraged many area residents. Now, I live nowhere near Essex, so I don’t know why Amazon is trying to convince me that its purpose in life is enabling human-scale entrepreneurship. Probably the difference between a mass mailing to Essex and a mailing to the entire state of Vermont is mere pocket change for Jeff Bezos. (I’m imagining him cackling softly and caressing a snow-white cat while approving this piece of corporate greenwashing.)
Do I have to critique this thing? Well, I guess I do. I am the one writing about it, after all.
The Vermont Political Observer. 