Tag Archives: Phil Scott

The VTGOP Is on the Verge of Blowing a Great Opportunity

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Gov. Phil Scott and his party are going in opposite directions in just about every way, and that’s bad news for both sides. And great news for the Democrats.

This campaign season ought to be a good time for the VTGOP. Scott is pushing hard on “affordability” and there’s every reason to think it will resonate with the voters. Many people are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. Few think of themselves as comfortable.

And while Scott has a simple, compelling narrative, the Democrats are trying to address tough issues through the messy process of legislating. And yes, the Dems are looking for revenue to pay for the things they see as necessary. It’s not an easy case to make. If you want a depressing example of the Dems’ messaging problems, take a listen to the February 28 edition of Mark Johnson’s “802 News” podcast. He interviews several Democrats about the school funding situation, and they all say it’s complicated and will take time, probably years, to sort everything out. It was a bleak outlook on the verge of a Town Meeting Day where many Vermonters rejected school budgets with big tax hikes.

And all the while Scott is hammering on a single point. I’m not saying he’s right; I’m saying it’s politically effective. And it should pay dividends. The Dem/Prog supermajorities ought to be in mortal peril. Scott should be able to emerge from 2024 with a stronger hand.

But he probably won’t because the Republicans are completely unready for the moment. The party is underfunded, under-organized, and dominated by extremists. Case in point: recent events in Windsor County.

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The Great Broward County Public Schools Land Grab, Starring Your New Education Secretary

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More information has emerged regarding Zoie Saunders’ brief stint as Chief School Executioner (Ed. Note: Actual title may vary) for the Broward County Public Schools. It’s not exactly flattering, and it raises questions about the timing of Gov. Phil Scott’s hiring process.

Reminder that in December, a mere three months ago, Saunders was hired specifically to manage a consolidation effort in Broward County’s schools, many of which are underenrolled. The plan has been awash in controversy as school officials have dropped unsubtle hints that it’s a done deal even before a series of public forums was held, and many fear the closures will disproportionately hit students of color. There are also massive questions about the scale of the effort; as few as five schools or as many as several dozen could be targeted.

And a March 9 article in the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports that the plan “could turn into a major land grab for local cities and developers,” including operators of charter schools. “The district owns about 38 million square feet worth of property in a county where open land is scarce,” according to the Sun Sentinel, so you can see how this unschooling plan could touch off a feeding frenzy.

This casts the plan in a different light, as a way for system administrators to ease budgetary pressure by cashing in some prime real estate. Might work in the short run, but it’s not a strategy for sustainability.

And managing this process, which she is abandoning well before her job is done, is the sum total of Zoie Saunders’ experience in public school management.

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The New Education Secretary Is Literally Unqualified for the Job, and That’s Not the Bad Part

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Well, well. After taking almost an entire year to find a new education secretary, Gov. Phil Scott sprang his choice on us with very little notice on a Friday, when news organizations are ramping down for the weekend and have no time for a deep dive on the new hire’s background.

That wasn’t a coincidence, not at all, because Zoie Saunders not only hails from Florida, the state on the forefront of smothering public education, not only comes from a position where her primary responsibility was to close public schools, but also fails to meet the legal standard for her new job. The relevant passage:

At the time of appointment, the Secretary shall have expertise in education management and policy and demonstrated leadership and management abilities.

I suppose the governor would argue that Saunders has “expertise in education management and policy” dating primarily from her five years as an executive for Charter Schools USA, a for-profit underminer of public education. But c’mon, she has never taught, she has never managed a school building let alone a district, and she has racked up a mere three months actually working in a public school system. That shouldn’t strike anyone who cares as “expertise in education management.”

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There’s Probably a Humanitarian Disaster Happening, But the Judge Said It Was Okay

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Truly bizarre happenings over the last 24 hours, even by the bizarre standards of this seemingly never-ending crisis of housing and homelessness. We’ll get to the judge’s decision allowing Gov. Phil Scott’s ridiculous policy to go forward, but first a note from an official in the city of Burlington, timestamped 4:45 p.m. yesterday:

There are 192+ folks outside in Chittenden County; 0-5 motel rooms available.

This was after the Scott administration had decided to close its four temporary shelters on schedule Friday morning. And almost four hours before the administration reversed course, announcing at around 8:30 p.m. that the Burlington shelter would reopen at least for Friday and Saturday night.

I guess they decided it was a bad look to close a shelter in the face of a severe winter storm with close to 200 people known to be unsheltered in Vermont’s most prosperous county. Too often, it seems as though administration policy is designed to be cruel until the optics get too bad, and then they change course just enough to limit the damage. So they opened the shelter unexpectedly at 8:30 p.m. How many more people could have accessed the shelter if it had never closed in the first place? How many didn’t find out the shelter was available at all or couldn’t make their way to Cherry Street that late in the evening? Or, God have mercy on our souls, how many had already found a refrigerator box or an overpass or other makeshift shelter and didn’t want to lose their spot?

The good thing, from the administration’s point of view, is that this is all happening on a weekend when our news media are essentially unstaffed. As of Saturday afternoon I’d seen no coverage from VTDigger, Vermont Public or Seven Days. Don’t even ask about the Free Press, whose top story right now is “Chittenden County Irish Pub Closes.” There’s a brief item on WCAX-TV’s website announcing the shelter’s reopening, but that’s about all.

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Welp, I Guess We’re Going to Try Doing Nothing

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A not-so-fond farewell to Winters Hall, a.k.a. Governor Phil Scott’s crappy shelter down an industrial side road near Montpelier, pictured above. The Scott administration announced this morning — well, they slipped it out in a routine statistical report, if that counts as an “announcement” — that the governor’s four temporary shelters, including this lovely little number, were closing down as of today.

Every morning, since the shelters opened, the state has reported the nightly census at each location. Today’s count was topped by the following sentence, and I quote: “All shelter are now closed.” Did anybody proofread this thing before it went out?

The closures come despite Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger’s call for the state to keep open the Queen City shelter, which has seen by far the most use. But he’s a Democrat, so screw him, right?

More good news: Vermont Legal Aid lost its attempt to get a court order forcing the administration to reopen the wintertime Adverse Weather Conditions program, so we get no relief there. Written statement from VLA attorney Maryellen Griffin:

This is terrible news for the hundreds of people experiencing homelessness in Vermont including people with disabilities, families with children, people who are elderly, and people who are low-income and unable to find housing. It is unconscionable that they will be facing unsheltered homelessness. It is particularly concerning now when it is still very much winter in Vermont. Housing is a human right and no one should ever be forced to live outside.

Oh, did I mention that we’re facing a truly fearsome weather forecast for this weekend?

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Come On Down to Big Phil’s Policy Lot!

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Automotive metaphors are always a temptation when writing about the man behind the wheel of #14, Gov. Phil Scott, but sometimes you gotta go with it. Now, the governor doesn’t look like a used car salesman when he’s holding court in his ceremonial office. He can sound convincing when he tells you about this sweet little number, low mileage, owned by a little old lady who only drove it to church on Sunday. You’ll look great behind the wheel of this baby!

But if you drive it off the lot, pretty soon it’s leaking fluids and making funny sounds and belching smoke out the tailpipe.

Which brings us to, you guessed it, the governor’s shambolic temporary shelter “plan.” He calls it “a successful mission” and gives himself top marks: “I think we did a good job.” His sales associate, Human Services Secretary Jenney Samuelson, is effusive about how her people were all over the state, keeping in close contact with those about to lose their motel rooms, “actively communicating, going door to door last week,” and being “really flexible” about helping folks fill out the necessary waivers to achieve eligibility for continued motel vouchers.

Get into the real world, though, and this thing starts looking like a complete lemon.

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“We Didn’t Have to Do Anything”

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At his weekly press conference today, Gov. Phil Scott again pushed his affordability agenda and characterized the Legislature as tax-and-spendthrifts. And answered some pointed questions about his emergency shelter program, which saw a substantial uptick in business last night (although still well below projected capacity). A total of 34 people slept in the governor’s slapped-together, nighttime-only shelters.

The governor defended his program as “a success,” although he didn’t seem awfully confident. His voice got noticeably quieter when talking homelessness than when he was hammering Democrats about “affordability.” And when push came to shove and he’d reached the limit of his ability to emit thick clouds of verbiage, he twice resorted to that most desperate of defenses: “We didn’t have to do anything.”

Sounds like headstone material to me. Sure, you didn’t have to do anything. No one had a gun to your head. But sweet Jesus, what a statement. The fact that he wasn’t absolutely required to do anything is supposed to make his crappy shelters more acceptable? I don’t think so.

Are we supposed to judge his administration by that standard? There’s actually precious little he has to do. As Donald Trump’s presidency showed, the machinery of government largely keeps moving even if the captain is an ill-tempered, narcissistic boob with a short attention span. But if that’s all you aspire to, well, please don’t run for re-election. We deserve better.

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Touch a Name on the Wall

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The most important piece among all the missing pieces in press coverage of Gov. Phil Scott’s “manufactured crisis” of mass unhousing is the experience of those displaced people. VTDigger’s preview piece about “Just Getting By,” a new documentary about Vermonters living on the edge, gives these people far more of a voice than all the press coverage of the unhousing combined. And that’s a fucking disgrace on the part of Vermont’s media outlets.

Another missing presence: the on-the-ground service providers who were already up to their necks in helping the unhoused. The governor’s deliberate policy choices effectively rip at the fabric of the social safety net, and he tacitly expects these providers to catch anyone who falls through the holes.

So I paid a visit this morning to a place I’ve driven by about 8,000 times without ever noticing it. Not surprising, since it’s in a nondescript house tucked into a driveway off Barre Street in Montpelier. Another Way describes itself as “a sanctuary for those with psychiatric disabilities.” As you might expect, many of its clients are or have been homeless.

Some of those present had been kicked out of their state-paid motel rooms last Friday, including one couple who actually qualified for an extended motel stay but weren’t approved in time to avoid eviction. They plan to join Vermont Legal Aid’s lawsuit against the Scott administration.

You probably have expectations for what you’d experience if you walked into a house full of “those with psychiatric disabilities.” Well, go ahead and dump all those images out your earhole.

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If You Build It Terribly, They Won’t Come

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Whad’ya know. The Scott administration set up four crappy homeless shelters in a two-day period of time last week. The four were meant to fit up to 500 people, if they crammed in real tight. (Click here and scroll down to see a photo of the Burlington shelter, which at least was in a relatively modern building. Just imagine what the inside of the Berlin shelter, pictured above, looks like.)

Well, I’ve received what are apparently official figures from an unofficial source, and they indicate that the four shelters housed a grand total of 10 people on Saturday night.

Ten.

That’s seven in Burlington, two in Rutland, one in the Berlin shelter (a.k.a. Winters Hall), and a big fat zero in the southeast Vermont shelter, located in a disused office building formerly occupied by Entergy Nuclear.

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The Press Coverage of the Temporary Shelters Is Somehow Even Worse than I Thought

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The Gods of Time were very kind to Gov. Phil Scott when they arranged for March 15 to fall on a Friday this year. The 15th was the expiration date for the Adverse Weather Conditions emergency housing program, and that’s when the governor, in all his infinite wisdom and alleged niceness, deliberately unsheltered nearly 500 vulnerable Vermonters.

And partly because it happened on a Friday, the press coverage was scant and woefully incomplete. Almost to the point of moral bankruptcy.

It was bad enough that the coverage of Scott’s decision was slanted pretty strongly in his direction. But the lack of attention to the details of his slapped-together temporary shelter “system” may well let him off the hook entirely for an administrative failure of the worst kind

Friday afternoon is the beginning of the long, dark, largely journalism-free weekend. Staffing is minimal at best. Our biggest outlets (VTDigger, Seven Days, Vermont Public) may have a designated reporter who’s on call to cover big breaking news, and the bar is pretty high for that. The TV stations have smaller staffs but still maintain a weekend presence because they’ve got airtime to fill. But don’t expect their A-Team, such as it is. Any coverage from Friday afternoon to Monday will mainly focus on fires, crashes and crime.

With the background set, what did we get for shelter coverage from Friday evening, when the shelters opened, until now? Damn near next to nothing.

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