Tag Archives: Patricia Moulton

The Incredible Disappearing Corrections Commissioner

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Well, this is a new twist on the old “Friday Newsdump,” the storied tradition of minimizing the impact of bad news by pushing it out on a Friday afternoon or early evening. I guess we can call this a “Monday morning newsdump.”

I’m referring to the sudden announcement, with absolutely no explanation given, that Nicholas Deml is resigning as commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections, effective less than three weeks from now.

The announcement came in the form of a press release from Gov. Phil Scott’s office, which included the naming of Deml’s replacement: Fformer Burlington police chief Jon Murad will step into the roleon August 15, the day Deml officially departs. No reason for Deml’s resignation was offered.

And apparently, there was little effort to find out by the Grey Gardens of our Fourth Estate. The stories posted by VTDigger and Seven Days essentially barfed up Scott’s press release with no indication of much additional effort. Not even a line saying “Deml was not immediately available for comment.” Vermont Public‘s story did include one line from am emailed statement in which Deml wrote of launching “an advisory practice to continue the work I care about most.” That’s the only hint I could find, anywhere, of a reason for leaving or plans for the future.

Other media outlets, including the comatose Burlington Free Press and WCAX and WFFF/WVNY, led their stories with Murad’s appointment. Deml’s resignation didn’t even warrant headline placement.

That’s awfully thin coverage for a significant departure, likely thanks to the weekly rhythms of the newsroom. Monday is for gearing up to full operations after a weekend of little to no activity. You’re trying to get some news out there ASAP, and often starting from scratch. Which means that Monday morning isn’t quite as good a time to bury news as Friday afternoon, but it’s not a bad second choice. The administration got the kind of minimal, incurious coverage it probably hoped for.

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Boo This Man

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It’s possible, in this moment of his ultimate disgrace, to feel just a little bit sorry for ex-governor Peter Shumlin. From fall 2014 to summer 2015, he endured three separate political de-pantsings — any one of which could have felled a lesser man in his tracks. First, his near-defeat at the hands of political outsider (and truly terrible campaigner) Scott Milne; then, having to admit failure in his signature push for single-payer health care; and then, in the spring of 2015, finding out that the Quiros/Stenger EB-5 projects were built on fiscal and ethical quicksand.

That said, his governorship will have to go down in history as singularly disastrous.

We know this now because of the dogged efforts of VTDigger to unearth a trove of documents kept secret by state officials. Its pursuit of the EB-5 White Whale was rewarded last week by a federal judge’s ruling that the documents must be made public.

And now, after poring their way through the docs, Alan Keays and Anne Galloway have published one of the most damning political pieces in recent memory. They recount how Shumlin and his team knew by the spring of 2015 that the EB-5 projects were fundamentally fraudulent and doomed to collapse… and yet they kept on flogging the projects for a full year. Their efforts only ended in the spring of 2016 when the feds launched a massive civil suit against Bill Stenger and Ariel Quiros.

That’s bad. But Keays and Galloway document a variety of ways in which the story is even worse than that dreadful topline. Let’s run the highlights, shall we?

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Is this the most useless policy review ever?

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Hey, here’s some good news. One of Vermont’s more problematic job-creation programs is getting a policy review.

Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ends.

The program is the Vermont Employment Growth Initiative, or VEGI for short. It provides incentives to employers who grow jobs in Vermont. The most frequent VEGI beneficiary is Keurig Green Mountain, which has raised eyebrows in some quarters, (“Fascinating,” I have found myself saying with left brow cocked, “but highly illogical.”) That’s because KGM’s rapid growth was fueled, not by the state’s generosity, but by its then patent-protected K-Cup brewing system.

Since its patents expired, it has struggled to maintain market share, bungled two key product rollouts, and — VEGI grants or no VEGI grants — laid off hundreds of Vermonters.

So yeah, I’m all for a review of this program. Unfortunately, this is a fox/henhouse situation. The people doing the review are members of the Vermont Economic Progress Council, the panel that awards the VEGI grants in the first place.

Uh-huh, they’re reviewing their own work.

That ought to go well.

But wait, there’s more!

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Pat Moulton has a great idea.

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Commerce Secretary Patricia Moulton was far too busy to comment on the sudden, unexplained departure of Gene Fullam as head of Vermont’s EB-5 office, but she did manage to make time for a live interview on Thursday’s “Vermont Edition.” Subject: EB-5.

Inexplicably, host Jane Lindholm didn’t ask about Fullam’s departure. A deal, perhaps?

UPDATE 7/23: Got this Tweet from Lindholm:

Immediately preceding Moulton was State Auditor Doug Hoffer, who’s been critical of the grant programs administered by her agency. Among other things, he pointed out that it’s impossible to prove whether the state grants actually create economic activity that wouldn’t exist in their absence.

And then Moulton came on and admitted that those programs operate on the honor system. Regarding the Vermont Economic Growth Initiative, she said:

… we believe the CEOs, when they sign an application, that the material is true and correct.

Aww. Isn’t that sweet. “We believe the CEOs.”

Because a CEO would never lie to us.

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The limits of credulity

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Okay, so after less than one year on the job, the director of Vermont’s embattled EB-5 program has resigned. And nobody is saying boo about it. No explanation, no praise for the departed, just No Comment across the board.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move it along.

Well, sorry, but if there’s one area of state government where That Dog Won’t Hunt, it’s the scandal-plagued EB-5 program.

Plus, we’re not talking about some schmo plucked from bureaucratic obscurity to caretake EB-5 through the fag end of the Shumlin administration. When he was hired in August 2015, Gene Fullam appeared to be the idea candidate.

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Jobs for the Boys (and Girls)

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Patricia Moulton just became the latest high-ranking rat to leave the Good Ship Shumlin. The Commerce Secretary, under whose watch the EB-5 scandal went on undetected for years, has herself a soft landing spot as interim president of Vermont Technical College.

Moulton is one of those seemingly unmovable fixtures of Montpelier life — a species that moves effortlessly between government, private sector, and government-related nonprofits. She’s served in the last two administrations, Douglas and Shumlin; and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she turned up in a hypothetical Phil Scott cabinet.

What are her credentials to lead an educational institution? Pish tosh. Who needs relevant experience when you’re one of the cross-partisan In Crowd?

“… I can bring to that institution great knowledge about education and workforce for the state of Vermont,” Moulton said in an interview Thursday.

Well, that’s one way to spin it.

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EB-5: the tar baby of Vermont politics

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I was wondering when a candidate would dip his hand into the EB-5 cookie jar. It’s easy pickin’s if you want to criticize Democratic leadership of state government. And here we go, Phil Scott’s dug in for some sweet treats.

After positing his support for EB-5 “with proper oversight,” he laid into the Shumlin administration on a specific point:

I was disappointed to learn… that the Shumlin Administration enabled the owners of the EB-5 projects in the Northeast Kingdom… to continue to solicit investors for months after the SEC had suspended that permission for Jay Peak. … By the Administration’s own admission, it was a ‘calculated risk.’  Yet, they’ve not yet explained why they took this risk or why they allowed the problem to continue to grow.

Now, here’s the problem.

The Shumlin administration made that decision in the spring of 2015. (More on that in a moment.) In June of that year, VTDigger’s Anne Galloway broke the news that federal authorities were investigating Jay Peak.

For months after that, Lieutenant Governor Phil Scott expressed his wholehearted support for Jay Peak. Indeed, in November he criticized the administration for inserting itself into the process, thus delaying payments to contractors.

Despite the issues at Q Burke, Scott says he still supports Vermont’s EB-5 program. He added that he sympathizes with [Jay Peak contractor] PeakCM, as he owns his own construction company.

So, hypocrite. But wait, there’s more.

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Dept. of Unwarranted Hubris, EB-5 Division

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I don’t know what it would take for Patricia Moulton to realize that the jig is up, that business as usual in the EB-5 program simply won’t cut it anymore. But clearly, a major scandal isn’t enough.

The chief of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development put in an eppearance Tuesday before the Senate Finance Committee, where she steadfastly refused to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with Vermont’s EB-5 program. According to VTDigger, one lawmaker characterized her testimony as “unrepentant.” And Sen. Kevin Mullin, not exactly an outside-the-box thinker, said Moulton “kind of scared me today because she was so much of a cheerleader.”

Okay, let’s look at the record. Moulton, following in the footsteps of her predecessor Lawrence Miller and his predecessors in the Douglas Administration, allowed horribly lax oversight of EB-5 projects, thus enabling the (cough, allegedly) fraudulent Jay Peak scheme to proceed for most of a decade. The last two people in charge of overseeing EB-5 left the agency to take jobs with EB-5 developers. The Shumlin administration, belatedly, realized that ACCD was failing to do the job and transferred regulatory oversight to the Department of Financial Regulation.

After all that, the feds raid Jay Peak, haul off the records and computers and change the locks, and issue a massive indictment of Bill Stenger, Ariel Quiros and company, which is a tacit indictment of Vermont’s dereliction of duty.

And now comes Patricia Moulton saying “as secretary of ACCD, my job, absolutely, is to be a cheerleader for the [EB-5] regional center.”

Amazing. How tone-deaf can you be?

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The hottest potato in Vermont

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Our political elites are still involved in the unedifying spectacle of desperately trying to create distance between themselves and a former best buddy. Unedifying, and beggaring belief.

The best bud, of course, is alleged EB-5 scamster Bill Stenger, who still denies  — also beggaring belief — that he knew nothing about the misuse of $200 million in investor funds, and that it was all the dark-skinned flatlander’s fault. Pretty much everyone in Vermont politics has cozied up to Stenger in the past, and anyone in a position to bestow favors did so on a regular basis. Democrats, Republicans, even Bernie. (Who has thoroughly ducked the issue, his endless narrative about the evils of corporate influence notwithstanding.)

At the head of the “run away from Bill” parade is none other than our esteemed Governor, Peter Shumlin. One of his worst attributes as a leader is his extreme reluctance to admit he screwed up, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. And that makes his frantic positioning in this case all the more incredible; you can almost hear him claiming that Vermont’s handling of Stenger was a “nothing-burger.”

Yeah, that phrase will be on his political headstone, and it’s largely his own fault. He’d be better off just acknowledging unpleasant realities and accepting responsibility. Because as the state’s chief executive, he is uniquely responsible.

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When the shit volcano erupts, everybody runs for cover

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When you’ve got a big development scheme in your state that’s had the enthusiastic backing of The Great and Powerful, what’s the last thing you want to hear?

“Ponzi-like scheme”?

“Systematically looted”?

“… the gamut from false statements to deceptive financial transactions to outright theft”?

“… pilfering tens of millions of dollars in investor money”?

Yep, we’ve got ’em all, as Mount Quiros, the shit volcano, erupts and everybody runs for cover lest their expensive suits get ruined.

You know, it’s not very often that the term “clusterfuck” is an understatement, but here we are.

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