Author Archives: John S. Walters

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About John S. Walters

Writer, editor, sometime radio personality, author of "Roads Less Traveled: Visionary New England Lives."

Straw Men and Uppity Women (UPDATED)

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So the big question on #vtpoli Twitter today was: Did Public Safety Commissioner Michael Schirling call Rep. Tanya Vyhovsky “uppity”?

Short answer: Yeah, kinda.

See note below: Schirling has issued a kinda-apology.

It happened in a Thursday hearing by the House Judiciary and Government Operations committees, to consider a statewide use-of-force policy for law enforcement personnel. I didn’t monitor the hearing live, but after seeing some outraged tweets, I listened to the passage in question. (One of the benefits of the Zoom Legislature is that all hearings are streamed live, and archived, on YouTube. I hope they continue the practice after We All Return To Whatever Normal Is.)

Vyhovsky and Schirling had a lengthy colloquy about current policy and practice. She questioned whether police should be trained, “first and foremost,” in de-escalation tactics instead of resorting to force. Schirling acknowledged the need to review training practices, but said her premise (that police use force more often than they should because of the training they receive) was dead wrong.

I’ll go through the confab in more detail after the jump, but first we’ll cut to the chase. At the end of the back-and-forth, Schirling made reference to “the somewhat uppity exchange that the Representative and I had.” He paused before “uppity.” I think he was searching for the right word. He chose the wrong one.

He did not actually refer to Vyhovsky as “uppity,” but that’s how he characterized their discussion. The problem is, “uppity” is often used to describe women or people of color who don’t “know their place.” It definitely has a pejorative connotation. And I doubt he would characterize himself as “uppity.”

Schirling committed another offense, albeit a very common one, elsewhere in the exchange. He consistently misinterpreted Vyhovsky’s points and instead whaled away at straw men of his own devising. He didn’t take her arguments seriously. Which is a subtler kind of sexism than calling someone “uppity.”

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Tell me again why we can’t defund the police

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One of the homey little touches in my local newspaper, the Times Argus, is the regular listing from the police blotter. This is labeled “a sampler” from the log; I can’t say how they choose what they print. I’d assume it’s somewhat representative.

Well, if it is, then Montpelier could probably get by with a couple fewer cops. The latest Police Log largely contains calls that didn’t require an armed response, and every log is simliar in content. Let’s run it down, shall we?

Feb. 1: On Northfield Street, a report of someone having seizures who was using alcohol and Valium was unfounded.

Well, ehh. Better handled by a trained social worker. Which is one of the ideas offered by the “Defund the Police” movement: Fewer cops and more social worker/counselor types.

A vehicle broke down on Main Street.

I’d suggest calling Bob’s Sunoco. Very prompt towing service. Or AAA if you’re a member.

Someone from Oregon called to report their Vermont phone number was prank called. They were told to contact their local police.

Yeah, no.

Feb. 2: A trash can was blocking a sidewalk plow on Pearl Street.

Get out of the truck and move the damn thing.

After the jump: The carnage continues.

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Adventures in Bureaucracy, Capitol Security Division

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“Bureaucracy” is usually a pejorative term meaning excessive complication and expense, especially in the public sector. That’s one side of it, for sure. On the other hand, the public’s business must inevitably involve some level of bureaucracy.

Take, for example, security in Montpelier’s Capitol Complex. The map above shows it almost exactly. The borders, more or less, are the Winooski River in the south, Bailey Avenue on the west, Terrace Street and somewhere behind the Statehouse on the north, and Governor Aiken Street/Taylor Street to the east. It’s a mix of state buildings, privately owned buildings, lawns and parking lots. The state properties include all three branches of government plus offices for statewide elected officials.

Security in the area involves numerous entities, including the Capitol Police, the Department of Buildings and General Services, the judiciary’s security team, the Montpelier Police Department, the Washington County Sheriff’s office, and the Vermont State Police.

That’s a lot of bureaucracies, and they need seamless coordination to provide effective security. This was the subject of a Tuesday hearing before the Senate Institutions Committee which, frankly, was bone-dry at times — but nonetheless crucial, if we’re to have the best security in and around the Capitol.

Which has become much more urgent in recent years, with frequent demonstrations in and around the Statehouse and the threat of potentially violent protests around President Biden’s election and inauguration.

Security protocols for the complex are laid out in a Memorandum of Understanding involving the Capitol Police, BGS and judicial branch security. The most recent version was crafted in 2016, and committee chair Joe Benning believes there’s a pressing need to “rebuild [the MOU] from scratch.” He wants to come up with a draft MOU by the end of this month.

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Any room for expanded opioid treatment in the budget?

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Just askin’.

It’s clear that opioid use disorder has gotten more prevalent since the pandemic began, both nationally and in Vermont. The Centers for Disease Control published a report in December that said overdose deaths rose sharply after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, due to “a larger supply of illegal drugs, reduced access to addiction and overdose treatment, and the lethality of synthetic fentanyl.” A study published in Population Health Management reports that, while testing for illicit drugs plummeted in the early weeks of the pandemic, positive test results for opioids went through the roof.

The American Medical Association says that “More than 40 states have reported increases in opioid-related mortality as well as ongoing concerns for those with a mental illness or substance use disorder,” and recommended action “to remove barriers to evidence-based treatment for those with a substance use disorder as well as for harm reduction services.”

Which leads me to the question posed above.

Maybe there has been an expansion of treatment, harm reduction and availability of naloxone, buprenorphine and other relevant medications. Maybe the feds’ Covid relief bills brought some funding to the states for such programs. Maybe the state acted on its own to fight this aspect of the pandemic’s impact on society.

But if they have, it’s news to me.

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Maybe We’re Finally On Our Way to a Functioning Mental Health System

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“Temporary facility,” well beyond its sell-by date.

Congratulations to the Scott administration for finally making a long-overdue commitment to the state’s mental health system. Its FY22 capital budget includes $11.6 million to build a replacement to the rattletrap pictured above. That, in all its prefab glory, is the Middlesex Therapeutic Community Residence, which houses people who are transitioning from psychiatric hospitalization to independent living.

The MTCR was built in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene, which flooded the old state psychiatric hospital in Waterbury. It was thrown up quickly using a pair of modular units, and opened in 2013 as a stopgap. Its time has come and gone.

It’s also too small for demand. Its seven beds are almost always full. The new digs would have 16 beds. The idea is that a larger step-down facility would allow more patients to be discharged from hospitals sooner, freeing up those beds and (hopefully) eliminating the constant issue of severely ill patients being parked in emergency rooms for lack of psychiatric beds.

This all sends me down Memory Lane. I’ve been following the state’s woeful efforts to rebuild the system since 2011. In the wake of Irene, the Shumlin administration announced plans to craft a new, much more community-oriented system. Such a system would theoretically require fewer inpatient beds because more people would get treatment sooner, before they got really sick.

Shumlin’s original plan for a new psychiatric hospital called for 16 beds. At the same time, embarrassingly, the then-medical director for the mental health department Dr. Jay Batra was saying the new hospital should be at least as large as Waterbury’s 50-plus beds.

At the time, administration officials pooh-poohed Batra.

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Bookshelf: “Jesus and John Wayne”

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Yes, this is very real and entirely serious.

There’s a lot of talk these days about information bubbles like Fox News, Newsmax, and the sludge pits of Facebook. But the original, biggest, and baddest information bubble of them all surrounds white evangelicalism. For decades, white evangelicals have existed in their own cultural ecosystem, with their own churches and schools and universities and books and movies and music (ever heard Christian rap?) and cartoons. And artists like Stephen Sawyer, who created the above depiction of the Lamb of God as a tattooed he-man. Biker Jesus?

Anyway. This evangelical ecosystem is invisible to the rest of us, but it’s very real. And understanding its worldview is key to understanding why over 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. Yes, devout Christians voted in droves for a philandering divorcee who paid off a porn star and bragged about grabbing them by the you-know-what and has a long, sordid business career full of bankruptcies and lawsuits. And swears a lot. And clearly doesn’t know beans about the Bible, except that it’s a useful prop.

You’ll get it entirely if you read “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation” by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, published in 2020. She takes us inside the world of modern white evangelicals, and shows clearly that they didn’t support Donald Trump in spite of who he was — he was the exact kind of leader they were looking for. He fit the role to a T.

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Another Baby Step in the Long, Treacherous Journey to Ethical Standards

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Couldn’t resist.

Hey, guess what! Vermont is one of only three states without any enforceable ethics standards in law. Let’s hear it for Vermont Exceptionalism!

The effort to change that state of affairs has been percolating along at a barely perceptible pace for years now. At every step along the way, it’s met with opposition by state lawmakers, who tend to be very protective of their rights and obligations. The basic argument is, “Vermont is better than that! We don’t need no stinkin’ ethics law!”

Which is like saying we don’t need speed limits because Vermonters are inherently safe drivers. The vast majority of public officials do their jobs right, just like the vast majority of Vermont drivers abide by the speed limit. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need police patrolling the roads.

The latest turn in this long, depressing saga came Friday afternoon, when the House Government Operations Committee approved H.135, a bill that makes a few minor changes in how the Ethics Commission does its business. Still secret, still unfunded, still toothless. The bill got unanimous support after committee leaders assured members that the bill didn’t really do anything.

Left for future debate are the tough items: Adopting a Code of Ethics in state law, deciding how enforcement will work, whether the Commission should have any powers, and whether it should have a big enough budget to maybe hire at least one full-time staffer. (Right now, the only paid person is Executive Director Larry Novins, and he’s part-time. You call the Ethics Commission, you’ll likely be shunted to voice mail.)

After the jump: A little history, and a look ahead.

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The Legal Clusterf* Around Public Dollars for Religious Schools

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You know you’re onto a hot mess when, in the course of a one-hour hearing, a situation is described as “a potential landmine of constitutional issues” and a passage between Scylla and Charybdis, and a leading Constitutional scholar can’t even guess where the courts are going on the issue.

Such was the state of affairs before the Senate Education Committee Wednesday afternoon. The five solons took testimony on how, or whether, the state must pay tuition to religious schools. The short answer is “yes,” under certain circumstances. The long answer is, “yes,” but exactly how we should do it is an impenetrable thicket of non-ambiguous court decisions and costly legal maneuvers.

And if you don’t, under any circumstances, want your tax dollars going to, say, The Lord’s Anti-Semitic Academy Of Creationist Heteronormativity, well, you’re shit out of luck.

The “credit” for this morass can be awarded to the John Roberts Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision (along ideological lines) in the 2019 case Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the high court ruled that the state of Montana could not exclude religious schools from a program that doled out tax credit-funded scholarships for schoolkids.

Vermont doesn’t have a program like that, but if a community chooses not to operate public schools, the state pays tuition for the town’s kids to attend one of a handful of approved private schools, like St. Johnsbury Academy and Burr and Burton Academy. If you apply the Espinoza standard to Vermont, the state must throw the program’s doors open to any qualified private school, religious or not. And “approved” can’t be decided on the increasingly frayed principle of church/state separation.

“The Supreme Court has been moving the goalpost in favor of funding religious institutions,” said Vermont Law School Professor Peter Teachout, the Legislature’s go-to guy for thorny constitutional issues.

After the jump: Fasten your seat belts, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

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The Ghost of Jeb Spaulding Returns

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Somewhere, Jeb Spaulding is saying “I told you so.”

The former chancellor of the Vermont State College System fell on his professional sword last spring by unveiling a plan to decimate VSCS in order to save it. In the ensuing uproar, he resigned.

Well, the new leadership has totted up the cost of saving the system — and it’s one hell of a price tag. On Tuesday, Spaulding’s successor Sophie Zdatny (pronounced just like it’s spelled) told the House Appropriations Committee that the state needs to pour another $203 million into the system over the next six fiscal years.

That’s on top of VSCS’ base appropriation of $30.5 million a year.

And that’s in addition to round after round of projected cost-cutting that would mean significant reductions at all VSCS campuses.

None of which would begin to address the system’s $150 million in deferred maintenance. Well, if VSCS sells or demolishes buildings in the downsizing process, that cost would go down somewhat.

All of this is necessary, Zdatny said, to return the system to fiscal sustainability. (Her presentation can be downloaded from the committee’s website.)

There’s one significant difference between Zdatny’s plan and Spaulding’s. The latter called for the closure of both Northern Vermont University campuses plus the Randolph campus of Vermont Technical College. Zdatny would keep all the system’s campuses open — but with a substantially reduced footprint at each location.

In order to follow through on the plan, the system would need $51 million on top of the $30.5 million base for fiscal year 2022. The additional need would decrease over time, from $51M in FY22 to $18M in FY27. After that, VSCS could maintain operations on the $30.5 million base.

How? By slashing $5 million a year off expenses in each of the next six years.

Seems as though Jeb had a point after all.

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Three Mulligans and Counting

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Lookin’ a little sweaty there, bud.

Submitted for your consideration: Michael Harrington, commissioner of the Department of Labor, and three-time offender against good government.

The latest offense is a massive cockup in printing IRS Forms 1099 for Vermonters who collected unemployment benefits in 2020. Tens of thousands of people received forms that contained other people’s personal information instead of their own, which is a low-tech kind of privacy breach in our age of digital hacking.

This will require a costly fix. DOL will reprint all 180,000 forms and mail them all out, plus it will provide prepaid envelopes to those who got bad 1099s so they can return the faulty forms at no cost. Harrington also said his department has contacted the Attorney General’s office as required by state law, in case there are legal repercussions.

VTDigger reports that this is DOL’s second data breach since the pandemic began. The first, back in March, saw DOL send nearly six thousand Vermonters’ Social Security numbers to employers not connected with their cases.

But while it was the second data breach, it was the third major administrative failure by DOL during the pandemic.

Deets after the jump.

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