Tag Archives: Phil Scott

Phil Scott Loses His Binky

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For months and months, Gov. Phil Scott has been setting the stage for a Big Austerity Year where he could issue a rousing call to Live Within Our Means Like a Family Around the Kitchen Table, and slam the Democratic Legislature as mouth-foamin’ tax-and-spenders. After all, the federal Covid relief money has been spent, so the state will have to rely more heavily on its own coffers. And as the federal tide recedes, the knock-on effect will be a slowdown in Vermont’s economy. Of course. It all made perfect sense.

And then state economists Jeffrey Carr and Tom Kavet came along yesterday and pissed in the punchbowl. Take it away, VTDigger:

Despite last year’s hand-wringing over an anticipated downturn of Vermont’s economy, one year later, state economists on Thursday were notably optimistic about where the state’s finances stand.

Vermont’s favorite stats ‘n charts duo delivered the surprising good news to the Emergency Board, which consists of the governor and the four legislative “money committee” chairs. The Carr and Kavet economic forecast (downloadable here) will provide the basis for budget deliberations for the fiscal year beginning July 1.

And Scott just lost a fair bit of leverage in those deliberations. I’m sure that as a person, he’s glad to see Vermont doing so well. But c’mon, despite his protestations to the contrary, Phil Scott is a politician. He’s been in politics for more than 20 years. This, speaking purely in political terms, is a setback for his planned austerity offensive.

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Kumbaya for We, But Not for Thee

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Gov. Phil Scott held a momentous press conference today/Wednesday, in which he and a whole bunch of lawmakers unveiled major legislation aimed at tackling Vermont’s housing crisis. (Nobody used the fabled term “omnibus,” but it would have been appropriate.)

It was inspiring, it really was. Scott shared the stage with Democrats and Progressives as well as Republicans, to launch an initiative that’s the end product of what had to be really hard and earnest tripartisan negotiations. It’s the kind of thing that Scott has managed to pull off on occasion when truly engaged. It’s the kind of thing that has earned him his (overblown) reputation for being less interested in politics than in Getting Stuff Done, a reputation that flies in the face of his all-time record for gubernatorial vetoes. Still, this time he rose above partisanship to put this bill together.

And given the truly “all hands on deck” nature of the unveiling, I expect they’re going to pull it off. Which would be remarkable, and a real accomplishment.

(Before I continue, I must explain the illustration at the top of the page. The event featured a whole lot of people sharing the stage with the governor. After the big reveal, Scott asked reporters to stick to the subject at first and hold other questions for later. After the housing questions were exhausted, Scott allowed the assembled guests to depart. Apparently some technician back at the office mistook the ensuing hubbub for the end of the presser, because the feed was cut off at that point. The rest of the Q&A was unavailable on either ORCA Media or WCAX. Oopsie!)

So here’s the place where I point out the turd in the punchbowl.

The event was in stark contrast to the situation with emergency housing for Vermont’s homeless, where the administration is sticking to an inhumane approach that will leave more than a thousand Vermonters, many of them disabled, elderly, or children, without shelter come April 1.

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On Homelessness, a Day Full of Questions and Precious Few Answers

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Tuesday was the Housing Policy Dog and Pony Show at the Statehouse. Housing-related officials from the Scott administration made the rounds of three House committees, talking about housing policy with an emphasis on helping the homeless. The big takeaway: Man, are we ever screwed.

The lead witness slash sacrificial lamb was Chris Winters, former deputy Secretary of State and former Democratic candidate for SoS, who now occupies the hottest seat in Montpelier — the commissionership of the Department of Children and Families, home base for the moral and administrative failure that is Gov. Phil Scott’s policy for dealing with homelessness. (Winters is pictured above with one of his deputies, Interim DCF Business Office Director Shawn Benham, speaking to the House Appropriations Committee.)

There were, as my headline indicates, a whole lot of hard questions and precious few clear answers. But the biggest and least-answered question of them all: How in Hell did we get to this place, where Winters and his team are hastily cobbling together a temporary shelter program that will, at best, house a fraction of those about to be unhoused when the state’s motel voucher program expires on April 1?

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Welcome To Another Performance of Retail Theft Kabuki Theater

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Last Friday’s meeting of the House Judiciary Committee was, to the casual observer, devoted to beating the drum for a crackdown on retail theft, the crime formerly known as shoplifting. (Does “retail theft” sound less, I don’t know, recreational than shoplifting? Probably.)

Anyway. There’s precious little evidence to support claims that retail theft is on the rise. The main propagator of this assertion is the National Retail Federation, a lobbying group for the industry that’s been making it easier and easier to steal stuff by cutting staff and instituting self-checkout. The NRF spent years flogging a bogus study that allegedly showed a tsunami of “organized retail crime,” only to retract it last month. Actual crime statistics indicate that “organized” theft accounts for a small fraction of shoplifting. And outside of a handful of major cities, there’s no evidence that retail theft is on the rise at all.

So now the tactics have shifted. We hear much less talk about rampant crime in our malls and downtowns, and more about the “perception” of a problem. People “feel” as though shoplifting is a crisis. Therefore, the argument goes, we must treat it like a crisis.

As a result, House Judiciary is considering an array of crime bills, and it began a scheduled series of hearings on Friday. But if you watched closely, you could detect a bit of nudge-nudge, wink-wink going on. The hearing seemed designed to meet the perception of disorder with the counter-perception of a crackdown than with an actual “tough on crime” offensive.

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Hey, Democrats: This Is the Kind of Thing That Keeps the Progressive Party Afloat

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Oh, those smiling happy faces. At left: Everybody’s Favorite Governor. At right: the boy genius formerly known as Phil Scott’s Financial Regulation Commissioner Mike Pieciak, now State Treasurer and presumptive future Democratic candidate for governor.

Yeah, they were chummy back in the day. Funny thing: Even though they now reside on opposite sides of the metaphorical aisle, they still seem to be awfully simpatico. Yesterday, the two of them announced something of a superhero team-up to address climate change and resiliency issues.

Talk about things that make you go hmmm. A top Democratic elected official joining up with the Republican governor to tackle an existential issue on which the Democrats are often at odds with the governor? All I can say is…

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We Have a Homelessness Crisis and a Housing Crisis. We Should Not Conflate the Two.

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Two crises. Both involve the concept of “housing,” but they are not the same and we should not confuse the two. Which seems to be the willful intent of the Scott administration heading into a legislative session in which housing will be near the top of everyone’s priority list.

Remember the administration’s big presentation to the Joint Fiscal Committee in November? The one I called “a gloomy overview that has to rank as one of the most depressing events I’ve experienced in my 12-ish years following #vtpoli”? The whole intent of that presentation was to conflate the two crises and, well, subtly shift the focus toward housing and away from homelessness.

Administration officials have continued on that track ever since. The starkest example of this was the opinion piece co-authored by Human Services Secretary Jenney Samuelson and Commerce Secretary Lindsay Kurrle that focused almost entirely on housing policy and virtually ignored the rolling humanitarian crisis of unsheltered homelessness that state policy is creating.

I suspect we’ll get a heavy dose of the same in Gov. Scott’s state of the state address on Thursday. And we shouldn’t fall for it.

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You Should Think of “Protect the Most Vulnerable” as a Purely Aspirational Statement

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The available evidence points to one dispiriting conclusion: We are about to experience another substantial wave of Covid-19. Both state and federal data (the two are drawn from different testing regimens) show that our wastewater is full of the virus. The Centers for Disease Control says that nationally, wastewater levels are Very High, and the worst levels in the country are in the Northeast. Case counts in Vermont, although still classified as “Low” by the state Health Department, are on the rise. Nationally, according to the CDC, Covid-related emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths are all heading upward.

Dr. Michael Hoerger of the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative is projecting that “Nearly one in three Americans will get infected during the peak two months of this winter surge. That’s 105 million infections & more than five million resulting Long Covid cases.” The PMC says we could be headed into the second highest peak for Covid transmission ever. Including those times when we avoided exposure as much as possible and wore masks whenever we ventured outside.

Yeah, well, I’m sure it’ll be just fine. At least that seems to be the foundation of Gov. Phil Scott’s post-pandemic policy. Because his administration isn’t doing a damn thing about it. Not even to “protect the most vulnerable,” which he says is one of the three pillars of his governorship.

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Party Reorg: The Rich Get a Little Bit Richer (Updated)

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Note: This post has been updated with comment from the Progressive Party, see below.

This fall, Vermont’s political parties have undertaken their biennial obligation to reorganize themselves. It’s quite the task. The parties have to encourage members across the state to take part in town caucuses and establish town committees.

The process Is now over and the results are in. The Vermont Democratic Party had the biggest success, organizing town committees in more than 170 communities (they’re still totting up a few stragglers). The same process two years ago resulted in 150 Democratic town committees. That’s a nice bump, considering (a) they had less room to grow than the Republicans or Progressives, and (b) given the flood and all, it wasn’t the best year for encouraging turnout at political meetings.

The Vermont Republican Party lost a bit of ground, falling from 132 town committees in the 2021 reorg to 120 this time around. The Progs saw a modest increase from 44 towns in 2021 to 48 this year.

So what does it mean?

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Well Hey, Vermont’s Unemployment System Is in the Shitter Again

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Behold, tidings of great joy. Just in time for the holidays, the Scott administration is forcing jobless Vermonters to jump through hoops and navigate needless obstacles because the Labor Department can’t seem to keep the unemployment system working. The above messages are what you see when you visit the Department’s Unemployment Insurance webpage.

I mean, seriously. Each claimant is required to file every week. But the UI Claimant Portal is on the fritz, and the call center is so overwhelmed that people are being urged NOT to call. If I were of a conspiratorial bent, I’d suggest that this is a nice way to try to keep costs down — by making it very difficult for claimants to comply with the terms of the UI program.

But really, given the Labor Department’s recent track record, the explanation is more likely a combination of incompetence and underfunding.

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Phil Scott Popularity Challenge Accepted

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Yep, it seems impossible, but the latest Morning Consult poll of gubernatorial popularity (Mississippi’s Tate Reeves bringing up the rear) shows that our very own Phil Scott actually improved his top-of-the-nation standing from his customary perch in the high 70s to… 84 percent. In a state where Democrats have a nearly 30-point edge over Republicans.

The poll was received with applause from Scott fans and many of those who draw paychecks from him. One of the gov’s top Democratic boosters, Ed Adrian, suggested I try to blog my way through this. Because, as what Dorothy Parker would call my Tonstant Weaders are aware, I’m not exactly on Team Phil.

For many reasons I find him an underwhelming leader. He’s not a creative thinker. He’s been in office for nearly seven years, and I can’t think of a single bold policy idea he’s put his weight behind. Well, he used to claim that he could reinvent state government and save tens of millions a year, but that was a complete bust. He took strong action that one time on gun legislation, following a credible threat of a mass shooting at a Vermont high school (which inspired one of the best columns I ever wrote, so don’t say I won’t give him credit where it’s due).

Otherwise his tenure has seen Vermont’s most intractable problems get worse: Housing, opioid addiction, workforce, demographics, climate instability, and more. He himself cites these issues at every turn. And yet his proposed solutions tend to be lukewarm. He nibbles at the margins instead of sinking his teeth into the issues.

So why is he so overwhelmingly popular?

Well, let’s start with this: Popularity is not a measure of quality. Bud Light is popular. Potato chips are popular. “The Macarena” was popular in its day. Indeed, I will argue that broad popularity requires a fundamental inoffensiveness. A song or foodstuff or bestselling book can’t be difficult or challenging. It has to be accessible, first and foremost. And boy oh boy, from an ideological perspective, Phil Scott is nothing but accessible.

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