I realize there’s a “Day” for just about everything, just as the Catholics have a stunning collection of patron saints. But fact-checking? Now there’s a party. For those wishing to celebrate IFCD, it’s on April 2. You’ve got plenty of time for venue-shopping and caterer-hiring.
Anyway, in my post about the filing deadline, I offhandedly remarked on the difficulty of moving from President Pro Tem or Speaker to the governor’s office. Lately, every single House or Senate leader has been included on everyone’s short list for governor but none of ’em have gotten a sniff of the corner office. The soon-to-be-dearly-departed Phil Baruth and Jill Krowinski were once widely seen as chief executive timber; not now, and probably not ever again.
I stand by my comments about the political difficulties of leading a legislative majority: You’re responsible for herding the cats and engaging in The Art of the Possible, not establishing a strong personal image or agenda. Every Pro Tem and Speaker acquires baggage, often at a rapid clip. That’s why the longest-serving leader in Vermont history, Ralph Wright, managed “only” 10 years in the job. (In his memoir, he acknowledges that his power was pretty much gone by his final term.) Most leaders hit their sell-by dates after two or three terms. Many (including Wright himself) get 86’ed by their home voters, presumably for seeming too removed from their district’s interests.
Just to be clear, I’m talking about Speakers and Pro Tems advancing directly to the governorship. It rarely happens despite the high profile those offices confer. (House or Senate majority leaders, occupying the #2 post in each chamber, have been more successful, perhaps because they enjoy the advantages of networking and favor-trading without the burdens of being the leader.) But I’ve gotten some pushback from diligent readers who cited exceptions, so it seemed worthwhile to take a closer look at the question.
Listening to Phil Scott talk is like bathing in a vat of Malt-o-Meal: Sleep-inducing, no stimulative properties, somehow comforting and discomfiting at the same time. If you don’t believe me, just look: Scott’s buddy Lt. Gov. John Rodgers is fixin’ to nod off.
Seriously, this is the second time in a month I took notes on a gubernatorial address only to barely scratch the surface of my legal pad. (Yes, I’m old.)
Which stands to reason. He was never an orator by any means and he’s been in office for nearly a decade. If he had anything new to contribute, he would have done so long ago.
He did try to pretend there was new wine in those old, moth-eaten wineskins but it wasn’t nearly enough to persuade. Every governorship has an expiration date, and this speech was one more sign that Scott’s has come and gone. Not that he won’t win another term if he tries, since all the top-tier Democrats seem to be scared out of their minds to confront him and far too many Dems are happy to keep on voting for him because, I don’t know, he handled Covid pretty well (six years ago) and he’s not Donald Trump?
I mean, he talked about permit reform as the fix for the housing crisis. He complained about the cost of public education. He emphasized enforcement in his approach to crime, juvenile offenders, and substance use. He called for rollbacks or repeal of Democratic initiatives on climate change. Blah blah blah.
Oh, and he had the brass balls to blame Peter Shumlin for our crisis in health care costs. Shumlin, who hasn’t been in office for a decade and who abandoned his single-payer plan in The Year of Our Lord 2014. Scott cited Shumlin’s failed effort and the regulatory regime he did implement as the wellspring of our health care woes.
To which I say, well, who the hell has been governor since January 2017 and why hasn’t he done anything to counteract the alleged poison of Shumlin’s doomed reform plan?
One of Scott’s core efforts to lipstick his pig of a record was his call for reinvention of how state government does its work. As precedent, he cited reforms initiated under Dick Snelling and continued under Howard Dean, and said it was time to refresh that effort for a new era.
You know what it reminded me of? When Scott was first running for governor in 2016, he touted lean management at every opportunity. Lean management, he said, was the key to unlocking huge savings in state government:
I believe we can reduce the operational cost of every agency and department by one cent for every dollar currently spent, in my first year in office. Saving one penny on the dollar generates about $55 million in savings.
The link above is to a piece I wrote in 2020, by which time the phrase “lean management” had long been assigned to the dustbin of bankrupt political schemes. When asked about it in early 2020, Finance Commissioner Adam Greshin said “It’s not necessarily about savings, it’s about maybe spending the same amount of money and providing better value.”
Okay, fine. But that’s not what candidate Scott promised. And if he had made good on his promise, that’d be more than half a billion dollars we could have returned to taxpayers or invested in addressing some of our many challenges.
That was the unfulfilled promise of Scott, the businessman who knew how to make government work better and cheaper. And just like all the other businessmen-turned-politicians before him, he found out that the real-life work of managing government was a hell of a lot harder than he thought.
And now he’s coming back with a vaguely-described plan to reinvent state government. I’ll believe it when I see it. No, wait, I won’t believe it when I see it — I’ll believe it when it produces real, tangible savings. Not holding my breath.
I think Phil Scott has had his chance. He’s had many chances, thanks to his easy-going Real Vermonter charm and the failure of top Democrats to mount the least resistance, to put in the effort needed to rough up his Teflon coat. But it sure looks like we’re stuck with him for a while yet.
I tell you what, the next governor is going to have a massive job on their hands to clean up all the messes Scott leaves behind and all the crises he’s allowed to get worse and worse.
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.
In response to revenue cuts ordered by the Green Mountain Care Board, the University of Vermont Health Network is slashing services at multiple locations. Most egregious, to me, is the closure of Central Vermont Medical Center’s inpatient psychiatric unit.
Reminder that we’ve had a chronic shortage of inpatient psychiatric space more or less continuously since 2011, when Tropical Storm Irene put the final nail in the old Waterbury state hospital’s coffin. And now we’re cutting eight beds?
A cynical observer might infer that UVMHN disagrees with the Board’s mandate, and is forcing the issue with unpopular and/or unworkable reductions. Seven Days’ Derek Brouwer wrote that the Network’s announcement “ratchets up a long-simmering tension” between the Health Network and the Board.
The Board was in a ratcheting mood itself. It issued a huffy statement Thursday afternoon expressing deep concern with the cuts and asserting that it “was not consulted on, and did not approve, these reductions.”
It’s still kind of early on Election Night, but I can’t stand watching the national seesaw and the trends in Vermont seem awfully clear. It’s a great night for Gov. Phil Scott and pretty much a disaster for the Democrats.
And Progressives, who are on the verge of losing their most prominent political figure. Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman has been running narrowly but consistently behind former state senator John Rodgers since the polls closed.
But that race pales in importance to the outcome in the House and Senate, where the Dem/Prog supermajorities are bound for the dustbin of history. Republicans are on track to flip at least five Senate seats, so the Dem/Prog caucus is likely to be a couple votes or more shy of a the 20 needed to override a gubernatorial veto. I haven’t done a count in the House, but it sure looks like the Republicans will win enough seats to knock the Dem/Prog majority below the two-thirds mark.
The next biennium will be a whole new ballgame. There will be no more veto overrides. Legislative leaders will have to try to find common ground with the governor if we’re going to take action of any sort on the many challenges we face.
So, why did this happen, and what does it say about Vermont politics moving forward? And why didn’t I see it coming?
I remember a moment, long ago in a much simpler time, when the Shumlin administration came under scrutiny for hiring communications staffers for multiple state agencies. In fact, hey, here’s the story from Seven Days way back in 2012, reporting that while candidate Peter Shumlin had vowed to cut communications people from state agencies, his administration eventually tried to hire even more of ’em.
Okay, so the idea that comms people are a luxury seems kind of quaint nowadays. But wait, there’s more!
The Director, according to the job description, “will oversee a team of three digital communications and policy specialists.”
Yep, that’s right. The Education Agency doesn’t just need a flack. It needs a gaggle of flacks to handle both external and internal communications. This “team” would not only handle the press, legislative relations and interagency communications — it would also serve as a middleman between AOE leadership and its own people.
There was plenty of talk during the 2024 legislative session about housing, homelessness, Act 250, climate change, school funding, crime, opioids, and other big issues. I don’t recall health care occupying the spotlight at all.
And then last week, an outside consultant delivered a devastating assessment of our “badly broken” health care system and said that wide-ranging “structural reform” is needed as quickly as possible. Or, for those underwhelmed with what passes for leadership in our Brave Little StateTM, much quicker than seems plausible.
Maybe the only person who might feel a little bit good about the consultant’s report (downloadable here under the title “State-Level Recommendations for Hospital Transformation,” because the Green Mountain Care Board is all about that clickbait) is former governor Howard Dean. You may recall that when he dipped his toe, ever so briefly, into the political waters, health care was the only issue he spotlighted. I noted that it was kind of refreshing to hear someone focus on health care, which seemingly left the front burner after former governor Peter Shumlin abandoned single-payer health care.
Howard Dean floated onto his balcony this afternoon, favored the adoring crowd below with a regal wave, turned his back, and disappeared into the billowing curtains.
Okay, not really. What he did was issue a lengthy, self-indulgent statement about his dalliance with running for governor that didn’t actually make a commitment either way. In other words, stay tuned!
Methinks he’s getting a kick out of having #vtpoli-land hanging on his every word for the first time since he ran for president nearly a generation ago.
All he said about running was that he would hold “a press event when and if I file.” Curiously, he then sent a text to VTDigger declining its interview request because he is “not doing interviews until I file.”
Until, eh? Not “Until or unless”? Freudian slip? Intentional foreshadowing? Misdirection for the sake of drama? Only Dean knows for sure.
I’m sure it was merely a coincidence. But one day after the Senate Education Committee went all Patty Hearst Syndrome in its confirmation hearing for education secretary nominee Zoie Saunders, and on the same day the Senate panel voted 3-2 in favor of her, the House Education Committee scheduled a witness who excoriated the politicization of the Education Agency, questioned Gov. Phil Scott’s commitment to public schools, and revealed some backstage maneuverings around the selection of the last secretary, Dan French.
The witness was Krista Huling, former chair of the state board of education. Why was she called, seemingly out of nowhere, on Wednesday, April 24? Committee chair Rep. Peter Conlon invited her to testify in response to “a lot of discussion around the building” about how the education system has changed since Act 98 was passed in 2012. Act 98 made the state Board of Education much less powerful and gave the governor significantly more control over education policy.
And if you think that has nothing to do with Zoie Saunders, well, God bless.
I must return to Mark Johnson’s epic interview slash psychodrama with convicted EB-5 fraudster Bill Stenger, seen here standing next to a gent whose name I cannot quite recall. This time, let’s take a look at how Stenger explains himself as a naive, trusting soul whose biggest sin was that he wanted so desperately for the projects to work that he ignored some very obvious signs of trouble.
Johnson did his level best to hold Stenger’s feet to the fire, and Stenger repeatedly responded by steering down what John Ehrlichman called the “modified limited hangout route.” Stenger admitted complicity but not criminality, depicting himself simultaneously as perpetrator and victim. Neat trick, that.
The problem is, even if you believe Stenger’s account — which would be a dangerous thing to do — he seems to be guilty of gross negligence instead of overt criminality. That’s not a great consolation prize. Neither does it make me feel sorry for him that he had to serve a short sentence in a relatively comfortable federal facility.
Which he describes, as often as not, in the second person, a subtle way of deflecting the fact that this happened to his own self. “You” reported for prison. “You” were welcomed by fellow inmates. “You” got time off for attending courses. And so on.
But that’s a minor point. Time for a deeper dive on how he describes his role in the EB-5 scandal and his timeline, which serves to make his own story less believable.
The Vermont Political Observer. 