Tag Archives: Calvin Cutler

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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Howard Dean?

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Well, well. I did not have a “Howard Dean for Governor” trial balloon on my Bingo card, but here we are. WCAX-TV’s Calvin Cutler got the scoop:

Multiple sources inside the Democratic Party tell Channel 3 News that Dean is “seriously considering” running in the 2024 election, two decades after he left office the first time.

Contacted out of state where he is visiting family, Dean did not confirm or deny the report, saying in a text message: “I’ll make a statement at the appropriate time when I’m in Vermont.”

This was apparently a topic of much conversation at last night’s kickoff event for Treasurer Mike Pieciak’s re-election bid.

My first thoughts went to almost exactly this time two years ago, when Gov. Phil Scott looked like a shoo-in for re-election and former lieutenant governor Doug Racine made it known (and I got that scoop) that he was pondering a bid. Racine told me “it depends on the level of support” he could count on from the Vermont Democratic Party and its donors. Nothing much came of it.

I thought the same thing about this sudden Dean talk, that it was a way for a pastured workhorse to get back in the discussion and make some news but not much more. However, I have been told by a reliable source that nominating petitions for Dean are being circulated. That, in itself, is a step closer to actuality than Racine ever got.

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The Press Coverage of the Shelter Situation Has Been Terrible. We All Need to Take Some Responsibility for That.

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The media coverage of this week’s Scott administration temporary shelter ClusterfuckTM has been dispiritingly spotty and incomplete. This has helped the admin play a little game of “Hey, look! A Squirrel!” with the press. Gov. Phil Scott came out swinging in his Wednesday press conference, bashing the Legislature for allegedly failing to address Act 250 reform when, in fact, the legislative process is a lengthy one and it’s way too early to declare victory or defeat. Since the environmental and development lobbies seem to be unified behind the effort, there is every reason to believe that significant reform will be enacted and Scott’s panic will prove unwarranted.

But all the whining and finger-pointing diverted press attention from the simultaneous rollout of the shelter plan, which involves kicking 500 vulnerable Vermonters out of state-paid motel rooms and into hastily-constructed temporary shelters that will (a) only be open at night and (b) will only be in operation for one week. Or less.

Starting tonight.

The press took a while to get in gear on the shelter issue. It’s a complicated situation, and most of the stories failed to get a full grasp of it. Some weren’t much better than water carriers for administration policy.

I was prepared to write a scathing critique of our press corps, and I will, but then I listened to a really good podcast this morning about the fallen state of journalism today. It made me realize that every one of us plays a part in the health of our media ecosystem, and that I should do something about it as well as complain about it.

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Hey, Let’s Take an Early Check on the Republican Ticket and… Oh.

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The Vermont Republican Party has a long record of losing statewide races except when the name “Phil Scott” is on the ballot. Scott is still undefeated for the entirety of his political career going all the way back to 2000, when he rode the anti-civil union wave* into the state Senate. Otherwise, it’s been solid goose eggs for the VTGOP in statewide contests since the Jim Douglas era, if memory serves.

*Seems unbelievable now, but the Republicans nearly swept Washington County’s three Senate seats that year. The late Bill Doyle** finished first, Scott second, and Republican J. Paul Giuliani almost ousted two-term incumbent Democrat Ann Cummings. But we were all much older then, we’re younger than that now.

**Correction: “The late Bill Doyle” is still with us at age 97. My apologies.

Otherwise, the top of the Republican ticket has featured tons of fringey no-hopers with a sprinkling of old-fashioned conservatives. Lately it’s been more of the former, as the far right has seized control of the VTGOP apparatus. And it’s looking like 2024 will be no exception. Not only do we have the soundly defeated Gerald Malloy making another bid for the U.S. Senate, but the even more soundly defeated Gregory Thayer has staked his claim to another bid for lieutenant governor. (The Vegas wise guys have set the over/under on joint campaign appearances featuring Thayer and Scott at… zero.)

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Welcome to The Governor’s Weekly Agenda Promotion Event

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These things used to be weekly updates on the Covid-19 pandemic but, as of today, that’s no longer the case.

For the second week in a row, Gov. Phil Scott opened the event by declaring he had nothing to say about the pandemic. Instead, he used his platform to tout an administration policy priority. And the first administration official who followed Scott the lectern wasn’t Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine or Virus Vaticinator Michael Pieciak or Education Secretary Dan French.

No, it was the person pictured above: Public Service Commissioner June Tierney.

Needless to say, she didn’t talk about Covid. She talked about Scott’s plan to enhance mobile phone service by spending $51 million on new cell towers.

Right off the bat, we get two big tells that the state of the pandemic is no longer the chief subject.

Then came Strike Three. WCAX’s Calvin Cutler wanted to ask about the medical monitoring bill making its way through the Legislature, so he opened by noting that his question was “off topic.”

Scott’s response? “It’s not off topic for our weekly press briefings.”

That’s a new, and I’d say deliberate, change on the governor’s part.

So, per Scott himself, we no longer have weekly Covid briefings. We have weekly administration Happy Hours broadcast live across the state. In an election year, it begins to look less like public information and more like free publicity.

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