Category Archives: Business

Nothing to See Here, Just Your Garden Variety Ruling Class Mutual Back-Scratching

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So, the Scott administration finally did the long-rumored thing. It signed a five-year, $2.3 million lease for commercial office space in Waterbury. Office space that’s only necessary because of Scott’s back-to-commute order that would overload the state-owned buildings in town.

Now, that $2.3 million is only part of the price tag for this deal. It costs real money to prepare office space for full-time occupancy. Will we ever get a full accounting of the cost? I wouldn’t bet on it.

The immediate beneficiaries of this deal are some good friends and political supporters of, ahem, Gov. Phil Scott. VTDigger’s Shaun Robinson got a lot of this story, but not all of it.

As Robinson reported, the lease involves 22,000 square feet of office space in the Pilgrim Park complex, the former headquarters of Green Mountain Coffee. It’s now owned by Malone Superior, LLC, a real estate firm co-owned by Wayne Lamberton, Patrick Malone, and Randy Lague. As Robinson reported, Malone Superior is located at the same address as Malone Properties, also owned by Patrick Malone. And as Robinson reported, Malone Properties donated “about $12,000” to Phil Scott’s gubernatorial campaigns in 2016, 2018 and 2020.

But there’s more, quite a bit more, that Robinson missed.

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So This Is What Mega-Corporate Cosplay Looks Like

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So, this landed in my mailbox last week.

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.

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I Understand the Call Letters “WGOP” Might Be Available

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Welp, the other shoe has dropped. Two months after the death of NASCAR legend and central Vermont radio mogul Ken Squier, the stations of Radio Vermont have been sold. Depending on which source you trust, the new owner is failed Republican candidate (and very briefly head of the Ethan Allen Institute) Myers Mermel (Radio Vermont press release) or Mermel and failed Republican candidate and travel mogul Scott Milne (VTDigger). The press release, posted at the Vermont Daily Chronicle, lists Milne as “an investor” and “key advisor,” while Digger bills him as a full partner. Either way, the two men are deeply conservative. Milne somehow got a reputation as a moderate, but he’s a lot less moderate than Phil Scott.

The crown jewel in the Radio Vermont firmament is WDEV, a throwback of a locally-owned, community-oriented station with a mixed format of news, talk, music and sports. The station bills itself as “a forum for all voices to be heard,” although in recent years the loudest voices have come from the right. I expect that trend will only accelerate under its new Republican ownership.

Coincidentally, the call letters “WGOP” are probably available for pocket change. The letters are currently assigned to a tiny AM station in Pocomoke City, Maryland, whose building was destroyed by fire in August 2022. It’s been off the air since then.

I’m a bit sad that the Squier family has exited the scene after owning WDEV since its founding in 1931. I’d be more dismayed by the partisan lean of the new owner/s, except that the station — and all of terrestrial radio — is a mere shadow of its former self.

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Veepies Resurrexit a Mortuis

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It’s been a loooong time since I last awarded the Veepies — @thevpo’s honors for exceptional stupidity in our politics. But the end of the year seems to have brought out the stupid in folks, so here we go!

First off, the Any Old Excuse In a Storm Award goes to the fearless folk who wear the uniform of the Vermont State Police. This has to do with their continuing failure to bring Daniel Banyai into custody. They allowed the original arrest warrant to expire. Now, they seem to be in no hurry to act, in spite of the fact that Banyai is defying a court order to turn himself in.

That’s bad enough, but there’s one singular item in VTDigger’s account that spurred the Veepies Board of Trustees to action. VSP spokesperson Adam Silverman helpfully told Digger that Banyai is one of roughly 5,200 people in Vermont with some kind of active warrant. I guess that’s supposed to impress me? But c’mon now, most of those warrants are not at all time-sensitive. Banyai has been defying justice and terrorizing the town of West Pawlet for years, as chronicled in a recent New Yorker piece. He ought to be on top of the VSP’s priority list, and they shouldn’t have the temerity to even suggest that he’s merely one among thousands.

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How Not to Do Crisis Communications: A Case Study. Or Maybe a 12-Pack Study.

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Question. Did Justin Heilenbach take a PR class taught by Craig McGaughan? Because the president of Citizen Cider has pulled off a comms faceplant the likes of which hasn’t been seen in these parts since McGaughan opened a gay bar called Mister Sister and responded to the backlash by staunchly defending his choice until it killed his business.

Citizen Cider has been taking it in the shorts for more than a month. A substantial number of employees have anonymously reported leaving the company over the marketing campaign for Hey Bub, which seemed to position the brew somewhere to the right of Bud Light, a curious choice for a Burlington-based artisanal outfit. Many ex-employees shared their experiences and views on Reddit. Then came a meaty Seven Days exposé and a slamtastic video from Burlington shit-kicker Jonny Wanzer, leading to his very successful campaign to encourage retailers and bars to stop selling Citizen Cider products.

Throughout it all, radio silence from Citizen Cider. Until last Wednesday, when Heilenbach dropped a thoroughly tone-deaf statement on social media.

In retrospect, he should have just kept quiet.

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Well, That Was a Lot Harder than It Needed to Be

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Barre’s got problems.

At last week’s gubernatorial press conference, flood recovery czar Doug Farnham threw out a shocking statistic: Barre suffered two and a half times as much damage in the July flood than any other community in Vermont. That’s on top of its perpetually troubled Main Street and its usual struggles with drugs and crime.

Even so, a handful of conservative troublemakers forced the city council to spend way too much time deciding the fate of the Wheelock Building, pictured above. The matter was finally settled this week, as council approved the building’s sale to the operators of East Montpelier’s Fox Market, which plans to open a second location in the building.

The Fox, for those unfamiliar, is a remarkable success story. Co-owners Doni Cain and Liv Dunton took a severely rundown building near the corner of US-2 and Route 14, where no one had managed to sustain a business for years, and turned it into a specialty food store and gathering place for the LGBTQ+ community and its allies.

And there’s the rub, I suspect. That handful of conservatives tried to hide their prejudice behind ludicrous procedural objections, but c’mon. It was obvious that they would rather have let the building go empty than risk seeing a rainbow flag on Main Street.

When, in fact, they ought to be throwing a damn parade for any entrepreneur willing to invest in Barre’s downtown.

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Sometimes, the Lobbyists Don’t Win

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This column regularly bemoans the influence of lobbyists in our Statehouse. It’s less about overt corruption and more about relationships and the difficulty faced by unstaffed part-time lawmakers in assessing complicated issues.

But this week has brought us a couple of cases in which the Legislature — so far — has resisted the blandishments of the Folks In Smart Suits. First, the state Senate has unanimously approved a bill to ban PFAS and other toxic chemicals from a range of products. Second, a bill to establish a Right to Repair for agricultural and forestry equipment has made it through a House committee. Both bills represent modest but measurable victories for consumers over industry.

(And let me note that we may not have heard about either action if not for VTDigger’s Final Reading, which provides a valuable space for coverage of legislative happenings that might not warrant standalone treatment.)

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The Inherent Conflict of Ram/Hinsdale Comes to the Fore

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So. Prominent Chittenden County Landlord Stiffs Tenant. A story we’ve definitely heard before. But never with a twist like this one.

The landlord: Jason Jacob Hinsdale, scion of the family development/property management firm. The tenant: Scrappy BIPOC-owned Little Morocco Café. The situation: Hinsdale has imposed a 150% 250% rent increase effective in August an increase he himself admits the market doesn’t justify.

The twist: Hinsdale’s wife, small-P progressive stalwart Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, one of Vermont’s handful of BIPOC electeds.

It will be interesting to see how both of them play this out. Hinsdale’s move isn’t unusual for a landlord in a red-hot market but it could be political poison for Ram Hinsdale. She figures to face embarrassing questions about her husband’s power play, and he figures to come under pressure to get his loyal spouse out of this dilemma by not kicking Little Morocco to the curb.

This is the three-dimensional realization of the conflict expressed in the above image: Ram Hinsdale trying to position herself as the progressive in the 2022 Democratic Congressional primary while speaking from the shiny, spotless, open concept kitchen of the suburban manse she now occupies.

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Yeah, I’ve Seen This Movie Before

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VTDigger’s Sarah Mearhoff authored an article Thursday that prompted flashbacks in this tired old brain. The story was copiously entitled “As the ‘right to repair’ debate comes to Montpelier, lawmakers face a ‘flood’ of opposition from national interest groups.”

Yep, a look back in the Google Machine reveals that I wrote the same damn story back in 2018.

“Right to repair” is a concept that ought to be enshrined in our law, except that it causes conniptions in Our Corporate Overlords. They’ve created perpetual revenue streams for consumer products by making it difficult to downright impossible for an owner to repair stuff outside of the corporation’s closed circle of bespoke parts, tools, software, and authorized repair shops.

This is fine in some ways, bu in excess it costs consumers bucketloads of extra money. You can’t, for instance, take your iPhone to an unauthorized shop to get a cracked screen replaced or a new battery installed. You’ve got to go to an official Apple shop and pay full Apple prices. And a repair shop has to pay through the nose for the privilege to be an official Apple joint. (Small Dog is no longer authorized to do Apple repairs because they didn’t want to pay the requisite freight.)

At issue in 2018 was a bill to establish a right to repair for all consumer items. It ended up as yet another study bill after hungry packs of top-dollar lobbyists descended on the Statehouse. This year, the bill in question would create a right to repair only for farm equipment. And once again, the custom-tailored lobbyists have swarmed the Statehouse. It’s the same playbook, and I fear it will once again end with the bloody carcass of pro-consumer legislation being ripped to shreds in their oh-so-sharp teeth.

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Fox Offers Rewrite of Henhouse Bill

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There seems to be substantial momentum toward reform of the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive (VEGI) program. Two committee chairs, Democrat Emilie Kornheiser and Republican Michael Marcotte, worked together to craft H.10, which would require much greater transparency in the program among many other things.

That in itself is pretty unusual — leaders of the two major parties cooperating on a big piece of legislation. But what clinches the deal for me is that the Scott administration actually wrote its own version of H.10. It doesn’t usually bother to do that. I take it as a sign that Team Scott thinks some type of reform is inevitable, and they want to influence the process as much as they can. (Both versions of the bill can be accessed via the House Commerce and Economic Development Committee webpage. Archived hearings are on the committee’s YouTube channel.

VEGI is administered by the Vermont Economic Progress Council, a nine-member body including seven gubernatorial appointees. The administration’s version of H.10 was presented by VEPC Executive Director Abbie Sherman, whose interest was clearly in maintaining the current process as much as possible while making pleasant noises about reform. .

Let’s start with the fact that the administration bill would drop the VEGI name and replace it with the decidedly uncatchy Think Vermont Investment Program, or TVIP for short. (Tee-vip? Tuh-vip? Tveep?) When you propose changing the name of an established program, you’re acknowledging that the current name has a bit of stink about it.

Auditor Doug Hoffer, who’s a consistent critic of VEGI because of its lack of transparency and the lack of evidence that it works, is scheduled to testify before House Commerce at 1:00 Wednesday. I’m sure his view will be more comprehensive than mine, but let’s go ahead and take a closer look at VEPC’s version of H.10.

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