Tag Archives: Mike Pieciak

Just Waiting for Smilin’ Mike to Dash Your Hopes to Smithereens

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This oddly askew photo of Your Treasurer Mike Pieciak, cropped exactly as it appears above, can be found on his “End-of-Year Survey” webpage, in which Our Man feigns interest in your top priorities for the year 2026. It is, in actual fact, aimed more at building a contact list than shaping Smilin’ Mike’s political agenda.

But okay, I thought, I’ll play along. But before I relate my survey experience, I’m going to skip ahead to a little shocker that came later in the process. Because after you SUBMIT the survey, you’re redirected to a fundraising pitch that includes the following bit of news beneath yet another photo of Smilin’ Mike:

“I’m running for reelection to continue investing in housing, climate resilience, and rebuilding the middle class because every Vermonter matters.”

My first thought: Did I miss his re-election announcement? Is this his re-election announcement? Perhaps. But upon reflection, it’s probably a bit of sloppy work on the part of Team Pieciak, a failure to update the website from his 2024 campaign. (Let’s see if they fix it after they read this, which they will.)

Still, I think it’s just a matter of time before we get the disappointing news. If he was going to run for governor, we would have been hearing about it by now. He’d be charging around the state, fundraising and pressing flesh at every opportunity.

But for the moment, let’s hold onto a shred of hope that we could see a top-shelf Democrat stepping boldly into the arena in 2026 instead of hanging back in the locker room waiting for the reigning champeen to retire. There are only three people with the name recognition and connections to make a serious run: Pieciak, Attorney General Charity Clark, and Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas, who has already announced her run for re-election. It’s gonna take a lot of money, a strong message, and a unified, engaged state party to mount a credible challenge to Gov. Phil Scott.

In a previous fundraising email, Pieciak sought our help in building “a movement.” My thought was, a movement to what, exactly? Re-elect our treasurer by a lopsided margin over some novelty Republican like H. Brooke Paige? The only thing that would qualify as “a movement” in my book is making a run for governor.

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Our Housing Crisis May Be Unsolvable

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I’ve been thinking about the need for a plausible, recognizable Democrat to step forward as a candidate for governor with a campaign focused on a big policy idea. This is because so many Dems seem to be playing into Gov. Phil Scott’s hands instead of carving out a recognizable alternative, and because the Vermont Democratic Party has been weakened for years by the lack of a strong, unifying voice at the top of the ticket.

Also because the only Democrat to actually win the governorship in the last quarter-century was Peter Shumlin, who staked his fortunes on single-payer health care and won a hard-fought 2010 primary and three straight statewide elections. He’s the only Democrat to be elected governor since Howard Dean in the year 2000. Some of you weren’t even born then.

So I was casting around for a big policy proposal that could turbocharge a gubernatorial campaign, and I remembered a post of mine from February 2024 which floated the idea of a $250 million housing bond. That’s right, take our solid bond rating and gamble it on the sensible proposition that building more housing would pay off in economic growth and higher tax revenues. You know, like a TIF writ large. It’d be an idea tailor-made for Treasurer Mike Pieciak, who has the expertise to craft such a plan while preventing the wise heads at S&P from catching a bad case of the fantods. And who needs to give voters a reason other than “Everybody likes Mike” to vote for him.

But now, in light of two recent news stories, I worry that a massive housing bond would amount to nothing more than pissing into the wind, that there simply may not be a way out of our housing crisis. At least not without structural economic changes on a scale much larger than our B.L.S.

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But It’s Way Too Early to Even THINK About the 2026 Cam — Oh. (UPDATED)

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You probably heard about the baby race at a recent WNBA game. Yeah, the one where all the babies sat unmoving at the starting line until one of them got up and walked, allegedly for the first time ever, all the way to the finish line. It was a heartwarming moment, at least until the Internet trolls started accusing the baby’s parents of cheating.

Well, the Vermont Democratic Party’s competition for the top of the ticket reminds me of that baby race, except it’s been going on for close to a decade. We’re all staring at these babies waiting for one of them to make a move.

And now, suddenly, one of them has made a move. Unfortunately, the move was to walk off the race course.

Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas has announced she’s running for a third term, presumably against H. Brooke Paige, the world’s most elegantly dressed tomato can. (This development was apparently of interest only to WPTZ-TV. I’ve seen no other reports on her announcement. Hell, VTDigger ran a story about Copeland Hanzas today that somehow didn’t even mention her 2026 declaration.) But there are three things more important to us Vermont Political Observers than the fact that she’s running for re-election.

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It’s Such a Fine Line Between Prudence and Appeasement

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Gov. Phil Scott continues to tiptoe the line when it comes to the rank berserkitude of the Trump administration. He got a lot of press coverage for his refusal to approve Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s request for Vermont National Guard personnel for administrative assistance. Since then, it’s been pretty much prudence slash appeasement.

Frankly, I don’t give him much credit for the ICE decision. They only wanted 12 people to basically do secretarial work. (I guess someone’s got to fetch the coffee.) It was such a small-stakes request that I wondered why ICE even bothered. Were they trying to get a foot in the door for bigger asks down the line? Or were they doing Scott a favor by making a request he could safely refuse?

Whatever, Scott’s subsequent actions make it clear that we shouldn’t be giving him a membership card in The Resistance anytime soon. In context, the ICE decision looks more like a brief tactical pivot than a sign that he takes Trump seriously as an existential threat to democracy.

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News You Should View: A Commons Trifecta

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I think this is a first in the brief history of NYSV: Three separate entries from a single outlet. That would be The Commons in Brattleboro. The honor does come with a pair of asterisks, because only one of the three is actually a piece of journalism. But all three are worthy of note.

The local impact of the Big Brutalist Bill. The Commons did something that every other outlet in Vermont would be wise to do: Evaluate the local consequences of Trump’s mega-bill. In the Brattleboro area, three separate medical centers are at risk of closure due to Medicaid cuts in the bill. Reporter Joyce Martel quotes Brattleboro Memorial Hospital CEO Christopher J. Doughtery as calling the BBB “vicious” and saying it would “disproportionately affect rural community hospitals.” Given the fact that Vermont’s community hospitals were already in severe straits, there are plenty of stories just waiting to be told in every corner of our B.L.S.

The Commons expands. Vermont Independent Media, the nonprofit that operates The Commons, has acquired The Deerfield Valley News, a weekly that serves a bunch of small towns in south central Vermont. The combined entity hopes to achieve some economies of scale without visible changes in either publication. Here’s hoping it leads to better financial sustainability for both.

Poking Pieciak. The Commons’ opinion pages were graced by a letter from Nick Biddle, a retired professor and Brattleboro resident, urging Treasurer Mike Pieciak to run for governor — or else get out of the way. Biddle observes that Pieciak has clearly been planning a run for governor someday, and is “in the leading financial position to run.” Biddle urges Pieciak to “Run, Mike, run – and announce it loudly… Or step aside now, so that another strong candidate can ready a powerful campaign” to challenge Phil Scott, assuming he seeks a sixth term. Amen, brother.

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The Latest News on the 2026 Gubernatorial Race is… No News

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No one besides us pathological Vermont Political Observers will have noticed, but July 1 was not just Bobby Bonilla Day, it was also a milestone in the 2026 gubernatorial campaign: the only campaign finance filing deadline in the year 2025. In fact, the next deadline isn’t until March 15, 2026 — not much more than two months shy of the filing deadline for major party candidates. But then, we do love our myth that nobody runs for office until June of an election year.

In other words, it’s going to get late early. Which makes it especially disappointing for campaign finance sickos (raises hand with pride) that Tuesday’s deadline produced no hints whatsoever about the race for governor in 2026.

Going into the day, I was expecting that Treasurer Mike Pieciak might report a decent-sized pile, like in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if only to pre-empt a potential flood of Democratic candidates and an unpredictable dogpile primary á la 2010, when Jim Douglas was retiring and an entire generation of Democrats entered the race. Well, five Democrats, anyway. Four of ’em finished within four percentage points of each other, and Peter Shumlin won (by two-tenths of a percent over Doug Racine) with less than one-quarter of the vote. And we all know how that turned out (cough) EB-5, single payer health care, Scott Milne (cough).

I’m allowing myself a little historical tangent because it’s much more interesting than the great big nothing we got in Tuesday’s filings. The details follow. If you like disappointment, read on.

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Doing Something, Vermont Mainstream Edition

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Pretty obvious move today. We made a donation to the brand-new Vermont Immigration Legal Defense Fund, launched on Thursday by a group of prominent political figures. Mostly Democrats, but Thom Lauzon, the mayor of Barre and longtime Friend of Phil, is on the “Team,” as is former Republican lawmaker turned lobbyist Patti Komline.

Oh, heck, here’s the whole list, in the order they appear on the VILDF website.

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Time for the AG to Take Center Stage

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Charity Clark is in a unique position. At a time when our democracy and our system of government are under threat from The World’s Biggest Golf Cheat, she is Vermont’s chief legal advocate. More so than, say, our other Democratic statewides, she has the authority to take action. And the responsibility.

So far, she has followed the Bill Sorrell playbook: Signing on to 13 lawsuits against the Trump administration filed by coalitions of Democratic attorneys general. She also gave a nice speech at Saturday’s lawyers’ rally in Burlington. (In which she oddly referred to the rule of law and the separation of powers as “kind of one of our major brands” as if the Constitution is a consumer product.) That’s all fine, but it’s kind of the least she could do.

Stepping forward on her own would take some courage, but would also be the smartest political move she could make. Setting aside right and wrong for just a moment and focusing on the politics, which is after all the remit of this popstand, Clark is one of a number of top-tier Democrats presumed to be angling for higher office. But she appears to lag behind Treasurer Mike Pieciak (but then, don’t we all?) in terms of profile, connections, and fundraising prowess. If she wants to run for governor or the next Congressional opening, she’ll need to raise her public profile and differentiate herself from a potential swarm of primary candidates.

The best way for her to do that — and also, ahem, do the right thing — is to find ways to lead the fight against Trump. Even purely symbolic moves would help.

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Pieciak is Everywhere

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It’s pretty obvious to any Vermont Political Observer, capitalized or otherwise, that the skids are being heavily greased for Treasurer Mike Pieciak to be the next Democratic nominee for governor. But I’d like to point out a small but telling piece of evidence that should not go unremarked upon.

Last week the Vermont Bar Association held a meeting in Manchester, and the occasion was marked by near-universal castigation of the Trump administration’s assault on the legal system (as reported, after the fact, by VTDigger). Members unanimously approved a statement affirming their support for the rule of law. In addition, Digger reports, more than 200 Vermont attorneys and elected officials have signed a statement “supporting the independence of the judiciary and outlining 15 instances of the current administration allegedly disregarding the rule of law.” The statement also announces a rally for lawyers opposed to Trump’s trample on May 3 in Burlington.

Prominent people quoted in the article include Reiber, Attorney General Charity Clark, Bar Association board president (and former deputy AG) Josh Diamond, former assistant U.S. Attorney Scott McGee, Bennington attorney David Silver, and his daughter, attorney* Natalie Silver…

… and Treasurer Mike Pieciak.

Okay, Pieciak is, in fact, a member of the Bar, so technically he qualifies. But he hasn’t been an active attorney since February 2014, when he took a position in the Peter Shumlin administration. He’s been in state government, not as an attorney, ever since.

*Correction: Silver is not an attorney. She is a law school graduate awaiting her law license.

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Whistling Past the Elephant in the China Shop (UPDATED)

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Update. Within 24 hours of this post going live, the governor announced his first (and so far only) concrete response to the Trump presidency: an interagency task force to assess the potentiial impacts of Trump tariffs on goods imported from Canada and Mexico. Must have been a complete coincidence, right?

You might think that the deliberately shambolic start of the second Trump presidency would have been a major topic at Gov. Phil Scott’s January 30 press conference. After all, in a very short period of time Trump has issued a blizzard of executive orders, many of dubious legality and/or constitutionality, that are designed to radically recast or possibly euthanize the federal government. The one most directly pertinent to governing the state of Vermont was Trump’s since-withdrawn threat to put an immediate halt to a wide range of federal payments. (The threatened imposition of tariffs on Canadian imports would have had a profound effect on Vermont, but they hadn’t been bruited as of January 30 and have since been put on hold.)

You might think the specter of Trump would have dominated Scott’s presser, but you’d be wrong. The topic of the day was, shocker, “affordability,” especially with regard to Scott’s housing plan and his extremely modest tax reduction plan. Which, at $13.5 million, would average out to a scant $20 a year for every Vermonter.

(Of course, it wouldn’t be distributed evenly. The three elements of his plan are (1) an expansion of the Democrats’ child tax credit, (2) an end to state taxation of military pensions, and (3) an end to state taxation of Social Security benefits. The latter two, aimed largely at retirees, seems an odd way to address Vermont’s demographic challenges. Our biggest demographic shortfall is in mid-career adults, who are mainly too old to benefit from a tax credit on young children and not old enough to benefit from the other two provisions.)

Neither Scott nor his officials voluntarily addressed how Trump setting fire to the federal government might impact Vermont. None of the assembled reporters asked a single question about it until the 44-minute mark in a 47-minute presser. Almost an afterthought, then. But Scott’s response was highly informative — for what he didn’t say, more than for what he did.

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