Tag Archives: Andrew Liptak

News You Should View: Return of the O.G.

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OK, having delivered some extra-credit rants about the successes and missteps of Vermont news media, it’s time to get back to basics. Here’s my weekly roundup of content worth your attention.

Well, someone cares about ethics. I don’t know how this is a scoop, but congrats to WCAX-TV’s Calvin Cutler for reporting the latest in Vermont’s lack of commitment to ethics in government. (And brickbats to the rest of our media for ignoring a pretty important development.) The dismaying news is that the state Ethics Commission has paused on giving advice to local governments because, shocker, it doesn’t have the resources to handle the task. See, the Legislature expanded the Commission’s remit to include advising municipalities. Not enforcing, good God no, why would we need that? But at the same time, the Legislature (as always) failed to provide adequate funding for the expanded responsibilities. So when the Commission experienced “a big spike” in local-government ethics complaints and requests for guidance, it simply couldn’t handle the workload. Great!

Trump’s impact on Vermonters, part eleventy-billion. From The St. Albans Messenger, a story about how cuts in federal food aid are likely to resonate in Franklin County. The news is bad, of course. But what made me sit up and take notice are the striking statistics on food insecurity in the county. As the Messenger’s Aidan Schonbrun reports, 11.6% of Franklin County households were on food assistance as of 2023 — and that figure is above 30% in Richford, the county’s most food-insecure town. Does that not strike you as disconcertingly high? It really drives home the potential impact of federal cuts. Well, that and the failure of our economy to provide decent incomes for working folk.

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News You Should View: Yeah, Most of It Is About Trump

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More and more of our Vermont news space is taken up with the local/state ramifications of Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy, the rule of law, and the government itself. So much so that unrelated stories are sometimes getting short shrift. More on that in my next post, or at least that’s the plan. In the meantime, please enjoy the panoply of bad news that Phil Scott thinks we should stop fretting about.

Counting the Trump damage done. Going to start with not a story, but an ongoing data collection effort. Vermont Public is tracking federal funding losses in our state in an easily digestible list. This is not the “rhetoric” that our governor insists we’re wasting time on; these are actual cutbacks with tangible effects. You’ve read about most of these if you follow the news, but it’s good to have them all in one place. The most recent entry is a lost federal grant for a local history training program, which was mentioned in a recent post and will make another appearance later in this missive.

Environmental Law Center “threatened on two fronts.” From the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News, a story about concern at the Vermont Law and Graduate School about potential Trump threats to the school’s Environmental Law Center. They’re feeling the heat, between Trump’s attacks on major law firms and educational institutions and his assault on anything that smacks of climate change or other inconvenient truths.

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