Tag Archives: Hardwick Electric Department

Is the School Centralization Model Coming for Vermont’s Small Utilities?

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Fascinating story in this week’s edition of The Hardwick Gazette, which merits follow-up coverage of the implications by our larger media outlets. (And I’m not saying so because of my role with the paper. This is all about the merits of the story.) As The Gazette’s Paul Fixx reports, the Hardwick Electric Department just replaced its general manager in a completely opaque fashion: no public notice, no agenda item at a board meeting, no explanation whatsoever. Nothing.

So what’s going on here?

We don’t know, but I have my suspicions. I see the current drive to de-localize management in our public education system, and I wonder if the same forces are at work in Vermont’s electric power system. In short, is there an effort underway to consolidate Vermont’s community utilities — up to and including the Burlington Electric Department?

For the good folks of Hardwick and environs, the most immediately important thing is the total mystery around the replacement of Sarah Braese as general manager less than a year after she was hired. What does it say about the organizational health of HED?

For the rest of us, the big piece is the identity of HED’s new interim (apparently) general manager. Scott Johnstone was the utility’s interim chief last year, plus he’s been chief of Morrisville Water & Light since 2022, plus he was recently installed as head of the financially troubled Hyde Park Electric. (The best source for coverage of Hyde Park’s perilous situation comes from, shocker I know, The News & Citizen. Local journalism FTW.)

That’s a hell of a portfolio: Johnstone now runs three small utilities in northern Vermont. Things that make you go hmm…..

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News You Should View: A Great Picture, a New Journalism Org, and Way Too Many Sugar Gliders

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Belated weekly roundup of the best reportage in Vermont, postponed due to the education reform vote and related stuff. Reminder: Although this post is coming out on June 18, it only covers material posted/published/promulgated no later than the 15th.

Glenn Russell strikes again. The best part of VTDigger’s Friday story about Gov. Phil Scott and the Legislature coming together on an education reform bill? Glenn Russell’s photograph. Not reproducing it for copyright reasons, so click on the link and enjoy.

Mmm, that’s the good stuff. In a single image, Russell perfectly captures the House-Senate conference committee dynamics that led us down this prickly path. The three Senate conferees are pictured. Two of them, Sens. Seth Bongartz and Scott Beck, strike identical poses, leaning forward, peering intently over their pushed-down glasses, holding copies of draft legislation, looking more than a bit skeptical of their House counterparts. The third Senator, Ann Cummings, leans away from the table with an expression that says, quite clearly, “I want nothing to do with these jamokes.”

In case you haven’t been reading me lately, Democrat Bongartz and Republican Beck share a common background and purpose. Both have substantial ties to the private schools that hoover up public education dollars, and both repeatedly centered those private institutions in what was supposed to be a discussion of how to improve the public schools. To capture all that in a single image? Chef’s kiss.

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