Tag Archives: Act 143

In Which the High and Mighty Look Down from the Clouds and Determine the Fate of Our Most Vulnerable

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Love the online access for legislative hearings where the audio quality is poor and the view so expansive that you can’t tell who’s talking. It’s even worse when a powerpoint presentation occupies 90% of the screen and all the little people are confined to a small corner.

But the optics seem appropriate when the subject is Vermont’s troubled emergency housing program, taken up briefly today by the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee. (It was one item on a packed agenda, with a mere 30 minutes allocated for multiple witnesses.) There’s something ironically apropos about those remote figures in an ornate room discussing the state’s failure to provide adequate shelter for our neediest Vermonters.

But enough philosophizing. The subject at hand was how the Scott administration is implementing Act 143, the Legislature’s attempt to create a better emergency housing system. In the eyes of advocacy groups, the administration has taken a heavy-handed approach and fast-tracked a new system without much input from outside the boundaries of its own sphincter.

This process has triggered an impassioned response from advocacy groups and helping agencies, up to and potentially including legal action for what they see as the administration’s deliberate flouting of Act 143’s intent. A small next step took place today before JFC, with more hearings to come in the near future. (The Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules is expected to take up the new process on October 1, and there will be a joint hearing of he House Human Service and Senate Health & Welfare Committees on October 9.) Nothing was settled today, but the lines are drawn a bit more clearly now.

Not that that will help anyone caught in the chaos — planned or otherwise — of a situation that seems to have been easily avoidable except that the Scott administration has rarely acted in good faith when it comes to sheltering the homeless. The constant preoccupation is with cost and with making recipients prove they are worthy, instead of meeting a simple basic human need. Or, to put it another way, doing the right thing.

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What If They Held an Election and Nobody Covered It?

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I would not be so bold as to say that our news media are in the tank for Gov. Phil Scott. But their sadly reduced capacity has redounded to the governor’s benefit, over and over again. No one has the bandwidth and/or interest in covering state politics anymore. As a result, recent events that might be harmful to Scott’s popularity have gone completely unreported or, at best, substantially underreported.

Example #1: The legislative hearing that revealed the disastrous state of the administration’s biggest IT project, which includes the budget, human resources, and finance and accounting — a project that touches on everybody in state government and every dollar it spends. This project is so badly off the rails that no one can say how long it will take to fix, how much more it will cost, or even if it will ever come to fruition. That’s not coming from critics, but from top administration officials themselves. I cannot explain why this isn’t a big fat deal.

Example #2: Scott’s attempt to bigfoot the Democratic primary for Chittenden County State’s Attorney. He openly urged Republicans to take Democratic ballots and vote for challenger Bram Kranichfeld over incumbent Sarah Fair George. At best it’s an ethically questionable thing for a self-proclaimed non-politician to do.

Example #3: What the Scott administration has done to Act 143, the Legislature’s attempt to reform the emergency housing program. I’m preparing to write a full post about this. For now, I’ll just say that Scott signed it and immediately began subverting it. His administration has devised its own plan that certainly violates the spirit of Act 143 and probably the letter of the law as well. Carly Berlin, a reporter shared by VTDigger and Vermont Public, did post a story about this on September 1, but it didn’t explore the full extent of the administration’s skulduggery. Otherwise this sorry affair has gone pretty much uncovered. It ought to be a scandal.

Example #4: In late July, the University of New Hampshire Survey Center published a poll showing that one-half of Vermonters “have a positive overall view of socialism, while only about four in ten have a positive view of capitalism,” and “a plurality have a positive view of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).” (It also showed Donald Trump’s popularity at an all-time low of 22% in Vermont, bwahahaha.)

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