Kurn Hattin Would Very Much Like You to Take Kurn Hattin’s Word For It About Kurn Hattin’s Sordid Past

13 Replies

Sometime in late August, very quietly, the Kurn Hattin Homes for Children released an astonishingly vague statement about allegations of child abuse within its walls. Repeatedly referring to itself in the third person, Kurn Hattin announced that some number of allegations about Kurn Hattin turned out to be true, while some other accusations about Kurn Hattin were not. Yep, that’s about it.

VTDigger reported the statement on September 8, but it was posted on Kurn Hattin’s website at least two weeks earlier without notice. I’m sure that Kurn Hattin would very much like us to accept this statement at face value and turn our attention elsewhere. Any elsewhere will do. HEY, LOOK! SQUIRREL!

But I’ll tell you, this had better not be the last word on the subject. Kurn Hattin needs to be held accountable. Department of Education? Agency of Human Services? Attorney General’s office? Legislature? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Continue reading →

Congratulations to Team Scott for Scoring a Cheap Political Point Against the Democrats

3 Replies

Legislative leadership has a somewhat (but only somewhat) overblown reputation for shooting themselves in the foot. They have often made Gov. Phil Scott’s job easier by giving him pain-free victories or allowing his minions to run rings around them.

The latest installment of this depressing melodrama features the complaint from House Speaker Jill Krowinski and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth about the “Vermont Strong II: Electric Boogaloo” license plates first suggested [checks notes] almost two months ago by Gov. Phil Scott.

Now, I’m no fan of the plate. It’s an obvious play on Vermonters’ partially earned self-regard, and there’s something ironic about flogging vehicle license plates to help recover from a climate change-related disaster.

Also, Baruth and Krowinski have a strong argument that the governor overstepped his constitutional authority by advancing the program without Legislative approval. Team Scott argues that he is simply extending a program authorized by the Legislature in 2012, after Tropical Storm Irene.

That seems pretty thin to me, but politically speaking it doesn’t matter. There is no way that this doesn’t end up being a strong net positive for Scott. Assuming he runs for re-election, this thing would be potent fodder for the TV ads he probably won’t have to bother airing: “Legislative leaders are so petty and obstructionist, they didn’t even want me to raise disaster recovery money with a positive, feel-good message.”

Team Scott fully realizes this. And when you look at the sequence of events, it’s pretty clear that his people leaked this story and that Baruth and Krowinski didn’t intend for this to become public.

Continue reading →

Canaan Launches Purification Drive

2 Replies

Oh Canaan, my Canaan. What are you up to now?

The Northeast Kingdom town, best known in these parts as (1) the home of the only public school district that never adopted a mask mandate during the Covid epidemic, (2) the home turf of former education secretary Dan French, and (3) the place where a parent threatened to “kill somebody” if his child encountered a transgender person at school, has just enacted a broad, sweeping ban on loitering — or doing just about anything else not specifically authorized by the town — on public property.

It’s obviously aimed at unhoused people, and it’s almost certainly unconstitutional. The Selectboard itself gave that game away when it inserted a “separability” clause, which anticipates a losing battle in court.

The Vermont ACLU, which has previously reminded other Vermont communities that anti-panhandling ordinances are unconstitutional, seems likely to fulfill the Selectboard’s anticipation. “[The ordinance] does appear to raise a number of constitutional concerns,” wrote ACLU Communications Director Stephanie Gomory in an email.

But wait, there’s more! The Canaan Selectboard has also embarked on a drive to clean up “junky yards,” a concept that’s clearly in the eye of the beholder.

Continue reading →

Pointless Brattleboro Petition Sparks Rage, Fear, Prejudice

1 Reply

Things are dire enough down Brattleboro way that someone named “Buck Russell” has launched a petition drive to prohibit panhandling. Gee, what do you know, you take a historic housing shortage, add a mass unhousing by state policymakers, toss in an opioid crisis we have yet to address, and hey presto, you get desperate people begging for money. Our unspoken pleas for the unhoused to simply, conveniently disappear seem to be falling on deaf ears.

The petition seeks to drive Brattleboro down a dead-end road. In 2018, the Vermont ACLU convinced six communities to deep-six their anti-panhandling ordinances. The nonprofit pointed to clear and consistent court rulings against such laws.

The 2015 Supreme Court case Reed v. Town of Gilbert made clear that it is unconstitutional for municipal ordinances to regulate only certain types of speech, including panhandling. Similarly, of the more than 25 laws attempting to ban panhandling reviewed by courts across the nation, all have been found unconstitutional.

I suppose that memories fade when communities are under stress. I doubt that the town Selectboard will give much credence to the petition, considering that Brattleboro was itself one of those communities that killed its anti-panhandling ordinance in 2018.

The petition itself is sort of a work of art in its own dystopian way. Russell does his level best to hide the wolf of contempt in the sheep’s clothing of compassion. He claims, in fact, that enacting a ban would actually be “encouraging [the unhoused] towards more sustainable solutions,” as if the unhoused could build housing and create a social safety net by themselves.

But if the petition tries to come across as Sincerely Having the Best Interests of Our Unfortunate Neighbors In Mind, the commenters employ no such restraints. Nay, rather, they are absolutely unhinged.

Continue reading →

Less “Lean Management” Than “Mean Management”

1 Reply

There have been numerous examples over the years of Phil Scott’s failure to build an effective bureaucracy in spite of his promises to lower the cost of government and improve the delivery of services The latest, and perhaps most outrageous, is the unconscionable handling of the extended emergency motel voucher program. As reported by VTDigger, the Scott administration is now requiring recipients to recertify once a week — and is making it damn difficult to comply by woefully understaffing its call centers and offices.

There are two possible explanations for this. Either the administration is doing its best to torpedo an extension it never wanted in the first place, or it has deliberately resource-starved the Department of Children and Families to the point where DCF can’t properly do its job. Either way, it’s inexcusable. As is the desperate display of blame-shifting put on by DCF functionary Miranda Gray.

It’s not our fault, she told VTDigger. It’s recipients’ fault for not being persistent enough or not answering the phone when DCF gets around to calling them back. It’s a caseworker’s fault for not communicating with DCF (through its terrible call center). Recipients who can’t get through by phone should go to a field office (but at least one recipient was forced to wait for hours and hours at a field office). It’s the Legislature’s fault for setting the rules (yes, they opened the door to weekly check-ins but (a) the admin sets the rules and (b) the mismanagement of the call system is all on YOU).

Meanwhile, recipients are waiting hours upon hours and living constantly in fear of losing their shelter. All because YOU couldn’t fully staff a call center after increasing your own workload by mandating weekly check-ins.

Also meanwhile, no one has received a damn dime from a disaster relief fund for the self-employed and independent contractors. And some of the applications seem to have been bungled. Wow, more management failure. And another administration official busily pointing the finger elsewhere.

Continue reading →

The Feds Place a Capstone on Dan French’s Tenure

5 Replies

Well hey, here’s something. The U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office is investigating the Vermont Agency of Education for violating the rights of students by limiting school districts’ authority to enact public health measures during the Covid-19 epidemic and, in the Office’s words, “discriminating against students with disabilities” who were at heightened risk of serious illness.

Yes, that would be the Agency of Education then helmed by the mask-averse Dan French, labeled in this space as the Inspector Clouseau of the Scott administration. I’d suggest that the feds could have assembled quite the dossier simply by reading this blog, but doubtless their investigation has been more thorough than that. And to judge by the reaction of French’s successor Heather Bouchey, I’m guessing the feds have got the goods. In her reply to the feds’ probe, as reported by VTDigger, she didn’t claim there was no discrimination. She simply said the agency had no intention of discriminating.

“The AOE devoted significant effort throughout its COVID-19 pandemic response to ensure the equal educational access of students with disabilities including students with disabilities who are at an elevated risk of severe illness from COVID-19 exposure. If the AOE erred in its responses, guidance or otherwise, it is eager to address the error and make corrections for the benefit of students.”

That word “if” is the giveaway. Bouchey didn’t defend her agency’s performance; she tried to frame any offense as inadvertent, not intentional. And she laid out a glidepath to future surrender by saying the agency was “eager to address” any errors “and make corrections.” And don’t overlook her emphasis on “equal educational access” rather than, say, the health and safety of students. Gotta keep those disabled kids in class so they get “equal access,” you know.

But in case you needed any more evidence that the agency, under French, went too far in pressuring school districts to moderate their public health measures, let’s take a little walk down Memory Lane.

Continue reading →

Another Event I Won’t Be Attending

6 Replies

Mark your calendars and then make other plans! This is the weekend of Libertystock, a Gathering of the Disaffected on a farm in Cabot which I like to think of as Klar-a-palooza. Libertystock’s market positioning is nicely encapsulated in the above T-shirt: an ultraconservative slash Libertarian message in alt-culture clothing.

It sounds like a downright tedious event. And it’s emblematic of the central problem of the far right in these parts: Way too many aspirational chiefs, nowhere near enough Indians, if you’ll pardon the dated turn of phrase. If you go a-Googling for conservative organizations in Vermont, it’s downright amazing how many you can find. All of them are starved for membership.

Anyway, Libertystock includes speakers, musicians, performers, and vendors in what its website describes as “an amazing event in a beautiful location” that will almost certainly draw an embarrassingly small audience. Probably more than VT Grassroots’ recent “modest but impassioned crowd of 25,” but I’d say there’s a very good chance that the performers, speakers and vendors will outnumber the actual attendees.

Continue reading →

You’d Think Maybe a Writers’ Conference Would Put Writers First

3 Replies

Well, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference is now over, but the consequences of an uncontrolled Covid-19 outbreak may continue for quite some time.

When last we left the situation, more than 10% of conference participants had become ill. Leadership responded by continuing activities as scheduled, including a dance, with masking suggested but not required. The infected attendees were sent home — or should I say were ousted from the conference. The departees, including some who had written about their experiences on Twitter, were not offered refunds or any help with unexpected travel costs.

Sometime during the day Friday, after several writers took to Twitter and I wrote about the situation in this space (and the paywalled Publishers Marketplace also covered the outbreak), leadership changed its stance. According to former participant and now Covid patient Caitlin Eichorn, Bread Loaf reached out to infected participants with an offer of prorated refunds for tuition, room and board — but only after, as Eichorn noted, “the bad publicity” around the Bread Loaf outbreak had begun to spread.

Better late than never, but it would have been preferable if leadership had acted on principle instead of damage control.

Continue reading →

Covid Outbreak at Bread Loaf

2 Replies

Middlebury College’s renowned Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference has been struck by the Covid-19 virus. According to email communications with participants, conference officials had confirmed 26 cases as of yesterday afternoon. That is, according to one source, about 10% of all participants. There have been no reports of serious illness. So far.

This year’s Bread Loaf Conference began on August 16 and is scheduled to conclude on Saturday. The official response seems more focused on continuing to the finish than on containing the outbreak.

Bread Loaf attendee Caitlin Eichorn has been chronicling the experience on Twitter, which I still refuse to call X. Her Twitter feed is the source of many of the quotations included in this post.

At first, according to Eichorn, there were daily email updates on the number of cases. That practice ended after conference leaders had “conversations with Middlebury’s trusted medical advisors,” according to a message sent to attendees. The counsel from those advisors was to “turn the emphasis away from reporting the number of the cases, which health departments stopped counting awhile ago, focusing instead on hospitalizations which provide a better estimate of how COVID-19 is impacting the community.”

So far this summer, there have generally been fewer hospitalizations than in previous Augusts. That’s nice, but no guarantee. Plus, avoiding immediate hospitalization doesn’t mean you won’t get some variety of long Covid down the road.

I’d prefer not to get sick in the first place. “Trusted medical advisors” notwithstanding, if I were a Bread Loaf participant, I’d want to know what the hell is going on in every detail. And I’d want strict measures taken to limit the spread, if indeed you want to press on with the conference, including limiting the number of indoor events and requiring the use of masks throughout.

Continue reading →

A Deal We’re Likely to Regret Someday

6 Replies

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Vermont is about to be swallowed whole by one of its much larger cousins. The deal seems benign and, since it holds out the promise of lower costs for health insurance, it’s virtually certain to go through.

The unintended consequences will come later. As will the intended consequences.

The proposed deal, first announced in May, is on a fast track to approval. The state Department of Financial Regulation set aside a two-week window for public comment, which closes the day after tomorrow. Next week, the DFR will hold a public hearing. After that, approval seems a certainty. The two partners have said they want to finalize the arrangement by October 1.

The deal involves BCBSVT, which I will call “Vermont Blue” for clarity’s sake, becoming “affiliated” with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, or “Michigan Blue.” And despite the seemingly collegial tone of “affiliation,” it’s a takeover. Like a shark devouring a tasty fish.

Or, to change midstream to a different animal analogy, Michigan Blue is the dog and Vermont Blue will be the tail. Michigan Blue insures more than five million people; Vermont Blue, at 200,000, will effectively be a rounding error on Michigan Blue’s bottom line.

Continue reading →