Phil Scott’s Getting a Free Pass on Pensions, and the Democrats Are Letting Him Get Away With It

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Legislative leadership is rightly getting an earful from teachers, state employees and union supporters over the emerging make-workers-pay pension reform plan. But let’s not overlook the fact that Gov. Phil Scott is playing no role whatsoever in devising a solution to this very large problem.

As he has done on issue after issue throughout his governorship, he is sitting back and letting the Legislature do the hard work and take the punishment. Then, after all their blood, sweat and tears, he saunters in, gives a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and ambles away. If it’s thumbs down, the Legislature gets another try at guessing what will be acceptable to him.

This isn’t my idea of leadership. But who can blame the gov, considering that it works so well for him?

Over and over again, Scott sits out a tough policy debate — and the Democrats let him get away with it. They bargain against themselves. They begin with a position that’s more than halfway to his side, and they only give ground from there. The governor doesn’t get exactly what he wants, but the Democrats get far less. And they look weak in the process.

You’d think the Democrats would have learned by now. But no, here they are doing the same damn thing on pensions — and in the process, betraying one of their core constituencies.

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How to Cost Your Financial Institution a Bunch of Customers in Two Easy Minutes

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Submitted for your consideration: Bob Morgan, CEO of the North Country Federal Credit Union. Well, he was as of this writing.

Morgan was the only witness in Friday afternoon’s hearing on public sector pension reform to play the Ebenezer Scrooge role, talking up the urgent need to stick it to state and school employees. All the other witnesses were teachers, state employees and their supporters, all urging the Legislature to hold the pensions harmless.

Morgan’s pro-reform pitch makes sense coming from a member of the Vermont Business Roundtable’s Pension Reform Committee, which he is. But it’s awfully risky for the leader of a financial institution where many teachers and state workers keep their money. After his testimony, Twitter got lit up with calls for people to close their NCFCU accounts.

And eventually, one Twitter sleuth discovered an article describing the generous custom-tailored retirement plan Morgan received from the NCFCU Board. Made it look like a clear case of Steak and caviar for me; hardtack and Alpo for thee.

More on that in a moment, but first, let’s revisit Morgan’s testimony.

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The Reign of the Invisible Man

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Harlan Sylvester, large and in charge (Not Exactly As Illustrated)

The House Democrats’ ill-considered pension reform plan was the icing on the cake, the topper in a series of events that expose the fundamentally centrist nature of the party and its officeholders.

And this I trace to the all-encompassing influence of one Harlan Sylvester.

For those just tuning in, Sylvester is a longtime money manager who shuns the limelight — but for decades, he has been the kingmaker of Vermont politics. You don’t get to the top of the heap without his blessing. And it sure seems like the modern Democratic Party has been fashioned according to his fiscally conservative taste.

There have been occasional press profiles about him, and they all describe him the same way. Peter Freyne, 2000: “Mr. Sylvester has had the cocked ear of Vermont governors going all the way back to Tom Salmon in the 1970s.” Freyne quoted then-UVM political science professor Garrison Nelson thusly: “Harlan loves conservative Democrats. He wants to erase the gap between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.”

Rutland Herald, 2002: “it was Harlan Sylvester’’s considerable influence and strategic skills that helped put [Republican Jim Douglas,] the apparent underdog candidate, in office.”

In 2010, Freyne’s successor Shay Totten described Sylvester as “The most powerful man in Vermont politics.” Totten also quoted Prof. Nelson: “He’s got access to people with real money, and those people with real money will invest in politicians who will protect their interests.”

So that’s Mr. Sylvester, who is in his late 80s but his power has not been visibly diminished. From what I’ve heard, he remains the power behind the throne.

And now let’s look at what the Democratic Party has become.

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Well, it’s not a flaming bag of poo

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With no advance warning, the House Government Operations Committee on Wednesday rolled out a reform plan for Vermont’s underfunded public sector pensions. And from the unions’ point of view, it could hardly be worse.

Before I get to the details, I’ll define “no advance warning.” On Wednesday morning, the committee first heard a proposal to restructure the pensions under a single Vermont Retirement Commission. That plan was posted to the committee’s website very shortly before the hearing began. Two lawmakers broadly hinted that they were reading it for the first time, with no chance to digest or formulate questions.

Ditto the pension reform plan. It was posted to the committee’s “Documents & Handouts” webpage only two minutes before its hearing was to begin.

For an issue as complicated as pension reform, this is unconscionable.

Well, it’d be fine if we were at the beginning of a normal legislative timeline with plenty of hearings and back-and-forth and rewrites of the legislation. But as far as I can see, we’re not going to get any of that. As I said in my previous post, legislative leaders are hellbent on enacting pension reform this year. If they’re going to hew to that ambitious timeline, Gov Ops would have to vote out an actual bill within days.

There were a few signs of exactly how rushed these proposals were. Rep. Bob Hooper asked if a cost analysis had been done on the new Retirement Commission. The answer was “No.” Later he noted that the reduction in benefits seemed out of proportion with projected savings; apparently a full fiscal analysis has yet to be done.

Whenever they want to slow-play an issue, legislative leaders usually claim that there’s not enough time to give the issue the scrutiny it deserves. If this pension plan gets fast-tracked, I don’t ever want to hear that excuse again.

After the jump: The grim details.

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Now, I’m not saying the House Democrats are ready to deliver a flaming bag of poo regarding public sector pensions. It’s just that all the signs point in that direction.The teachers’ and state employees’ unions should take care with any packages they find on the doorstep.

Because, apparently, the behind-closed-doors work has just about wrapped up. And suddenly, the House Government Operations Committee’s schedule is packed with pension-related hearings — leading up to the oft-promised public hearing on the as-yet-unreleased plan at the Traditional Newsdump Hour of Friday afternoon.

You know how rare it is for the Legislature to do anything substantive after 4:00 pm on a Friday? The only time it usually happens is during the last-ditch rush to adjournment.

And now, with a mere three days’ notice, the House Dems have scheduled a public hearing from 4:00 to 6:00 Friday. On a proposal that, as I might have already noted, hasn’t been made public as of this writing.

Friday’s dog-and-pony-show hearing will feature a parade of speakers who will each get three minutes to say their piece. Up to, presumably, the 120-minute time limit. That means, let me see, a total of 40 speaking slots. Forty! On an issue that touches the retirement security of thousands of Vermonters! You can register here; I suggest you do it fast.

It’s possible that the Dems have crafted a pension reform plan acceptable to all parties. But every sign points in the opposite direction. Secrecy? Check. Sudden effusion of hearings? Check. Little notice before a public hearing? Check. Public hearing scheduled for the Friday afternoon dead zone?

Check and double-check.

Did I mention there’s no actual bill yet? At least not one that’s publicly available.

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A Canard Comes Home to Roost

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Vermont’s “business leaders” scored a rare double last week. Their complaints resulted in stories published on the same day by Seven Days and VTDigger. Congratulations.

The articles trod the same well-worn path: The Usual Suspects in the business community are raising fears that proposed state unemployment benefits will hurt their efforts to attract workers. Both stories are replete with quotes from worried business owners and their paid lobbyists.

Because, as we all know, workers are inherently lazy. And the lower they are on the totem pole, the lazier they become — all the way down to the mythical creature known as the Welfare Queen.

In these stories, you won’t read any quotes from actual workers. Nor will you see anything from business groups that aren’t cut from the Chamber cloth. It’d be nice to know how Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility and the Main Street Alliance see things before deciding whether we should consider “business leaders” as united on the moral hazard of unemployment insurance.

It’s true that many unemployed people have gotten more in Covid-enhanced UI than they could expect to earn in their line of work, and that would again be the case under S.10. I’d argue this says more about the overabundance of low-paying jobs than about the excessive generosity of pandemic benefits. And there’s plenty of research that shows that the “business leaders'” fears are unfounded; that the effect of temporarily sweetened UI on the supply of available workers is negligible at most.

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Gloves Off, Let’s Go

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Says here Vermont’s public sector unions are feeling anxious about closed-door talks on how to fix their pension plans. Can’t say I blame them. The 2021 session is more than halfway done, Speaker Jill Krowinski is determined to get something done by then, and there’s been not a peep about what a fix might look like. And since Treasurer Beth Pearce has outlined exactly how drastically pensions might change, the teachers’ and state employees’ union have every right to be concerned.

And this is the time to show their concern through hardball, sharp-elbow politics. Give ’em hell. Threaten a cutoff of union support for any lawmaker who supports a major cut in pension benefits or a major increase in employee pay-in. Get in there and throw some elbows.

Mind you, I’m not talking right and wrong here. I’m talking the timely application of leverage.

The VSEA and VT-NEA are two of the most powerful forces in the Vermont Democratic Party. They provide financial support, volunteers, and lots of voters. They have earned a great deal of influence in party circles. That influence should be brought to bear, right now if not sooner.

You’d think this wouldn’t be necessary. You’d think the Legislature’s Demo/Prog majority would be working with the unions to resolve this crisis. But union lobbyists say otherwise.

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It’s the Cluelessness, Stupid

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Here in Vermont, we don’t have a lot of over-the-top, Bull Connor-style racism. What we do have in unfortunate abundance is white obliviousness, born (in part) of infrequent interactions with people outside narrow racial, ethnic, social and economic boundaries.

That includes yours truly, and I freely acknowledge the limitations of my own insight. I’m sure I have economy-sized blind spots. But at least I’m just a blogger. The stakes are a lot higher when people in positions of leadership betray their cluelessness.

So, in the same week when a Georgia sheriff’s officer made a complete ass of himself in saying that a white guy who’d killed eight people, six of them Asian women, was “having a bad day,” we’ve got two examples of the same phenomenon right here in Vermont.

First, I think you can guess, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger’s own goal on police oversight. Second, town officials in Manchester dog-whistling a state program for the homeless.

If you’re only going to read one piece on Weinberger’s blunder, make it state Sen. Kesha Ram’s op-ed on Weinberger and white neutrality. But since she wrote that piece, further developments have made the picture look even worse.

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The Governor Puts His Thumb on the Education Scale

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The news may be official by the time you read this post, but I’ve gotten word that Gov. Phil Scott has chosen two new members of the State Board of Education. The last two Peter Shumlin appointees on the 10-member board, Peter Peltz and William Mathis, have seen their terms come to an end. Yep, the entire board is now made up of Phil Scott appointees.

This ought to concern anyone interested in the health of the public school system. Since his initial run for governor in 2016, Scott has been nosing around some pretty big education reforms. He’s talked up a single statewide school district, which would include a statewide school voucher system. Such a system would drain resources from the public schools. Scott has also consistently voiced support for a “cradle to career” approach to education, which would likely mean giving some Ed Fund dollars to child care, early education, and secondary education.

Also looming overhead are the legal challenges to Vermont’s ban on paying tuition to religious schools. Given the compensation of the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s likely that Vermont will have to accommodate an unfriendly ruling sometime soon. The easiest way around these lawsuits is to stop paying tuition to any non-public school, including the approved independent schools like the St. Johnsbury Academy and the Burr and Burton Academy. That’s politically unlikely, but the composition of the State Board of Education makes it even less likely.

Lovett was the headmaster of St. Johnsbury Academy until last June, when he stepped down after 19 years on the job. His appointment would mean that fully half of the board, and half of its voting members, have strong connections to approved independent schools.

Jepson is executive director of Chamber & Economic Development of the Rutland Region. (The clumsily-named C&ED was born of a merger between the Rutland Chamber of Commerce and the Rutland Economic Development Corporation.) Before that, Jepson was head of the Career & Technical Teacher Education Program at Vermont Technical College.

So, two more people with no particular tie to the public education system are joining the body that oversees the public education system.

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All the Rabbit Holes

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I think this is the point where the far left and the far right come together. Or at least try to.

The above cacophony of colors and fonts is making the rounds on social media. No indication of creator or sponsor; “Vermonters Against Unconst. Lock-downs & Tyranny” is either brand new or fictitious. A Google search produces no matches. Dive down this rabbit hole at your own risk.

The Burlington “flash mob” event follows a rally at the Statehouse this past Saturday which, by my count, attracted maybe 30 people. I wasn’t there, but a participant uploaded a nine-minute video of the rally on BitChute, a “free speech” alternative to YouTube that’s welcomed many who’ve been banned by mainstream social media sites, including shouty conspiratorialist Alex Jones. The video plays under the headline, “Covid is a Fraud and We Know It.”

The speakers at the Montpelier event included Newport print shop owner Mike Desautels, who has lost his UPS affiliation and his court battle against the state’s mask mandate. (The video’s narrator claimed that Desautels is $15,000 in the hole for legal fees, and pleaded for donations to Desautels’ GoFundMe page.)

Another speaker was Shylo Bourdeau, co-owner of a farm in Lowell. The video includes a short passage from her speech, which I transcribed to the best of my ability.

They can’t stop us by convention in this oath of office allegiance. And the importance of as established by convention in this oath is them swearing to uphold the Constitution as established by convention for we, the people, was removed. So who are they swearing to? Who are they holding their allegiance to, with that removed?

Your guess is a good as mine. At that point, someone in the audience helpfully shouted “Rothschilds,” so there’s the Protocols of the Elders of Zion George Soros World Jewish Conspiracy which funded the creation of coronavirus in a Chinese lab, I guess?

After the jump: All the rabbit holes in one convenient location!

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