Tag Archives: Phil Scott

Phil Scott’s Two Big Money-Saving Ideas: Unshelter the Homeless, and Take Food from the Mouths of Schoolkids

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The contest for “Stupidest Veto in the History of Phil Scott Vetoes” is a richly competitive one, with numerous contenders for the honors among the [checks notes] 52 vetoes he has unleashed upon Vermont’s normally placid and communitarian political life*. But the next one he threatens to cast may prove to be the winner.

*Obligatory reminder: Scott has racked up 52 vetoes, more than twice as many as any other governor. He long ago surpassed Howard Dean’s second-place total of 21, and Dean served three and a half years longer than Scott. “Governor Nice Guy” indeed.

Scott is now promising to veto H.141, the Budget Adjustment Act, because the Democratic Legislature dared to spend a little more money on sheltering the homeless than he wanted to.

Honestly, why he has such a bug up his butt about the motel voucher program, I don’t know. He’s bound and determined to kill it, willing to go to almost any length to do so. Any length short of, you know, proposing an alternative, which he has never managed to do. Well, there’s permitting reform, which would likely increase the overall housing supply years from now.

It’s almost as big a bug as the one lodged in his rectum over universal school meals. Limiting free meals to schoolkids is, after all, his one and only concrete suggestion for cutting the cost of public education. “Governor Nice Guy” indeed.

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A Thoroughly Predictable Outcome of a Subverted Process

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Many, many, many words were spoken in Tuesday’s confirmation hearing for Education Secretary Zoie Saunders before the Senate Education Committee, most of them by Saunders herself. And then, after nearly two hours of jibber-jabber, her nomination was approved on a 5-1 vote, with Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale on the short end of the ledger.

The full Senate will have the final say (its vote is scheduled for Thursday), but we all know where this is going. Saunders will be confirmed less than a year after the 2024 Senate rejected her on a lopsided 19-9 margin. Immediately following that vote, Gov. Phil Scott effectively overrode the Senate’s power to advise and consent by installing Saunders as interim secretary. And once the Legislature was safely adjourned for the year, Scott named her permanent secretary. That move was challenged, fruitlessly, in the courts, so she continued to serve. And she will continue into the indefinite future.

I can’t really blame the Education Committee for voting yes. It was a profoundly weird situation, having to confirm a nominee who’s already been in office for almost a full year without major missteps or scandals, at least none that we know about. It’s too long a time to suddenly decide she should be here at all, and too short a time for a true accounting of her tenure. (Nor was there any chance to hear from other witnesses who might have offered alternative views of Saunders’ effectiveness.) In a lengthy opening statement larded with the arcane language of bureaucracy, Saunders ticked off a laundry list of initiatives, every one of which was a work in progress with few if any measurables on offer.

Neither is there any evidence, in this very limited hearing, to kick her out. Ram Hinsdale’s vote was more a token protest than anything; it was clear from the opening stages of the hearing that a majority of the committee would approve Saunders. The only other possible holdout, Sen. Nader Hashim, made it clear in his first statement that he would be voting yes “unless something totally bonkers happens in the next 45 minutes.” Committee chair Sen. Seth Bongartz, the third Democrat on the six-member panel, said almost nothing until the very end of the proceedings, and then he opined that “The governor has the right to appoint the people he wants… unless something egregious emerges.” The fix was in, and had been from the moment the Senate’s Committee on Committees created an Education Committee evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, and brushed aside last session’s vice chair, Sen. Martine Laroque Gulick, in favor of the obviously pliant Bongartz.

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Public School Reform As If the Public Schools Mattered

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The House Education Committee has set aside a fair bit of time this week for discussion of H.454, which sets out Gov. Phil Scott’s education reform plan in a brisk 194 pages. It is to be hoped that the committee’s deliberations will be centered first and foremost on what’s best for Vermont’s public school system. Because nobody else seems to be doing so.

Take the governor, for instance. (Please, says Henny.) He pays lip service to improving education, but his focus is clearly on cost containment. Radically centralizing the system is no guarantee of better quality. (It’s no guarantee of savings, either; the move to statewide negotiation of health insurance for public school personnel hasn’t prevented its cost from skyrocketing.) Doing away with local school districts in favor of five massive regional districts is clearly aimed at cutting administrative costs. And don’t get me started on the provision of H.454 setting minimum class sizes at 15 for grades K-4 and 25 for grades 5-12.

Those are minimums, mind you. What would the average class sizes be? 20 in the lower grades, or 25? 30 in the upper? 35? Cautious administrators will want a margin of error above the state-mandated minimums. And what happens when a school dips below the minimum? Does it close down? Put some crash test dummies in desks and hope no one notices?

Frankly, I wonder why any Republican who represents a rural district — which is the vast majority of Republican lawmakers — could support this plan as written. The class size provision alone would trigger a massive wave of consolidation that would hit rural Vermont especially hard. (Maybe that’s why H.454 has a mere five sponsors while H.16, the Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Heat Act, has 55 and H.62, to repeal the Global Warming Solutions Act, has 29. There hasn’t exactly been a stampede among legislative Republicans to sign on to the governor’s plan.)

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In the Long, Storied History of Bad Shelter Ideas from the Scott Administration, This Is Another One

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When you’re proud of an idea, when you really think you’re onto something good, you showcase it to the world. You present it openly, in a way that maximizes its chances of coming to fruition.

On the other hand…

There are times when you roll out an idea like it’s a flaming bag of poop. You leave it on the doorstep and head for the hills.

Which brings us to Administration Secretary Sarah Clark’s latest proposal for addressing Vermont’s crisis of unsheltered homelessness — a crisis that’s largely the result of deliberate policy choices by the Scott administration and the Legislature.

This here administration has been desperately trying to kill the GA Emergency Housing program, a.k.a. motel vouchers, for years now. But it has never, ever proposed anything like a real alternative. Instead, it has put forward some notions that have managed to be totally inadequate and financially wasteful at the same time. The policy equivalents of flaming bags of poop, they are.

Its latest bag was delivered on Friday, because of course it was. Friday is newsdump day, don’t you know.

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“Governor Nice Guy” Is Out There Pickin’ Fights With the Legislature

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Gotta start using air quotes around that appellation for our chief executive, because he seems to be going out of his way to antagonize the Legislature and prepare the fields for another bushel of his administration’s chief cash crop, gubernatorial vetoes. It’s funny, after all that talk about coming to the table and working across the aisle, he’s back in his comfort zone: confrontational mode.

You know, if Phil Scott was a politician — which he continually insists he is not — I’d say he had absorbed the lessons of the 2024 election and decided the path to victory was in demonizing his opponents. It’s smart politics. But it’s anything but nice.

Exhibit A: VTDigger reports that the Scott administration has finally, belatedly, delivered its full public education reform plan in actual legislative language.

On February 25. Almost two months into a five-month session. Three days before the Legislature adjourns for Town Meeting Week. Little more than three weeks before crossover, when any policy bill must have been passed by one chamber if it’s to have any real chance of passing the other this year. It’s just not possible for lawmakers to give due consideration to such a massive reorganization in such a short window of time.

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“Let’s Go to Work and Let’s Win”

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You’d probably have to be pretty deep in the weeds of Vermont politics, or perhaps a resident of Manchester, to recognize the name “Jim Ramsey.” (Pictured above with a slightly better known figure.) He’s only been involved in #vtpoli for a few years, but he’s been on a sharp upward trajectory that culminated on Saturday with his election as the new chair of the Vermont Democratic Party, replacing the prematurely departed David Glidden.

Well, technically Ramsey is the interim chair, filling out the remaining months of Glidden’s two-year term between now and November, when Ramsey will doubtless be elected permanent chair.

Members of the party’s state committee held a special meeting via Zoom on Saturday morning to choose Glidden’s replacement. Two people were nominated: Ramsey and former state senator Andy Julow, who was a late entry in the race.

If you needed any evidence that Ramsey had the inside track, you got it from VDP state committee member Susan Borden. In formally nominating Ramsey, she noted that he’d been endorsed by Treasurer Mike Pieciak, Attorney General Charity Clark, and Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas. The vote wasn’t close; Ramsey took 38 of the 45 votes cast. Julow received the other seven. In pre-vote remarks to the committee, Julow more or less acknowledged his longshot status. But even so, it’s telling that a former officeholder from the most populous region of Vermont finished a poor second to a guy from Bennington County who’d only been active in state party politics for about five years. It seemed clear that Ramsey was the choice all along.

And having heard his pitch to party leaders and learned a bit more about him, I can understand why.

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Sen. Sam Douglass, Campaign Finance Scofflaw

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The folksy Son of the Soil pictured above is Sam Douglass, senator-elect from the Orleans district. Or, as I find myself thinking of him, Senator Scofflaw. Because while he claims to be a “fierce advocate,” he was shockingly blasé about his legal obligations to report campaign finances accurately and promptly. Makes you wonder about his fierceness, not to mention his devotion to fiscal responsibility.

Because his campaign finance filings are the opposite of “responsibility,” and include numerous violations of state law. Fortunately for him, the penalties are laughably small and rarely enforced. Otherwise he’d be in a heap of trouble. As it is, maybe some Concerned Citizen will see fit to file a complaint with the Attorney General’s Office, for all the good that will do.

Let’s start with the fact that Douglass has yet to file his Final Report, which was due on December 15. And there’s a real need for a final accounting, because his most recent report leaves many questions unanswered.

His post-election filing, submitted on November 19, shows a serious imbalance between income and outgo — and not in the way you’d expect. The Douglass campaign has reported raising nearly $41,000 and spending only $27,460. Did he really leave one-third of his bankroll on the table in a race against Democratic Rep. Katherine Sims, who raised more than $76,000? Or has he failed to fully report his expenditures?

Vermont’s campaign finance law and the Secretary of State’s reporting system can be a challenge, but when you run for public office you are obliged to follow the rules. Besides, Senator Douglass is going to be responsible for writing the laws. Shouldn’t he be capable of obeying them?

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The Ghost of School Governance Trial Balloons Past Once Again Walks the Earth

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As the Scott administration’s school governance plan vanishes slowly into the Great Lost Swamp of ill-begotten ideas*, it’s time for a history lesson.

*You might think this premature, but Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth and the House Democratic caucus have said that universal school choice, a core feature of the Scott plan, is a non-starter.

Confession first: I didn’t remember this event. A reader reminded me of it.

Way back in 2019, then-education secretary Dan French let loose a trial balloon that sank quickly and without a trace. But in every important aspect, it was a precursor to this year’s plan — albeit an even more dramatic rethinking of how the public school system is organized and funded. What it tells me is that the Scott administration has been thinking along these lines for years. And now, likely emboldened by Republican gains in November, the admin is publicly promoting a modified version of the French plan.

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It Wasn’t the Best Week to Roll Out Your Ebenezer Scrooge Impression

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Last week, the Budget Adjustment Act sailed through the House on more or less a party-line vote, with Republicans raising whiny objections over a penny-ante increase in funding for the General Assistance Emergency Housing program. Gov. Phil Scott did his share of whining as well, and there’s been some talk of a possible BAA veto. Which, if it happens, would be utterly ridiculous.

But amidst all the Republican whining, the most ignorant, shameful, bigoted remarks actually came from a Democrat. Stay tuned for more on that.

This all happened against the backdrop of a tremendous piece of journalism that dropped the day of Scott’s comments and the day before the House’s BAA debate: a story by Vermont Public‘s Liam Elder-Connors and Seven Days‘ Derek Brouwer exploring how many unhoused people have died in Vermont, a statistic the state has so far declined to keep. With that story on the front page, it was a bad time to bitch about an extra $1.8 million in motel vouchers.

The two reporters found that “at least 82 people in Vermont… died between 2021 and 2024 while appearing to reside in an emergency shelter or outdoors.” That’s almost certainly an undercount; no one in Vermont officialdom tracks that number, nor does anyone seem interested in doing so. Outgoing Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine said it would be “very challenging” to collect such data.

Not as challenging as, say, sleeping outside in the dead of winter, but sure, let’s only keep the easy statistics.

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The Governor Cannot Possibly Be Serious About His Education Plan

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The long, slow rollout of Gov. Phil Scott’s education plan took another step yesterday, as Interim Education Secretary Zoie Saunders* testified before the House Education Committee about the governance portion of the plan. Her testimony was met with widespread befuddlement, as reflected in a series of “What the heck does this mean?” questions from majority Democrats on the committee.

*She dropped the “Interim” when she introduced herself to the committee**.

** It has been pointed out that Scott has appointed Saunders permanent secretary. Okay, but her entire appointment is still subject to a court ruling, so it remains to be seen whether she’s permanent or done.

Before we get to the sources of that befuddlement, we must mention the poison pills contained within Scott’s plan. First, it would implement statewide school choice and throw the doors open for unfettered expansion of the current “approved independent schools” system. Every public school student would have to be offered some measure of choice. That’s a nonstarter for Democrats, or it ought to be, because it poses a very real threat to the finances of actual public schools.

Second, it would centralize power over the education system to a remarkable degree. Local school boards would be gone. There would be only five large school districts. Each local school would have a “School Advisory Committee” with very little authority. Most of the state Board of Education’s powers would be assumed by the Agency of Education. And the current “boards of cooperative education services,” created and administered by school supervisory unions, would be replaced by “Education Service Agencies” controlled by the Agency of Education. According to the Scott plan, one of the purposes of this move is “to limit mixed messaging.” In other words, to stifle dissent.

One (anonymous) Democratic lawmaker suggested to me that House committees ought to just send this plan directly to the House floor and watch as Scott and Republican lawmakers — almost all of whom represent small, rural school districts at risk of disenfranchisement and school closures — try to explain themselves, or risk serious injury as they back away from the plan as quickly as possible.

To say this plan is doomed is to indulge in understatement. Besides the presence of poison pills, there are other signs that Scott doesn’t intend for this plan to be taken seriously. What he wants, I suspect, is for the Democrats to reject the plan so he can accuse them of refusing to face the issue. He has asked them to “come to the table,” but he has laid out a buffet of awfulness. It’s not an invitation; it’s a trap.

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