Tag Archives: Phil Scott

They Didn’t Fail, Governor. You Did.

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After the School District Redistricting Task Force* recommended a voluntary plan instead of new district maps, Gov. Phil Scott responded with guns a-blazin’. And as is often the case when you go guns a-blazin’, there was a bit of an accuracy problem.

*Seriously, who named this thing?

Then again, one couldn’t really expect him to identify the real culprit: the governor himself.

For those just joining us, Scott said that the Task Force “didn’t fulfill its obligation” under Act 73. “They were supposed to put forward three maps for consideration, and they failed,” he said on Thursday. (Not true, actually; more later.) And he blasted Task Force members for being “OK with the ever-increasing property taxes, cost of education, and they don’t want to see change.”

I understand his dismay but he’s being a bit harsh on a group of Vermonters who know more about public education than he ever will, and who gave of their time, sweat and tears to try to meet an unreasonable deadline. He could have at least thanked them for their service. Even if he didn’t mean it.

Especially since the real author of this failure isn’t anyone on the Task Force. It’s the governor himself.

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This Is How a Bunch of Distinguished Vermonters Tells the Governor and Legislature to Go Fuck Themselves

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Well, the panel tasked with drawing new school district maps for the entire state has essentially turned down the assignment and tossed the whole mess back into the laps of Our Political Betters.

Instead of completing the assignment contained in Act 73, which was to draw up to three different maps for the Legislature to choose from or ignore), the School District Redistricting Task Force* instead proposed a plan to incentivize voluntary mergers among school districts.

*That name will never not be funny.

WCAX-TV called it “a departure” from the process mandated in Act 73. VTDigger, equally polite, said the Task Force proposal “in a way, flouts Act 73’s directive.”

“In a way,” my ass. This was a flat rejection of the Act 73 mandate and a slap in the face of the governor and Legislature.

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There Is Nothing Like a Dame

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Congratulations, I guess? to Paul Dame for his re-election as Vermont Republican Party chair. He overcame a challenge by state Sen. Russ Ingalls in a 50-47 vote at the party’s convention on Saturday.

The margin does not speak of a rousing endorsement for a two-term incumbent. Quite the opposite, in fact. Dame has been in office since 2021, and almost half of the VTGOP’s ruling class wanted him gone? That’s not a positive indicator for Dame’s third term or for the party itself.

Completely absent from the convention, and from the Dame v. Ingalls campaign as a whole, was Gov. Phil Scott. It was a return to his pre-2024 abstention from the Republican political scene, which doesn’t bode well for the party or Dame as we enter a 2026 campaign season likely to be dominated by anti-Trump backlash.

Did the party make the right call? No idea. Ingalls was correct in pointing out that Dame has failed to improve the VTGOP’s dire financial situation, but would the senator have done any better? We’ll never know.

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Julie Moore, Off the Top Rope

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I don’t know whose idea it was to make Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore the lead signatory on an opinion essay aimed squarely at Vermont’s environmental community, but… it’s… a choice, that’s for sure.

The Moore op-ed, co-signed by Public Service Commissioner Kerrick Johnson, is entitled “Vermont’s Housing Needs Require Decisive Action – Step Up or Step Away.” The unfortunate echo of Donald Trump’s infamous “Stand Back and Stand By” remark aside, the essay is a direct attack on the environmental groups that Moore frequently interacts with — and hopefully cooperates with. I guess not, eh?

The essay posits environmental advocates as The Enemy in Gov. Phil Scott’s effort to ease Vermont’s housing crisis. I mean, “Step Up or Step Away” comes across as a very thinly veiled threat.

Before I go on, I must point out an inadvertent admission in Moore and Johnson’s essay. It’s right there in the second sentence: “The cost of housing has skyrocketed with median home prices in Vermont more than doubling in the last 10 years, putting both homeownership (sic) and rentals out of reach for many.”

To which I immediately thought, well, who’s been governor of Vermont for almost the entire last decade? Oh yeah, Phil Scott, that’s who.

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Phil Scott’s Back-to-the-Office Order Is Going to Cost Something, Whether He Wants to Admit It or Not

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There are questions circulating in legislative circles about the potential cost of Gov. Phil Scott’s return-to-office mandate, which takes effect on December 1 and requires at least three days a week of office work for state employees. Questions, but few answers.

Well, my headline gives away the real answer: It will definitely cost some amount of money at a time when the state faces a severe financial pinch due to Trump administration fuckery with federal spending, including a government shutdown that Congressional Republicans are in no hurry to resolve.

The governor couldn’t have foreseen the shutdown when he issued his order in late August. But the current situation would seem to call for reconsideration. Because we don’t know how much it will cost to accommodate state employees returning to office work, but we do know one thing for certain: It’s gonna cost something. And we really can’t afford it right now.

Last week, Agency of Human Services staffers rallied in Waterbury to protest the potential impacts of the back-to-office order. They pointed out that the Agency doesn’t have enough space to accommodate its entire workforce. They pinned the shortfall at 250 desks; later, the administration gave an actual figure of 254. Administration Secretary Sarah Clark suggested it wasn’t so bad because staffers working part-time on-site could share desks! Wow, that’d boost morale. And productivity.

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A Band-Aid on a Broken Arm

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Welp, Gov. Phil Scott has unveiled his 14-point “short-term action plan” (his words, underlining the lack of sustained commitment) to improve public safety in Burlington. And, unsurprisingly, it’s a combo platter of disappointing, punitive, and cheap. It’s more political than policy, aimed at demonizing Vermont’s biggest and most important city and avoiding his administration’s culpability for the problems that beset all of our communities.

Kudos to Seven Days’ Courtney Lamdin for spotlighting, near the beginning of her story, the most crucial shortcoming in Scott’s plan:

Conspicuously missing from the plan is an expansion of homeless shelter capacity in Burlington or elsewhere in Chittenden County, despite the dire need for it. The plan also ignores specific asks that Burlington city councilors made of Scott in a resolution they passed in August.

Yeah, ignoring dire needs is kind of Phil Scott’s jam. Remember in June, when I headlined a post about his veto of H.91 “Phil Scott Doesn’t Give a Fuck About the Homeless”? His Burlington “action” plan validates my point. He is, quite literally, the Levite averting his eyes as he walks by a wounded traveler. His plan is heavy on the punitive and light on the humanity. The goal is to remove the unfortunate from his view shed, not to actually help them. The best outcome for Scott’s plan is some short-term cosmetic improvement while the underlying economic and social causes of our problems continue to exact their toll.

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If Jim Ramsey Is Leaving a Legacy, It Didn’t Involve Fundraising Success

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When I wrote earlier this week about Jim Ramsey’s imminent departure from the Vermont Democratic Party, I didn’t think to check in on party finances. Not until someone suggested that I do so, and boy howdy, did it tell a story.

Ramsey was elected interim chair last February by the VDP state committee. He succeeded David Glidden, who barely managed to last two years in the job. Ramsey made a barnburner of a speech to the state committee and won in a walk over former state senator turned podcaster Andy Julow, thanks in part to the active backing of the party’s top three elected officials: Treasurer Mike Pieciak, Attorney General Charity Clark, and Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas. At the time, State Rep. Kathleen James called Ramsey “the perfect leader” with skills in “the nuts and bolts of fundraising.” James and Ramsey both hail from Manchester, so she may not be the most dispassionate of witnesses.

And if Ramsey brought fundraising skills to the post, there’s no hint in the party’s financials that he ever put them to good use.

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Whiny Little Bitch-Ass Punk Resigns in Whiniest, Littlest, Most Bitch-Ass Punk Way Possible

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If there was any doubt about whether soon-to-be-ex-senator Sam Douglass was unfit to hold public office, he removed it with his self-indulgent, clueless resignation statement — newsdumped on Friday afternoon, no less, without ever speaking to a single reporter.

If anything, it was even worse than the non-apology “apology” he issued the day before.

It was longer, that’s for damn sure. It rambles on mawkishly for a page and a half, single spaced. VTDigger has embedded the whole thing in its story on Douglass’ departure, so you can go read it there if you want to. I don’t have the stomach for it.

The heart of the matter is his assertion that he is resigning “to keep my family safe.” So he thinks he’s the real victim, I guess?

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For the Second Time in Two Days, Our In-State Media Have Been Scooped on a Vermont Story by a National Media Outlet

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Yesterday, it was Politico stirring up a hornets’ nest in Vermont with its story about a trove of Young Republican Telegram messages that amounted to a dick-swinging contest over who could be the most offensive — including Vermont Sen. (for now) Sam Douglass. (Speaking of which, he is so far resisting universal calls for his resignation with what I can only describe as a “No one was driving, officer, we were all in the back seat singing” defense. Goddamn weasel.)

And today comes Grist.com with a story about wasteful spending by the state of Vermont in subcontracting part of its flood-response efforts. A story that might have been uncovered by one or more of our respected media operations, but oh well.

The story, entitled “How Vermont Lost Track of Millions in FEMA Flood Recovery Funds,” recounts how the state was apparently fleeced by its subcontractor. The consequences: federal aid didn’t go as far as it could have, and the feds might demand clawbacks from the state because of the apparent waste.

At a time when we don’t need to be giving the Trump administration any excuses to cut federal funding to a deep blue state.

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I Tried to Tell You About Sam Douglass (and There’s a Lot More Like Him)

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Gov. Phil Scott couldn’t act fast enough to distance himself from newly-disgraced state Sen. Samuel Douglass. Within hours of a Politico report that identified Douglass as an active participant in a racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic Young Republican group chat that reads like a bunch of adolescent boys trying to out-gross each other, Scott had called for Douglass’ resignation — along with Democratic and Republican legislative leaders.

That’s nice, but Douglass’ politics have been obvious for years. His extreme views were out there for anyone to find, long before our “moderate” governor lent his support to Douglass’ 2024 campaign, long before Scott’s buddies in the Burlington-area business community dumped tens of thousands of dollars into Douglass’ campaign treasury.

Scott must have known what kind of person he was endorsing. Unless he pulled a Sergeant Schultz because he needed Douglass-style Republicans to win elections and eat into Democratic majorities.

I know this because, as far back as 2022, I wrote about Douglass’ extreme views. My post wasn’t based on any deep investigative dives; it was the product of simple searches of social media and YouTube. It was all out there for anyone to find. Too bad no one in political authority or our news media bothered to look. Until Politico gift-wrapped the story and dumped it in our collective laps. Now, suddenly, everyone is paying attention.

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