Tag Archives: Phil Scott

Here’s the Early Favorite for 2023’s Saddest Piece of Legislative Testimony

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Pictured above: Members of the House Human Services Committee, giving themselves a round of applause after unanimously passing H.222, a bill that would do quite a few good things on overdose prevention. The bill would make it easier for providers to prescribe buprenorphine without going through the cumbersome process of getting prior authorization* from the state Health Department; improve access to needle and syringe disposal programs and pay for it with a fee charged to prescription drug makers; make it easier to site recovery residences; give reasonable protection against lawsuits for those who administer overdose treatments; and set up some studies on how to best administer treatment and reduce opioid-related deaths.

*Stick a pin in that. We’ll circle back to it in time, and you won’t want to miss it.

All reasonable. And all acceptable to the entire panel. The “Yes” votes included Republicans Anne Donahue and James Gregoire and right-of-center independent Kelly Pajala.

Which brings us to this guy.

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You’d Think a Governor Who Spent His Life Building Roads Would Have a Flawless, Efficient Road Construction Process

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Now comes Auditor Doug Hoffer with all kinds of cheery news about the Agency of Transportation’s road construction effort. His latest performance audit takes a look at VTrans’ work in cost and scheduling of paving projects, and he didn’t find much for former contractor and now Governor Phil Scott to be proud of.

In fact, Scott ought to be embarrassed.

(Full report downloadable here.)

Hoffer looked at 14 major paving projects and found… “significant deviations” in project scheduling, especially in the preliminary engineering phase; “a lack of consistent record-keeping” that made it difficult to determine why delays took place; a lack of performance metrics for scheduling; and while VTrans did fairly well with simpler projects,

… for the more complex projects, VTrans always exceeded the initial cost estimates provided to the Legislature by more than 50 percent and completed them up to six years late.

That sounds like abject failure to me.

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Turtle Season

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In January, when a new legislative session begins, ambitious agendas are rolled out. Big bills are proposed. Committees are ready to get down to work. This year, hopes were especially high on the Dem/Prog side, thanks to their historically large majorities in the House and Senate.

And then stuff starts to happen. Things get complicated, or are perceived to be complicated. The days rush by like the old movie trope of a calendar’s pages flying in all directions. Now, suddenly, time is short, hopes are muted, compromises are made, bills are sidetracked, and the aspirations of a new session lay in tatters. Yes, it’s Disappointment Time.

Necessary stipulations: Lawmaking is hard. It takes thorough consideration. It takes time, a commodity that’s always in short supply. Building majority support is complicated work, even when a single party holds all the cards. The Vermont Democratic Party is not a monolith; lawmakers have their own beliefs and constituencies. Many a Democratic lawmaker would have been a Republican before the VTGOP went off the rails. Now they’re moderate Democrats who often don’t support the party’s agenda.

That said, the VDP puts forward a platform every two years and urges people to give them money and elect Democratic majorities so they can get stuff done, not so they can think about it and decide that maybe it’s not such a good idea after all and they need to give it more study. It’s definitely not so they can parrot Gov. Phil Scott’s assumptions about public policy, and there’s a hell of a lot of that going on right now.

So let’s take a look at some of the areas where the Brave Hopes of January have given way to the Turtling of March.

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Phil Scott Elevates Anti-Abortion, Young Earth Christian to Environmental Post

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Gov. Phil Scott’s press office occasionally releases lists of gubernatorial appointments that are so long as to defy close reading. So, if not for the sharp eyes of a VPO reader, I would not have noticed that our Moderate-Republican-In-Chief had appointed Rob North to the District 3 Environmental Commission.

You may recall North from my 2022 campaign series about stealth Republicans. He ran for House last year, positioning himself as a reasonable guy who wanted to bring “Common Sense, Trust, and Transparency” to the Statehouse. Problem is, he had an easily discoverable record as a hard-right Christian who rabidly opposes abortion, has an active role in the conservative Evangelical “church planting” effort in Vermont, and is a member of a fringey denomination that forbids divorce, bars women from the ministry, and believes that the theory of evolution is heresy.

Look I realize that the governor has to fill literally hundreds of vacancies on our bottomless pit of boards and commissions, but really now. This guy?

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Vermont, Home of the Homeless

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Here’s something I didn’t know about our Brave Little State: Vermont has the second highest rate of homelessness in the country. Only California is worse.

That little tidbit appeared in a story posted by The Guardian on Friday, February 3. But it wasn’t new; it came from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report. Which also noted that between 2007 and 2022, Vermont experienced the highest increase in homelessness of any state.

Did I miss the widespread outrage? Did I miss our media’s in-depth coverage of this? Did I miss the hastily-called meetings and press conferences where Our Leaders expressed dismay and promised immediate action to make it better?

No?

May I take a moment to be retroactively appalled?

This is not the kind of ranking I expect from our green and pleasant land. Quite the opposite, in fact.

There was one significant piece of good news in the HUD report, but that news may get quite a bit worse in the very near future.

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Duval Picks Up Moore’s Envelope, Rips It To Shreds, Flings Pieces Into the Air

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The storm clouds are gathering. The forces are assembling. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the Scott administration is going to war against the Vermont Climate Council and any progressive climate legislation that the Statehouse majority might send to the governor’s desk.

Last week, we saw Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore give a “back-of-the-envelope” guesstimate of the short-term costs of S.5, the Affordable Heat Act, which she herself acknowledged was probably inaccurate. Then, on Tuesday, there was an unusually aggressive riposte by Jared Duval, a member of the Climate Council. Duval pretty much ripped Moore’s testimony to little tiny bits. (Video of the hearing is here starting at the 1:40 mark; his written testimony can be downloaded here.)

Duval submitted a lengthy, detailed written statement that destroyed Moore’s testimony line by line and concluded that it was “inappropriately selective, improperly done, and deeply misleading.”

No punches pulled, then.

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Top Administration Official Invites Senators to Disbelieve Her Testimony

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Some people in the Scott administration strike me as experts in their field who don’t necessary buy official policy, but stick it out in hopes of influencing said policy. Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore is at the top of that list, as is Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine. Sometimes when Moore is shilling the company line she seems less than 100% behind what she’s saying.

But inviting lawmakers to discount her testimony? That’s a new one.

Moore appeared on January 26 before the Senate Natural Resources Committee. The topic was S.5, the Affordable Heat Act, previously d/b/a the Clean Heat Standard. Moore was there to deliver dire news about the short-term costs of the Act and the lack of in-depth research on its consequences.

She acknowledged that her “back-of-the-envelope math” could “easily be off by a factor of two here.” She even said it would be “pefectly reasonable” for committee members to be “offended” by her guesstimates. VTDigger reported these remarks but failed to express how unusual, if not downright weird, it is for a state official to cast such doubt on their own testimony.

Mind you, these caveats weren’t off-the-cuff. They were part of her written testimony. Here’s the passage in full.

The administration is openly opposed to S.5 and, indeed, to any strong steps against climate change. In that context, one would suspect that administration officials would, if anything, exaggerate the negative impacts of S.5. And Moore openly courted that kind of suspicion.

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Hoffer Debunks Another Bag of Magic Beans

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The city of Burlington is in a spot of bother over “numerous errors’ in its Waterfront Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district. According to Auditor Doug Hoffer, the city owes the TIF district $1.2 million and owes the state Education Fund nearly $200,000, because it couldn’t keep proper accounts for its Waterfront TIF. He also found that the city spent $173,000 on bike path improvements that were, uhh, outside the TIF district. Since the total scope of waterfront improvements was $16 million, those mistakes add up to almost 10% of the whole ball of wax. Not inspiring, that.

But Hoffer doesn’t blame Burlington so much as the complex structure of the program itself. In a way, this shouldn’t be surprising; after all, it’s comically difficult to even explain the TIF concept in lay terms, let alone successfully manage one of the damn things.

But heck, let’s give it a shot. A tax increment financing district allows a municipality to incur debt for infrastructure improvements needed for development in the district and pay the debt out of future higher tax revenue. If it works, everybody wins. But the devil’s in the details, and there are hordes of pesky details in Vermont’s TIF program.

Whew. I think that’s in the ballpark at least, but don’t cite me as gospel. The point is, TIFs are complicated as all getout, and Hoffer’s audit indicates that it’s too much for our cities and towns to handle. In his words, ““Managing the complexities of this TIF district proved challenging for even the largest municipality in Vermont.” Says here if we can’t build a program amenable to proper management, maybe we should ashcan the whole thing.

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Phil Scott’s Charmless Offensive

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Since the beginning of his fourth term, Gov. Phil Scott has been busily drawing lines in the sand and daring the Legislature to cross them. It’s a strategy that seems to borrow much more from his years at Thunder Road than from his allegedly collaborative approach to governing.

But he’s not stopping with public defiance of the Democratic majority. He’s also putting out a series of aggressive policy stances that threaten to further inflame relations with majority Democrats. First there was the proposal to shift state retirees’ health insurance from Medicare to Medicare Advantage, the Potemkin Village of senior coverage. That proposal was cheekily unveiled during campaign season, when you might think he’d at least pretend to be friendly to the state employees’ union. Second, his proposal to spend $900,000 to study an issue that’s already being studied by the state’s Climate Council.

And third, the Department of Public Safety’s transparently political plan to publish a politically motivated (and dismally stupid) crime “heat map” that won’t help the public understand crime trends but will give the administration another cudgel for its attacks on criminal justice reform.

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An Investment is an Investment Except When It’s Not

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Gov. Phil Scott delivered a budget address full of “investments’ in Vermont’s future. It’s a great concept, but he fails to apply it consistently. Public sector expenditures he favors are “investments,” but other stuff is just wasteful spending.

The most recent example of this came with the release of a new report on the costs of improving Vermont’s wretched “system” of child care. (As with health care, it’s not so much a “system” as an abstract sculpture made of chicken wire and spit.) The RAND Corporation figures the price tag is between $179 million and $279 million, depending on how generous the package is.

Scott spox Jason Maulucci offered the usual bromide: Scott really, really cares about child care, just not enough to raise any revenue for the purpose. It’s the governor’s customary Susan Collins kind of caring.

The assertion underlying Scott’s position is this: Raising revenue for child care is pretty much exactly like putting tax dollars in a big pile and setting it on fire. Trouble is, there’s all kinds of evidence that improved child care would more than pay for itself — both in short-term economic growth and longer-term outcomes for kids.

You might even say it’s a bargain. Well, I’d say so.

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