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."

Julie Moore, Off the Top Rope

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I don’t know whose idea it was to make Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore the lead signatory on an opinion essay aimed squarely at Vermont’s environmental community, but… it’s… a choice, that’s for sure.

The Moore op-ed, co-signed by Public Service Commissioner Kerrick Johnson, is entitled “Vermont’s Housing Needs Require Decisive Action – Step Up or Step Away.” The unfortunate echo of Donald Trump’s infamous “Stand Back and Stand By” remark aside, the essay is a direct attack on the environmental groups that Moore frequently interacts with — and hopefully cooperates with. I guess not, eh?

The essay posits environmental advocates as The Enemy in Gov. Phil Scott’s effort to ease Vermont’s housing crisis. I mean, “Step Up or Step Away” comes across as a very thinly veiled threat.

Before I go on, I must point out an inadvertent admission in Moore and Johnson’s essay. It’s right there in the second sentence: “The cost of housing has skyrocketed with median home prices in Vermont more than doubling in the last 10 years, putting both homeownership (sic) and rentals out of reach for many.”

To which I immediately thought, well, who’s been governor of Vermont for almost the entire last decade? Oh yeah, Phil Scott, that’s who.

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Phil Scott’s Back-to-the-Office Order Is Going to Cost Something, Whether He Wants to Admit It or Not

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There are questions circulating in legislative circles about the potential cost of Gov. Phil Scott’s return-to-office mandate, which takes effect on December 1 and requires at least three days a week of office work for state employees. Questions, but few answers.

Well, my headline gives away the real answer: It will definitely cost some amount of money at a time when the state faces a severe financial pinch due to Trump administration fuckery with federal spending, including a government shutdown that Congressional Republicans are in no hurry to resolve.

The governor couldn’t have foreseen the shutdown when he issued his order in late August. But the current situation would seem to call for reconsideration. Because we don’t know how much it will cost to accommodate state employees returning to office work, but we do know one thing for certain: It’s gonna cost something. And we really can’t afford it right now.

Last week, Agency of Human Services staffers rallied in Waterbury to protest the potential impacts of the back-to-office order. They pointed out that the Agency doesn’t have enough space to accommodate its entire workforce. They pinned the shortfall at 250 desks; later, the administration gave an actual figure of 254. Administration Secretary Sarah Clark suggested it wasn’t so bad because staffers working part-time on-site could share desks! Wow, that’d boost morale. And productivity.

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Turns Out, Lawmaking is Hard

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Vermont Sen. Larry Hart, Sr. has become the second rookie Republican state senator to tender his resignation less than a year after voters chose him to represent their interests. Hart’s reasons are less dramatic than Sam Douglass’, but his resignation letter reveals him to be one more Republican who couldn’t handle the reality of life in a legislative body.

In his resignation letter, Hart referenced “the loss of my daughter and grandchild to addiction” as motivation for his candidacy. He took office hoping to “help with substance use addiction legislation among many other goals I outlined in my Senate race,” but he’d found that “it became too difficult for me to accomplish any major goals in my first session.”

I do not question his motives for running or the depth of his personal loss, but c’mon, really? A freshman lawmaker had trouble accomplishing “major goals” in his first go-round? Join the club, man.

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More Evidence That Nicholas Deml Was a Failure

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It’s been a minute since I wrote about the disastrous tenure of Nicholas Deml as corrections commissioner. To recap, he was on the job for the better part of five years and during that time, there was an almost complete turnover in the top ranks of the Department of Corrections. Most crucially, just about anyone with relevant experience left the department and were replaced with people who had no discernible background in corrections or law enforcement.

And now I have a bunch of numbers that underscore Deml’s failure to bring the long-awaited culture change to DOC. They come from the state of Vermont’s 2025 Employee Engagement Survey, available online for the entire state government and for every individual agency or department.

The results show rampant disaffection within the ranks at DOC. The numbers for Corrections employees are, across the board, substantially worse than they are for state government as a whole. If Deml had any positive impact on the department, it sure as hell doesn’t show up in this survey.

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Greetings From Elysium. How’s the Weather Down There?

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Recently I had the opportunity to sit in on an update and short-term forecast of the economy and the markets. It was an exercise in what they call “wealth management” — stewardship on behalf of the well-to-do. I did so as an investor with retirement funds in the markets, who’s been feeling a fair bit queasy about the chances that Donald Trump’s doggedly anarchic policies might cause everything financial to drop straight into the toilet.

Well, I have some very good news wrapped in a bad-news burrito.

The good news, from this analyst’s perch: The economy is doing pretty well, actually. It has weathered Trump’s reign of error because of some very strong fundamentals. Also because deregulation and tax cuts are business-friendly. By every measure, the outlook is positive.

In the aggregate, that is.

But within the aggregate, there are distinct winners and losers. I bet you can guess who falls into which category.

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A Band-Aid on a Broken Arm

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Welp, Gov. Phil Scott has unveiled his 14-point “short-term action plan” (his words, underlining the lack of sustained commitment) to improve public safety in Burlington. And, unsurprisingly, it’s a combo platter of disappointing, punitive, and cheap. It’s more political than policy, aimed at demonizing Vermont’s biggest and most important city and avoiding his administration’s culpability for the problems that beset all of our communities.

Kudos to Seven Days’ Courtney Lamdin for spotlighting, near the beginning of her story, the most crucial shortcoming in Scott’s plan:

Conspicuously missing from the plan is an expansion of homeless shelter capacity in Burlington or elsewhere in Chittenden County, despite the dire need for it. The plan also ignores specific asks that Burlington city councilors made of Scott in a resolution they passed in August.

Yeah, ignoring dire needs is kind of Phil Scott’s jam. Remember in June, when I headlined a post about his veto of H.91 “Phil Scott Doesn’t Give a Fuck About the Homeless”? His Burlington “action” plan validates my point. He is, quite literally, the Levite averting his eyes as he walks by a wounded traveler. His plan is heavy on the punitive and light on the humanity. The goal is to remove the unfortunate from his view shed, not to actually help them. The best outcome for Scott’s plan is some short-term cosmetic improvement while the underlying economic and social causes of our problems continue to exact their toll.

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If Jim Ramsey Is Leaving a Legacy, It Didn’t Involve Fundraising Success

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When I wrote earlier this week about Jim Ramsey’s imminent departure from the Vermont Democratic Party, I didn’t think to check in on party finances. Not until someone suggested that I do so, and boy howdy, did it tell a story.

Ramsey was elected interim chair last February by the VDP state committee. He succeeded David Glidden, who barely managed to last two years in the job. Ramsey made a barnburner of a speech to the state committee and won in a walk over former state senator turned podcaster Andy Julow, thanks in part to the active backing of the party’s top three elected officials: Treasurer Mike Pieciak, Attorney General Charity Clark, and Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas. At the time, State Rep. Kathleen James called Ramsey “the perfect leader” with skills in “the nuts and bolts of fundraising.” James and Ramsey both hail from Manchester, so she may not be the most dispassionate of witnesses.

And if Ramsey brought fundraising skills to the post, there’s no hint in the party’s financials that he ever put them to good use.

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Sam Douglass Enters the Lucrative Field of Self-Pity Monetization

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Oh, you didn’t seriously think disgraced former (?*) state senator Sam Douglass would learn something from his mistakes? Nah, that’s not how today’s crop of neo-Nazis roll.

*Douglass announced Friday afternoon that he would resign on Monday. But VTDigger has reported** that as of 11:00 a.m. Tuesday, no resignation letter had been received. And as of 12:00 noon Wednesday, Douglass is still listed as a senator on the Legislature’s website.

** Digger also brings us the darkly humorous aspect of this sad affair: Douglass apparently remains chair of the Orleans County Republicans, which means he is in charge of the first steps in the process of filling his vacant (???*) seat in the Senate.

Indeed, Douglass has doubled down on the notion that he is the real victim here, a popular idea in far-right circles. He has taken to GiveSendGo, the Evangelical crowdfunding alternative to GoFundMe, to beg for money from the gullible. And maybe he’ll cash in; he’s counting on the old H.L. Mencken axiom, which is usually a safe bet. But it’s sad that he hasn’t learned a damn thing from the self-induced implosion of his political career.

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News You Should View: The Last of His Kind?

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Apologies for skipping a week. Between Nicholas Deml and Sam Douglass, there was a lot going on. But here we are with another collection of news content worth your attention. Starting with a bit of sad news.

Remember when every newspaper had local columnists? They occupied a space between opinion and reportage. They were familiar figures to readers, and had their fingers on the pulse of community life. As a news consumer in southern Michigan, I got to know and appreciate Detroit Free Press columnists like Hugh McDiarmid (politics), Neal Rubin (entertainment, also penned the Gil Thorp syndicated comic for many years), and Bob Talbert (fluff and nonsense with a purpose). Those days are long gone, as newspapers have cut and cut and cut until there’s practically nothing left.

One survivor of the good old days: Jim Kenyon of The Valley News. I’ve been reading his stuff since I moved to this region in 2000. And now, at the age of 66, he’s retiring. I haven’t seen this reported in his own paper yet, but The Dartmouth has published an exit interview with him. I’m sorry to see Kenyon go, especially since I’m certain that he will not be replaced. He’s a luxury item in a bare-bones industry.

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From This Day Forward, Let No One Say It’s Too Early to Talk 2026

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Well, the Vermont Democrats fired the first shot of the election season today.

Sadly, it wasn’t the unveiling of a top-tier challenger for Gov. Phil Scott. No, it was a candidacy for the seat being vacated by disgraced Republican Sam Douglass. A candidate whose presentation is straight out of a Third Way fever dream. So I guess this is how the Dems are going to try to recapture seats they lost in 2024: By pretending to be moderate Republicans.

Meet Gaston Bathalon, checker of all the boxes. He’s a native of the Northeast Kingdom, a veteran of 30 years in the military, “a fighter for the… Kingdom” who’s dedicated to restoring “dignity and integrity” to a seat besmirched by Douglass’ online hangouts with toxic Young Republicans.

As I read through his announcement email, I honestly couldn’t tell whether he was a Democrat or Republican until I got down to the very bottom, where it says “Paid for by the Vermont Democratic Party – http://www.vtdemocrats.org. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.”

So he’s a Democrat, I guess. Not that you can tell from his announcement or his minimalistic campaign website, either. It’s more than a bit sad when Democrats see their identity and message as something that has to be slipped past the voters, like putting a dog’s medication inside a ball of hamburger meat.

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