Category Archives: Peter Shumlin

Legalization reconsidered

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Constant VPO readers (Hi, Mom!) know that I’ve thought marijuana legalization would fall short of passage. Not that I’m opposed to legalization; I just didn’t think it would happen this year.

Startin’ to change my mind.

There are two factors at play, and neither directly involve the State Senate passing the bill last week.

First, I’ve written that there’s one person who could turn the tide — Governor Shumlin. He supports legalization, but I wondered how actively he would engage on the issue. Well, in the Senate, he was heavily engaged, and probably made the crucial difference. Especially with two of his longtime Senate running buddies, John Campbell and Dick Mazza. Both were opposed to legalization, both are powerful enough to derail any bill they don’t like — and both stepped aside and allowed the process to go forward.

Second, House Speaker Shap Smith has consistently thrown cold water on expectations for the bill. Now, he seems to be opening the door a bit. In an interview with the Vermont Press Bureau, he called the bill “a squeaker,” which is different than calling it a loser. He said “the split that exists in the Senate reflects how people in the House feel.” Well, the Senate just passed the bill.

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I think Dick Mazza’s just trolling us now

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Well, the State Senate’s #1 Untouchable, Dick Mazza, is at it again.

This time, the alleged Democrat has co-written an opinion piece (published a few days ago in the Bennington Banner) with Republican Peg Flory and alleged Democrat Bobby Starr, slamming the Shumlin administration for, uhh, seeking the shutdown of Vermont Yankee.

To be more precise, the three solons accuse Shumlin of rank hypocrisy for wanting to close Vermont Yankee and now seeking divestment from coal stocks. Because Vermont Yankee was renewable energy, see?

Yeah.

The essay includes plenty of harsh rhetoric you might expect from the outer precincts of the VTGOP. (Tougher than Phil Scott, certainly.) Here’s a sample:

Recent issuances from Vermont’s government have overridden fiduciary responsibility and due process in favor of special interest campaigns and political gestures.

Right out of the Republican playbook, no? And then, this:

The eventual, unfortunate decision to close Vermont Yankee has now increased the state’s carbon footprint, as Vermont uses more fossil fuels for energy generation. State government officials at the time called the loss of high paying jobs and expanded tax base “hard news,” as if nothing could have been done to prevent the closure and its consequences.

Again, chapter and verse from the VTGOP: pinning the blame on Shumlin and ignoring the fact that it was Vermont Yankee’s owner that pulled the plug. For all of the Governor’s posturing, Entergy was winning the court battle over VY’s future when it decided, purely on financial grounds, to close down the plant on schedule.

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Another nail in Vermont Health Connect’s coffin

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The vultures are circling. The wolves are howling. The diminished corpus of Vermont Health Connect is crawling across a pitiless landscape; every time an oasis appears, it turns out to be a mirage.

Things aren’t lookin’ good.

I’ve been a strong supporter of Governor Shumlin’s health care reform plan — hopefully as a first step toward single payer, or at least universal coverage of some kind. I have bought and consumed every confident reassurance ever issued by the Governor and his minions. I have, unfairly in retrospect, mocked his critics as mindless partisans. I have allowed my hope to be renewed by fresh reassurances, most recently last fall, when the administration announced that VHC had met its performance benchmarks.

Today, not so much. Today I’ve turned a corner. I remain hopeful, but the confidence is gone.

The last straw was yesterday’s article by VTDigger’s Erin Mansfield, which began like this:

An independent expert on health care strategy advised the state to spend as little money as possible on Vermont Health Connect technology in the immediate future and instead use resources to evaluate alternatives to the exchange.

Frank Petrus, a senior managing partner at Connecticut-based Gartner Inc., told lawmakers the state should stop spending money to build new Vermont Health Connect technology, try to leverage investments it has already made, and commission a study that would take three to four months.

Basically, he wants to put VHC into hospice care. Stop trying to fix it, just help it “limp along a little while longer.”

Ugh. Yeesh. Aaaaaarrrrrgh.

This isn’t coming from a free-market ideologue, but a guy with unimpeachable bona fides:

Gartner has consulted for several state health exchanges, including Vermont Health Connect, and has a great deal of experience in public sector human services.

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GlobalFoundries: Too big to fail?

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Chittenden County is blessed — and a little bit cursed — by the presence of a large high-tech employer: GlobalFoundries, formerly d.b.a. IBM. The Essex facility is a major driver of the area’s economy, and the entire state’s economy for that matter.

And GlobalFoundries knows this, and they seem to know they have us over a barrel.

This is my inference based on a new report by the Associated Press’ master gardener Dave Gram, who has used public-records requests to discover the extent of GF’s demands on the state.

We already knew about the questionable $1 million from the Enterprise Fund. Gram now brings us tidings of a $17 million highway project that GF wants fast-tracked. It would involve improvements on Route 22A, which happens to be the most direct route from the Burlington area to New York State. (22A goes straight through downtown Vergennes. Hope you like your new highway, Vergennians!)

But otherwise it’s of little utility to intra-state traffic. For general transportation, trade and tourism puposes, improvements to US-7 would be more efficacious. But I have a feeling that what GlobalFoundries wants, GlobalFoundries will get.

(Now, if GF can convince New York State to build a decent highway from the Vermont border west of Rutland to I-87, then that would be a great benefit to the western Vermont economy as a whole. If they can do that, then our investment in 22A would be a worthwhile tradeoff.)

GlobalFoundries also wants state backing for “payments to GlobalFoundries from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multi-state pact that spins off money to states with a low carbon footprint.” Gram’s report doesn’t go into the reasoning behind GF’s request; in the absence of more information, I have a feeling that there are more pertinent uses for the money.

But hey, GlobalFoundries is a yoooge employer, and its loss would cripple Vermont’s economy. We may not have much choice.

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A big step forward for legalized pot, but don’t get your hopes up

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This hasn’t been a great month for marijuana legalization in Vermont. Sure, we had Governor Shumlin’s conditional endorsement in his State of the State address; but since then, we’ve had a parade of skeptical comments from influential voices in the House and Senate.

This week brought the best news for legalization since the State of the State: Shumlin and Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Sears reached agreement on a legalization bill. And since the issue wasn’t going to go anywhere without Sears’ buy-in, this was an important development.

But if you ask me, I say it ain’t happening this year. Eventually, yes. 2016, no.

The Sears/Shumlin deal has raised hackles in the pro-pot community because it would ban grow-your-own. Sears is opposed because it complicates law enforcement, a legitimate concern. If this is the bill’s biggest flaw, then I’d say take the deal, get it into law, and shoot for further changes in the future.

The bill does have a number of positive features, aside from the crucial fact of Sears’ imprimatur. A strong positive: it would ensure that Vermont’s marijuana industry would be small and local. A breath of fresh air after Ohio’s unfortunate experience, where a cadre of high rollers got a measure on the ballot that would have handed the business over to a handful of large companies.

I could go on, but an in-depth evaluation is kind of pointless because it’s not going to pass. There are too many obstacles along the way, and far too many other issues on the table this year.

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The Governor gives the Republicans a ready-made campaign slogan

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Hey, remember last Friday, when Governor Shumlin had to walk back a budget-cutting proposal he’d made less than 24 hours earlier?

Yeah, embarrassing and sad. I mean, how many people looked over the text of his budget address and didn’t realize that “cutting benefits to poor pregnant women” might cause a kerfuffle? Even if the cuts are counterbalanced by new benefits, that’s the worst possible topline for a sales pitch.

Well, maybe second worst to “confiscating crutches from crippled kids,” or possibly “Scrooge was right the first time,” but I digress.

Shumlin rolled out his kneecap-the-preggers initiative on Thursday, and took it back during a Friday appearance on VPR’s “Vermont Edition.” And just in case the abandonment itself wasn’t bad enough, he went and said this. For real.

“I don’t want to use this as a way to cost pregnant women more money,” the governor said on the program. “I said to my team this morning, ‘Listen there’s plenty of ways to save money in the budget. Go back to the Legislature and give them alternatives of other ways to make savings.’”

Wait, what?

“There’s plenty of ways to save money in the budget”?????????

?????????????

This, from a guy in his sixth year as governor, whose tenure has been marked by penny-pinching and an absolute refusal to raise “broad-based taxes” (as he himself defines the term)?

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The problem with Shumlin’s latest brainstorm

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On Monday, the Shumlin administration unveiled its proposed all-payer system, which would supposedly remove the perverse incentives driving up health care costs and, as the Governor is fond of saying, “pay our docs and our nurses and our health care providers for keeping us healthy, not for the fee-for-service system that we currently have.”

Sounds like a plan. But is it?

I’ll tell you this. If I was a doctor and the Shummy system goes into effect, I’m going to stop seeing overweight patients. Because contrary to the Governor’s sunny prescription…

“… doctors and hospitals would receive a set of payments for frankly keeping us alive and healthy and feeling good,” he said. “Obviously that puts huge priority on preventive care, on eating right, on exercising, on getting off the smokes, on doing all of the things that we know we should be doing.”

… the truth is, obesity is almost incurable. It doesn’t matter how much prevention and wellness support you provide, the vast majority of overweight people are never going to lose significant amounts of weight.

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Just what we needed: More bad news on Vermont Health Connect

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The headline says it all, thanks to Erin Mansfield of VTDigger:

VERMONT HEALTH CONNECT IS GOING BACKWARD, STAKEHOLDERS SAY

The “stakeholders” are Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont and Vermont Legal Aid, an unlikely pairing to be sure. BCBS is calling for an independent review of the troubled health care exchange, and Legal Aid is fielding scores of complaints from “frustrated consumers.”

“We’re going backwards,” said Trinka Kerr, the chief health care advocate for Vermont Legal Aid. “Towards the end of last year, we were making progress. You could get things straightened out relatively quickly, and now things are more complicated than they used to be.”

Some of Governor Shumlin’s high-profile declarations of victory are now looking inoperative. The “change of circumstance” function, which was supposed to be a benchmark for VHC, had to be taken off line because it simply wasn’t ready to handle the workload. And as a result, the backlog is back!

Yes, VHC has a backlog of change orders numbering about 4,000. To put that number in perspective, VHC has a total of 33,000 customers who buy individual policies through the website.

Now, I stopped being good at math in about the seventh grade, but to me that looks like the backlog amounts to 12 percent of all customers served. Which is, in a word, dreadful.

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Sorrell gets the wet noodle

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Scoop of the week award goes to Neal Goswami of the Vermont Press Bureau, for snagging himself an advance copy of the independent investigator’s report on Attorney General Bill Sorrell.

The topline is that Sorrell was exonerated.

The reality is not nearly so simple.

There were six accusations against Sorrell. On two of them, investigator Tom Little found no evidence of wrongdoing. On two others, Little admonished Sorrell for coming uncomfortably close to “crossing the line.”

As for the final two, Little concluded that they were outside the scope of his investigation.

Whaaaaaaaat?

Tom Little was appointed on May 7, 2015. Today is January 22, 2016.

Eight and a half months.

Couldn’t he have told us a bit sooner that he wouldn’t be investigating two of the six counts?   When exactly did he reach that conclusion?

Also, who outlined the scope of Little’s investigation? Well, we know the answer to that: he was appointed by Governor Shumlin. But was it written in a way that excluded certain areas of inquiry?

We were promised a complete investigation of Bill Sorrell’s activities — and that’s not what we got. 

And I think Tom Little, whose investigation was taxpayer-funded, owes us an explanation.

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Energize Vermont’s cockamamie political analysis

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Here’s something I bet you didn’t know.

Widespread unrest over the state’s renewable energy policy was responsible for Governor Shumlin’s near-defeat in 2014.

Actual piece of anti-wind propaganda from Ireland. I'm more afraid of Giant Baby than the turbines. But maybe the vibrations turned him into Babyzilla.

Actual piece of anti-wind propaganda from Ireland. Personally, I’m more afraid of Babyzilla than the turbines. But maybe the vibrations turned him into Babyzilla. Hmm.

Well, that’s the story being peddled by our buddies at Energize Vermont, an anti-renewable nonprofit whose funding sources are entirely opaque. They’re branding it as “The Vermont Energy Rebellion,” which allegedly poses an existential threat to the Democrats in 2016.

But let’s go back to 2014, the year that Scott Milne allegedly surfed the wave of anti-renewables anger to within an eyelash of the governorship. The fevered imagination of Energize Vermont focuses on the key constituency of Craftsbury, population 1,206.

Hey, you in the back: stop laughing!

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