Author Archives: John S. Walters

About John S. Walters

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

Here’s the Early Favorite for 2023’s Saddest Piece of Legislative Testimony

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Pictured above: Members of the House Human Services Committee, giving themselves a round of applause after unanimously passing H.222, a bill that would do quite a few good things on overdose prevention. The bill would make it easier for providers to prescribe buprenorphine without going through the cumbersome process of getting prior authorization* from the state Health Department; improve access to needle and syringe disposal programs and pay for it with a fee charged to prescription drug makers; make it easier to site recovery residences; give reasonable protection against lawsuits for those who administer overdose treatments; and set up some studies on how to best administer treatment and reduce opioid-related deaths.

*Stick a pin in that. We’ll circle back to it in time, and you won’t want to miss it.

All reasonable. And all acceptable to the entire panel. The “Yes” votes included Republicans Anne Donahue and James Gregoire and right-of-center independent Kelly Pajala.

Which brings us to this guy.

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Health Care for Me, But Not for Thee

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Now that Crossover Day has come and gone, it’s now official: State lawmakers will consider giving themselves health care coverage but won’t consider the same for all the rest of us.

On the Senate side, S.39 has emerged from the Government Operations Committee. It would significantly increase lawmakers’ pay from its current pittance to an amount that’s not absolutely insulting. There would be other improvements, all overdue, but the big one is coverage under the state employees’ health insurance system.

I’ve got no problem with any of that. However…

On the House side, a bill to put us on a path to universal health care was quashed without even the briefest of consideration. This, despite the fact that it had 59 co-sponsors.

Fifty-nine. More than one-third of the House.

Even so, the House Health Care Committee stuck it to the wall and left it there to die. No hearings, no votes. The contrast cannot go by without comment.

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The Company You Keep

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Christopher-Aaron Felker, seen here sporting a new fashion-casual look, went before the Burlington City Council Monday night and made an ass of himself.

Nothing new for him. In fact, his entire purpose in life seems to be trolling the libs. I’m going to pay as little attention as I can to his remarks because, frankly, attention is the air he breathes. But his little performance, for that’s what it was, can’t go without notice because it once again raises the question: What is acceptable behavior for a Republican Party official in Vermont?

He is, after all, STILL the chair of the Burlington Republican Committee. If his attacks on the LGBTQ+ community don’t make him persona non grata, then his admission of public vandalism might just do the trick. I don’t know, we’d have to ask Gov. Phil Scott, who shares the Republican brand with Felker — as well as notables like this guy.

The “Paul Bean” who took to Twitter repeating a thoroughly debunked anti-trans rumor is the same “Paul Bean” who was endorsed by Phil Scott in his bid for state Senate last year, and was just appointed by Scott to the State Workforce Development Board. Perhaps Bean will use his position to advocate for the public placement of litterboxes in order to attract members of the “otherkin” community to move to Vermont.

Bean’s appointment was part of the same tranche as ya boy Rob North, ultraconservative Christian who believes that forests, wetlands and waterways are as responsible for Lake Champlain’s pollution as agriculture or any other human activity.

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You’d Think a Governor Who Spent His Life Building Roads Would Have a Flawless, Efficient Road Construction Process

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Now comes Auditor Doug Hoffer with all kinds of cheery news about the Agency of Transportation’s road construction effort. His latest performance audit takes a look at VTrans’ work in cost and scheduling of paving projects, and he didn’t find much for former contractor and now Governor Phil Scott to be proud of.

In fact, Scott ought to be embarrassed.

(Full report downloadable here.)

Hoffer looked at 14 major paving projects and found… “significant deviations” in project scheduling, especially in the preliminary engineering phase; “a lack of consistent record-keeping” that made it difficult to determine why delays took place; a lack of performance metrics for scheduling; and while VTrans did fairly well with simpler projects,

… for the more complex projects, VTrans always exceeded the initial cost estimates provided to the Legislature by more than 50 percent and completed them up to six years late.

That sounds like abject failure to me.

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Turtle Season

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In January, when a new legislative session begins, ambitious agendas are rolled out. Big bills are proposed. Committees are ready to get down to work. This year, hopes were especially high on the Dem/Prog side, thanks to their historically large majorities in the House and Senate.

And then stuff starts to happen. Things get complicated, or are perceived to be complicated. The days rush by like the old movie trope of a calendar’s pages flying in all directions. Now, suddenly, time is short, hopes are muted, compromises are made, bills are sidetracked, and the aspirations of a new session lay in tatters. Yes, it’s Disappointment Time.

Necessary stipulations: Lawmaking is hard. It takes thorough consideration. It takes time, a commodity that’s always in short supply. Building majority support is complicated work, even when a single party holds all the cards. The Vermont Democratic Party is not a monolith; lawmakers have their own beliefs and constituencies. Many a Democratic lawmaker would have been a Republican before the VTGOP went off the rails. Now they’re moderate Democrats who often don’t support the party’s agenda.

That said, the VDP puts forward a platform every two years and urges people to give them money and elect Democratic majorities so they can get stuff done, not so they can think about it and decide that maybe it’s not such a good idea after all and they need to give it more study. It’s definitely not so they can parrot Gov. Phil Scott’s assumptions about public policy, and there’s a hell of a lot of that going on right now.

So let’s take a look at some of the areas where the Brave Hopes of January have given way to the Turtling of March.

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We’re Not Retreating. We’re Advancing to the Rear.

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What is an institution to do when it makes a decision that kinda blows up in their face? Well, one option is to stick with the decision but modify it just enough to quiet the critics. Or to put it metaphorically, apply enough lipstick to a pig and make people stop noticing it’s a pig.

As it happens, two august Vermont organizations are currently engaged in the messy business of searching for the minimum acceptable capitulation. Vermont State University is trying to figure out how many books it will have to preserve, not because it wants the damn things, but because it desperately needs to quiet the howls of criticism; and the Green Mountain Care Board is looking for a way to give away $18 million while convincing us that they’re not giving away $18 million.

VSU’s nascent leadership continues to fumble its plan to close the campus library system… sorry, create something better than libraries… no wait, they’ll still be libraries but unencumbered by books… oops, now we’ve got a “refined plan” that will select the most academically important volumes while disposing of the rest. (You can tell they’re proud of their plan because they posted it online last Thursday with no formal announcement or public event of any sort.)

Gee, it’s almost as if the original plan was thrown together in haste with minimal forethought. Which inspires no confidence in the ability of this administration to lead a troubled system out of its current straits and into a better tomorrow. The future of VSU’s library system is way down on the list of critical issues to be addressed. If they can’t handle this without it blowing up in their faces, how will they address a massive structural deficit when they’ve already squandered their credibility dicking around with the library plan?

And all the while, they insist they’ll implement this vaguely defined thing by the end of June, come Hell or high water.

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Phil Scott Elevates Anti-Abortion, Young Earth Christian to Environmental Post

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Gov. Phil Scott’s press office occasionally releases lists of gubernatorial appointments that are so long as to defy close reading. So, if not for the sharp eyes of a VPO reader, I would not have noticed that our Moderate-Republican-In-Chief had appointed Rob North to the District 3 Environmental Commission.

You may recall North from my 2022 campaign series about stealth Republicans. He ran for House last year, positioning himself as a reasonable guy who wanted to bring “Common Sense, Trust, and Transparency” to the Statehouse. Problem is, he had an easily discoverable record as a hard-right Christian who rabidly opposes abortion, has an active role in the conservative Evangelical “church planting” effort in Vermont, and is a member of a fringey denomination that forbids divorce, bars women from the ministry, and believes that the theory of evolution is heresy.

Look I realize that the governor has to fill literally hundreds of vacancies on our bottomless pit of boards and commissions, but really now. This guy?

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Rutland, Hotbed of Liberalism

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The radical socialists pictured above are members of Rutland Forward, a group whose motto is “We Believe in Making a Rutland for Everyone.”

Wow. That kind of thing will not go over well in Vermont’s fortress of commonsense, blue-collar conserva—

Wait, what? All the Rutland Forward candidates were winners in Tuesday’s election?

Yep. Not only that, but Rutland Forward’s two candidates for school board finished first and second.

And not only that, but city voters overwhelmingly approved not one, not two, but three infrastructure bond issues. How shockingly generous of them.

I’m not saying that Rutland Forward is the Progressive Party South. They don’t espouse any really controversial positions. They talk about meat-and-potatoes stuff like infrastructure, downtown development and even crime. But they do want to leave behind culture-war debates like the Rutland High mascot issue and opposition to a plan to locate Syrian refugee families in the city. In context, “Forward” is a subtle negation of the forces that would drag Rutland backward — or prevent it from becoming, you know, “a Rutland for everyone.”

That’s not just me saying so. It’s reflected in the angry post-election muttering of defeated incumbent Thomas DePoy.

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Burlington Backs the Blue… and the Blue

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I don’t know if Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger smokes cigars. But if he does, he may have lit up a celebratory Arturo Fuente Opus X last night after the city election results came in. It may have been his best political day since maybe December 7, 2020, the day that Councilor Ali Dieng launched his bid for mayor. Dieng’s entry opened the way for a split in the anti-Miro vote, giving him an extremely narrow victory over Progressive Max Tracy.

Thus endeth the history lesson. Point is, everything came up Miro last night. His Democratic Party netted one seat to gain a plurality on City Council, and the voters resoundingly defeated the Progressive-backed ballot question on establishing an independent police oversight commission. The new Council will feature six Democrats, four Progressives and two Independents — one of whom, Mark Barlow, won the endorsement of city Dems. If you count Barlow as a Dem vote, Weinberger will have a Council majority behind him for the first time in his 11 years as mayor.

For the Progressives, last night was a disaster. The police board question lost by almost a two-to-one margin, while the party scored a single win against three losses in contested races for Council.

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The Dregs Find Their Own Level

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Time for a victory lap.

In the past several weeks, I wrote a series of posts about far-right extremist types seeking local elective office. Well, I couldn’t be more pleased to report that all but one of them lost on Town Meeting Day. The exception: Jennifer Cole Patterson, who beat The VPO Curse and somehow won a seat on the Franklin West Supervisory Union school board.

Funny thing. She won handily, but her fellow Fairfax fruitbat Daniel Mincica got absolutely trashed. Hard to discern a trend there.

In general, there weren’t nearly as many ultraconservatives on Town Meeting Day ballots as there were last year. Some of them, I’m sure, managed to avoid exposure. But my sense is that fewer of them are bothering. The vast majority lost in 2022. Maybe they’re getting the message?

Now, let’s run down the rest of the Dishonor Roll.

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