Author Archives: John S. Walters

Unknown's avatar

About John S. Walters

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

I Think We Should Call This “Winters Hall”

4 Replies

This, my friends, is what the Scott administration thinks is an acceptable shelter space for dozens of our most vulnerable Vermonters. This is the Agency of Natural Resources Annex building, technically in Berlin but closer to Montpelier than anything. Starting tonight, if the administration has its way, this will be one of four nighttime-only temporary shelters meant to house a total of roughly 500 people being booted from their state-paid motel rooms. For no good reason. Bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, pitched in multisyllabic words intended to drain all the human emotion from the matter.

(Note: Vermont Legal Aid is going to court to try to block the mass exiting operation. I kind of doubt they’ll succeed; this plan is cruel, obnoxious and heartless, but it’s within the purview of state decision-making authority. But we can hope.

Otherwise, what are we looking at here?

I haven’t been inside the Annex, so I can’t witness to the quality of the decor. Probably not great; it’s been used for general storage by various state agencies, which have apparently been busily clearing out all the stuff that’s been sitting around. I can’t swear to the bathroom or shower facilities, although I have heard that the building contains two single-stall bathrooms. For dozens of people?)

Food service? Refrigeration? Privacy? Personal storage? Need we ask?

Did I mention it’s in the Winooski River flood plain and that it was flooded last summer?

Opens at 7:00 p.m. Closes for the day at 7:00 a.m. It’s about a half-hour walk from the Statehouse. (Bitter irony alert: It’s almost directly across the river from a tent encampment that’s been occupied by unhoused folk throughout the winter.) There is no bus service on this industrial roadway that probably gets more heavy-truck traffic than anything else. Perhaps some, or many, of the residents will find day shelter in the Statehouse’s welcoming cafeteria. They sure won’t gain access to the governor’s own offices in the closely-guarded, entry-by-pass-only Pavilion Building.

Continue reading →

In Re: Coyote V. Boulder

2 Replies

You probably know what happens when a bunch of Trumpers walk into a courtroom seeking their twisted idea of justice. Unless a like-minded judge happens to occupy the bench, they get laughed out of court.

Well, it happened again today in a Windsor County courtroom. (Technically it happened in digital space; the hearing was conducted remotely via the Webex meeting app.) The Trumpers entered looking for redress, and wound up flattened under the Big Boulder O’ Justice.

The case involved an ongoing dispute between the leadership of the Windsor County Republican Committee and a band of die-hard Trump backers. This has mostly been reported in the pages of the Vermont Daily Chronicle because political journalism in the mainstream press is pretty much dead in Vermont. (I do wish the VDC would learn how to spell John MacGovern’s name, though.)

Close observers could have foreseen the outcome simply by looking at the forces arrayed on each side. The plaintiffs were represented by Deb Bucknam, a former Republican nominee for attorney general (she got her ass kicked by TJ Donovan in 2016) and a former officer of the state party, who now found herself suing that very institution. She really Perry Masoned the case, assembling at least 13 exhibits of evidence and stretching out the hearing to the point where the judge asked her if she could, you know, get to the point.

The defendants, Windsor County Republican Committee chair John MacGovern and VTGOP chair Paul Dame (and the state party itself), didn’t bother hiring lawyers. They didn’t assemble any evidence. MacGovern even admitted that he hadn’t read some of Bucknam’s exhibits, partly because she hadn’t provided some of them until mere hours before the hearing. In short, neither Dame nor MacGovern took the proceeding very seriously. And by God, they were right. The judge dismissed Bucknam’s case after deliberating for about 10 minutes.

Continue reading →

The Shelter Clusterfuck, Continued: Now With More Ridiculousness

6 Replies

This is a follow-up to my previous post on the Scott administration’s plan to exit 500 homeless Vermonters from state-paid motel rooms on Friday and into temporary congregate night-only shelters.

Which seems slightly less devious but even more absurd with the news that the governor signed the Budget Adjustment Act on Wednesday afternoon. My proposition that he’d delayed signing so he’d have a pretext for exiting all those people was inaccurate.

But the signing raises new questions. The biggest of which is, why in Hell did he wait so long? The bill passed the Legislature on March 1. I’m sure it took a few days to reach his desk, but the language had been agreed to. There was no need to sit on the bill. And since he did, his officials were left without firm direction on how to extend, or not, voucher accommodation for those being housed under the Adverse Weather Condition program. It meant, according to Commissioner Chris Winters of the Department of Children and Families, that state officials had little to no contact with AWC clients until Wednesday.

The only previous communication had been a letter warning clients that they might have to exit their motels on March 15. That’s all.

Continue reading →

“A Manufactured Crisis”

3 Replies

Gov. Phil Scott’s treatment of the emergency housing program has been a case study in mismanagement with more than a hint of deliberate cruelty. But today, his administration outdid itself.

Extra bonus: He is openly defying the will of the Legislature as expressed in clear language that his own officials agreed to.

Let’s address the on-the-ground reality stuff first, and then we’ll circle back to process.

On Friday, the Adverse Weather Conditions (AWC, pronounced like a raptor call) program expires for the season. As it stands, roughly 500 people now housed in state-paid motel rooms will lose their shelter. And so the state is patching together a handful of temporary congregate shelters (think cots, communal bathrooms, and no known provision for food) in four cities across the state: Bennington, Berlin, Burlington, and Rutland.

But wait, there’s more! The shelters are nighttime-only. They will be open from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. During the daytime? You’re on your own.

But wait, there’s even more! They are only going to operate for one week, more or less.

But that’s not all! The shelters will be staffed by hastily-trained National Guard personnel with security duty contracted to local law enforcement, whose officers will be armed.

A reminder that most of these people would qualify for extended motel stays due to disability status, old age, youth, or other criteria.

Were they trying to create the worst possible program? It sure seems that way.

Continue reading →

…Or Maybe Everybody Just Hates Joan: A Deeper Dive into the Mayoral Numbers

Leave a reply

My recent post about the Burlington mayoral election drew a fair bit of intelligent response. Even on Twitter, which used to happen all the time but never in the post-Elon hellscape of X. Much of the discussion came from Democrats with fact-based arguments against the idea that Burlington is a Progressive town. Some good information, which makes me think that Burlington is less a Progressive town and more a swing town that can go either way depending on circumstances and candidate quality. And inspires me to write a follow-up taking a closer look at some telling statistics.

Let’s start with defeated Democratic hopeful Joan Shannon, seen above commiserating with campaign manager and soon-to-be-ex-councilor Hannah King. The failure of Shannon’s campaign was partially masked in the overall vote totals. She did draw 500-plus more votes than Miro Weinberger in 2021, but she badly underperformed Democratic council candidates in wards where there was a Democrat on the ballot. Shockingly so, in fact.

One more thing to emphasize up top: It wasn’t the student vote. Democrats can stop complaining about that. The numbers say quite the opposite; Progressive winner Emma Mulvaney-Stanak performed strongly in non-student areas of the city.

Continue reading →

Top VTGOP Official Accuses… VTGOP? … of Deploying a “Dishonest Mechanism”

Leave a reply

Former Vermont Republican Party chair — and current Vermont Republican Party Treasurer — Deb Billado has a beef with, um, the Vermont Republican Party. Billado is reportedly “the head of the Donald Trump campaign team in Vermont.” She claims that state party leaders fixed the presidential primary in Nikki Haley’s favor, presumably when she wasn’t in the room. From the Vermont Daily Chronicle:

“Republican leadership invited that very dishonest mechanism to get someone elected and nominated, only to have them drop out the next morning,” Billado said in a phone call to VDC Wednesday morning.

The irony is so thick you couldn’t cut it with a machete. Billado’s beau idéal is the all-time champion of election skulduggery, having (1) sought Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, (2) tried to blackmail Ukraine into providing bogus evidence against Hunter Biden, (3) sought foreign interference in the 2020 election, (4) fought to overturn the results of that vote after being told over and over again, by aides, lawyers, and the courts that there was no evidence of fraud, and (5) sparked an attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021.

Billado is fine with ignoring all of that. What she sees as a “dishonest mechanism” is Vermont’s long-established open primary system in which any registered voter can participate in the party primary of their choosing. She whines that only Republicans should be allowed to vote in the primary. Which would be a neat trick, since Vermont law does not allow voters to register a party preference. Perhaps she’d administer a loyalty oath at the polling place.

Continue reading →

Maybe Burlington Is Just a Progressive Town

1 Reply

Before Town Meeting Day, I was bracing myself for what could have been the most reactionary election in who knows how long. Conventional wisdom had it that Burlington Progressives would be punished for being “soft on crime,” and Vermont voters would revolt against rising property taxes by voting down school budgets.

As it turned out, none of that really happened. Sure, roughly one-third of school budgets lost. In a normal year, no more than a handful of budgets go down to defeat. But one-third doesn’t exactly constitute carnage. It definitely sends a message to state policymakers that something needs to be done, and if legislators are smart they’ll pass something significant before the session ends. What it says to me, in total, is that Vermont voters really like their schools and are willing to dig pretty deep to support public education, but their patience and resources are not unlimited.

In Burlington, meanwhile, the expected backlash to Progressive crime policy didn’t materialize. Councilor and Democratic mayoral nominee Joan Shannon, pictured above with Councilor Hannah King, who lost her bid for re-election and managed Shannon’s losing campaign), was seemingly on a glide path to the mayoralty after years of media drumbeating over CHAOS IN THE QUEEN CITY. But it turned out that voters weren’t there for an enforcement-heavy response to public safety concerns.

The campaign centered around the issue, but Mayor-elect Emma Mulvaney-Stanak promoted a comprehensive agenda that addressed the causes as well as the consequences of the public safety situation. Shannon emphasized boosting the police force (and ragging on the Progs for their 2020 vote to cut the BPD, and it might be time to retire that talking point).

Continue reading →

The Operation Was a Success, But the Patient Died

2 Replies

Congratulations to Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley for her big victory in the Vermont prim — what’s that you say? She ended her campaign after losing every Super Tuesday state besides Vermont?

Oh. Well, then. As Lou Reed put it, “Something flickered for a minute, and then it vanished and was gone.”

It’s pretty clear that Haley won Vermont thanks to our wide-open primary system in which any voter can select any primary ballot. The numbers from last night show that Haley’s win was fueled by independents and Democrats wanting to stick it to Donald Trump.

I took a deep comparative dive into the 2024 and 2020 presidential primaries. Now, every election has its own dynamics so no two are directly comparable, but the numbers are overwhelming. Trump’s vote total was virtually identical: 33,139 in 2024 versus 33,019 in 2020.

But that 33,019 represented 84% of the 2020 Republican primary electorate. Last night, 33,139 only represented 45% of the vote. With the same number of votes, Trump won overwhelmingly four years ago and lost by a significant margin this time.

Continue reading →

The Free Press Takes Another Step Away from Tangibility

Leave a reply

A sad but inevitable day for the dwindling cadre of Burlington Free Press readers, whoever they are. The “newspaper,” if that is indeed the proper term by now, has announced that as of April 1 (no foolin’), it will no longer deliver paper editions to subscribers’ homes, instead depending on the tender mercies of Louis DeJoy’s US Postal Service to get the papers to your doorstep mailbox within probably mere days of publication.

(As a subscriber to a paper that went to mail delivery a few years ago, I can tell you that this is a road to newspaper irrelevance. We hardly ever get the Times Argus on the day of printing. There’s often a gap of two or three — or four or six or more — days between publication and delivery.)

The announcement of the change, penned by the Freeps’ Dinosaur-in-Chief Aki Soga, contained a goodly quantity of desperate word salad meant to obscure the harsh reality of the business and make this seem like a good thing.

The reality is this: Free Press readership is cratering. I doubt that there are enough print subscribers to justify anyone’s time covering ever-longer delivery routes with ever-fewer paying customers.

I hadn’t realized how bad the carnage was until I read Seven Days’ writeup, which includes some extinction-level statistics:

Continue reading →

Last Call at the Moderate Republican Saloon

2 Replies

They say the room was packed and the crowd enthusiastic for Nikki Haley’s whistlestop visit to Vermont. The import of the former depends on the size of the room. Depending on configuration, the DoubleTree’s meeting rooms hold somewhere between 300 (not impressive) and 1,300 (respectable). As for enthusiasm, I watched her speech on YouTube. To me it was an ambivalent audience. The only time they were unified is when they were shouting down anti-war protesters. They didn’t seem to know exactly how to react to her very conservative talking points or her numerous attacks on Donald Trump.

I have two big takeaways from Sunday’s event. First, none of it matters because Donald Trump is winning the nomination. The GOP rigged the primary system in 2016 to favor the front-runner. The system allowed Trump to cruise to victory after taking an early lead, and it will do the same again this year. Even if Haley wins Vermont, and by all accounts she’s trailing badly here, the game is rigged against her.

And even if it wasn’t, well, the Republican primary electorate is overwhelmingly MAGA. She’s trying to sell a niche product in a mass market.

Second takeaway: The concept of “moderate Republicanism” is dead, dead, dead.

Continue reading →