Tag Archives: Brenda Siegel

Too Gentle for This World

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Rest in peace, Morgan W. Brown.

The housing advocate and fixture of Montpelier life has died after, as they say, a long battle with cancer. Word of his death was posted yesterday on Facebook by fellow advocate Brenda Siegel.

Before proceeding, a necessary acknowledgement: I’m far from the best person to memorialize Morgan. I knew him indirectly from his advocacy work and his Green Mountain Meandering Missives blog, plus that one time I had a cup of coffee with him. That was in the early stages of his illness, and I never sought another meeting because it seemed an imposition on an acquaintance with limited time remaining. But I have thoughts on his passing. Think of this is one pebble in the pond, not the final word on anything Morgan.

The above Muppetization of him and his beloved companion Miss Cleo adorns his YouTube channel, but it seems appropriate here because Morgan was a gentle soul who seemed to have been born on the wrong planet. He needed and deserved a more welcoming environment. Our world is a little colder without him.

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Five. And Counting.

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Since Thanksgiving Eve, at least five Vermonters have died after being turned away from the state’s General Assistance Emergency Housing program. Three deaths have been publicly reported, but at least two more can be added to the list. We’re up to five. And counting.

Or shall I say, in the words of End Homelessness Vermont’s Brenda Siegel, five “that we know about.” There is good reason to take her word for it; EHV has done a far better job than the state at keeping in touch with unsheltered people, assessing their needs, and trying to keep them safe and warm. And yes, Siegel is an advocate, but she has no need to exaggerate or embellish; the crisis is quite bad enough as it is.

There may have been more deaths that we don’t yet know about. There may be more by the time you read this post. This is an emergency. If the Scott administration was operating with less pride and more compassion, there would be an immediate summit meeting of state officials, key legislators, shelter providers, and housing advocates to find ways to help more people with available resources. The governor is right about one thing: The motel voucher program is a stopgap. It’s too expensive and doesn’t address any issues beyond roofs over heads.

There are options. There are ways to handle the situation — not perfectly, but better than we are now. The Scott administration has failed to explore other ideas. Instead, its policy has been to use whatever money is on hand to prop up the voucher program while making no provision at all for a better, longer-term solution. “It doesn’t have to be the motel program,” Siegel said. “There are other options. But we cannot keep unsheltering people.”

End of sermon. Now, more grim details.

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Phil Scott’s Shelter Policy Has Started Literally Killing People

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Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! The Vermont State Police found two people dead inside a tent in Wolcott on Thanksgiving Eve. They were Lucas Menard of Montpelier and Tammy Menard of Berlin. Few details are available, although police do not suspect foul play.

Unless, of course, you consider this fall’s mass unsheltering “foul play.”

And yes, the Menards were among the close to 1,500 vulnerable Vermonters recently unsheltered following cuts in the GA emergency housing program. Brenda Siegel of End Homelessness Vermont says they were clients of her organization who had “complex medical needs” but were denied shelter by the state. Siegel on Facebook:

Wonderful vibrant people. And Tammy herself helped so many others. Tell me again how what we did was fine and people will manage. Is this what you mean by “manage”?

I can’t add much to that, except to remind everyone that this was the inevitable and long-predicted result of denying shelter to so many of our most vulnerable. And the cold weather is just beginning. Siegel gets the last word:

I wanted nothing more than to be wrong about the catastrophic outcomes this policy would cause. But I knew that I was not.

The Groundhog Day of Our Disgrace

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One month later, nothing much has changed. Except that the humanitarian crisis then foreseen by advocates for the homeless has become a reality that ought to scar our consciences and lay to rest any claim we have to moral superiority, to the comfortable myth of Vermont as a better, more caring place.

It was on September 15 that a group of advocates gathered in the Statehouse to sound the alarm about the completely predictable unsheltering of close to 2,000 vulnerable Vermonters due to new limits on the GA emergency housing program. They gathered again on October 15 to sound the alarm yet again, as the unsheltering has proceeded apace and state leaders have refused to lift a finger to stop it.

“We are working frantically to keep people from dying,” said Julie Bond of Good Samaritan haven (pictured above, with former Brattleboro town manager Peter Elwell and Frank Knaack of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont looking on). “The situation is impossible, it is immoral, and it is untenable.”

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“The Days Grow Shorter, the Nights Grow Colder”

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Well, another press conference today about our ongoing, self-inflicted homelessness crisis. This one featured Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak (above), who gave us the title for this post, along with a crew of The Usual Suspects including Brenda Siegel of End Homelessness Vermont (left, above), Falko Schilling of the ACLU of Vermont (right, above) right, Frank Knaack of the Vermont Coalition to End Homelessness, and Julie Bond of the Good Samaritan Haven.

They made the familiar plea: Hundreds upon hundreds of vulnerable Vermonters are being exited from the General Assistance voucher program, while available shelters and support services are at or beyond capacity. You can find more comprehensive reports on the presser elsewhere; I’d like to emphasize a few key points.

First, the situation was already critical even before cuts in the voucher program began taking their toll on September 15. It has gotten worse since then, and will continue to get worse for at least the next two weeks as recipients hit their maximum stays. The pain has only just begun. And all of those affected have been classed as vulnerable. There are no able-bodied freeloaders here.

    Second, the speakers emphasized their desire to move beyond the blame game. “We must set aside our political and policy differences,” Siegel said, in order to craft a humane resolution to the crisis.

    Third, there is one and only one person who can get this ball rolling: Gov. Phil Scott.

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    A Modest Suggestion for Our Newsgatherers — Oh, Never Mind, They’ll Just Ignore Me Anyway

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    Really good piece of work by the cross-media combo of Carly Berlin and Lola Duffort on the humanitarian toll about to occur thanks to cuts in the state’s emergency housing program. They went out and did the work, speaking with numerous recipients of state-paid motel vouchers who are about to lose their places. The stories are heartbreaking, and dismaying for those of us who’d like to believe we’re capable of better than the planned unsheltering of up to 900 households, all of which fall into one or more category of “vulnerable.”

    By the customary multiplier, that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 individuals, including people with disabilities, children, and those fleeing domestic abuse. And where will they go? That’s “unclear,” per Duffort and Berlin.

    Area shelters were full, affordable housing waitlists were a mile long, and towns and cities across the state have grown more aggressive about evicting campers from public land.

    Full credit for a job well done. And now I have a suggestion for a great follow-up.

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    How Not to Debunk a Myth

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    The latest edition of “Brave Little State,” Vermont Public’s question-answerin’ podcast, addresses a widely-held belief that our homelessness problem is largely caused by people moving to Vermont to take advantage of our motel voucher program. And addresses it poorly, incompletely, and at great length.

    The episode is entitled “Is Vermont’s motel program a ‘magnet’ for out-of-staters experiencing homelessness?” There is no evidence for the notion. In fact, there is a body of research showing that people in distress don’t cross state lines in any real numbers in hopes of accessing better benefits. Reporter Carly Berlin, whose work is co-published by Vermont Public and VTDigger, gets there eventually, but takes a godawful long time to do so. In the process, she manages to distort the basic issue, omit crucial aspects of the story, and get some key facts wrong.

    The fundamental problem isn’t with Berlin or her many co-producers and overseers. (A total of seven Vermont Public staffers are cited in the closing credits.) The problem is that the issue was subordinated to the format. This wasn’t a story about homelessness and benefits; it was A Reporter’s Journey In Search Of Truth, filtered through the highly developed process of long-form public radio storytelling pioneered by Ira Glass’ “This American Life” and refined in this age of public media serial podcasting. The end goal of the production is more esthetic than journalistic.

    This question can easily be resolved, but that’s not how you build a podcast. A long-form narrative needs a build, a measure of suspense, unexpected twists and turns, even if the actual path is pretty straightforward. Which is how you wind up with a 38-minute-long piece of audio that kind of bungles the assignment.

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    The Humanitarian Crisis Is Almost Upon Us, and Official Vermont Is Doing Nothing About It

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    Nothing has changed since my August 18 post about pending reductions in the state’s emergency housing program. Well, that’s not exactly true. Nothing has changed in terms of the official response, but there are all kinds of ways in which the situation is looking even worse than previously thought. That light you see at the end of the tunnel? That’s the headlight of the train headed right for us. Today is September 6; hundreds of people in state-paid motel rooms will see their eligibility expire beginning in mid-September, at the same time a cap on the number of motel rooms will take effect.

    That cap is 1,100. At last count, there were more than 1,400 households in the program — and a waiting list of hundreds more. Om case you’d forgotten, eligibility had already been restricted to the truly vulnerable: People with young children or disabilities, people who had suffered a natural disaster or are fleeing domestic abuse.

    Remember when Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Jane Kitchel sought reassurance that no one in a wheelchair would be put out on the street if the voucher program were cut back, and Department of Children and Families Commissioner Chris Winters replied “Hopefully not”? Well, turns out we definitely will be kicking out people in wheelchairs, and others with severe disabilities, and generally, people with nowhere else to turn.

    In Friday’s mail was the latest edition of The Montpelier Bridge and its two front-page articles: “City Moves to Clear Country Club Road Encampment” and “Motel Program Restrictions Mean 100 Local People To Be Ousted.” Yeah, welcome to the greatest nation on Earth.

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    It’s Not Quite George Aiken, But It’s Uncomfortably Close

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    This election season is shaping up to be both boring as hell and one for the record books. Really, can you think of a comparable set of circumstances in Vermont or anywhere else? We have a Republican governor certain to win re-election. At the same time, no other Republican on the statewide ballot has a hope in Hades. And despite the governor’s efforts to whip up anti-tax frenzy against the Legislature, the Democrats stand a very good chance at retaining their supermajorities because, well, the VTGOP can barely tie its own shoes. At worst, the Dems will retain substantial enough majorities to frustrate the governor even if they can’t win veto overrides by the half-dozen anymore.

    You see this becoming reality in the July 1 campaign finance reports, which feature an all-time dismal performance by the only Democratic candidate for governor. It’s not quite George Aiken level — the longtime Republican kingpin famously spent a mere $17.09 on his final Senate re-election bid — but it’s astonishingly bad.

    Gubernatorial candidate Esther Charlestin reported total fundraising of $12,235 for her campaign.

    For context, Charlestin is no better than the 12th most prolific fundraiser among Democratic candidates in 2024. She trails every fellow statewide Dem, many of whom are facing token opposition at best. She also lags behind five candidates for state Senate: Dems Stewart Ledbetter, Katherine Sims, Kesha Ram Hinsdale and Martine Gulick, and Republican Scott Beck.

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    So What Did Howard Dean Mean by “Scorched Earth”? (Updated With MORE Phil Scott Fails)

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    On Monday, former governor Howard Dean ended his brief dalliance with running against Gov. Phil Scott by explaining that his only path to victory was “a scorched earth, negative attack campaign” out of character with Vermont politics, and that he refused to be the one to inject our system with that kind of vitriol.

    Okay, well, at the time it seemed like a hollow, self-serving rationale — more acceptable to a politician’s ego than “The polls showed me way behind” or “I found out I couldn’t raise enough money” or maybe even “Turns out half of Vermont doesn’t even remember me.” But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered:

    What would a scorched earth campaign against Phil Scott look like?

    Secondary question:

    Would it work?

    I can think of two potential scenarios; one really doesn’t meet the definition and the other would be doomed to fail. So I’m still wondering if Dean had some brilliantly Machiavellian concept that could bring down Governor Teflon or if he was just bullshitting his way off the stage. I suspect the latter.

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