Tag Archives: Seven Days

Fear of a non-binding resolution

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The anniversary of Roe v. Wade is an opportunity for a bit of political theatrics. Congressional Republicans famously muffed their attempt this year, with an anti-abortion bill so extreme that quite a few female congresscritters objected, leading to the bill’s abandonment.

In Vermont, folks on the other side of the abortion issue brought forward a resolution recognizing the anniversary. This happens every year; but this time, supporters asked for a roll call vote.

Which caused a moment of panic, captured by Seven Days’ Terri Hallenbeck:

Last seen heading for the cloakroom.

Last seen heading for the cloakroom.

The House roll-call vote clearly made some Republicans uncomfortable. In a pre-vote caucus, Rep. Bob Bancroft (R-Westford) asked how members could abstain. Only by not being in the room for the vote, House Minority Leader Don Turner (R-Milton) told him. When Bancroft’s name was called during the vote, he was absent.

Sudden attack of the runs, Bob?

Kudos to Hallenbeck for putting this moment of cowardice on the record. But it made me curious: why was Bancroft especially touchy about this?

Simple answer. He represents Chittenden 8-3, a district represented until this year by Democrat Martha Heath. In 2012 the Republicans didn’t even bother contesting the seat. When Heath announced her retirement, the district was in play. The Democrat, Liz Subin, was expected to win a fairly close race; but Bancroft was swept in on the Republican wave.

It’s likely to be different in 2016, with a Presidential election and Pat Leahy’s Senate seat on the ballot. Democratic turnout will be much higher, and Bancroft may face an uphill battle to win a second term. It’d be very inconvenient for him to be on the record opposing the Roe resolution; but if he supported it, the anti-abortion base would be outraged.

Faced with this dilemma, he chose expediency over exposure.

The Shummy Shimmy

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Before the November election, I’d planned to write a post-election piece offering my services to the Shumlin administration for the newly-created position of Shitkicker-In-Chief. The duties would include pointing out the flaws in administration reasoning, deflating egos when necessary, and the occasional loud guffaw.

The idea was based on my belief (hahahaha) that the election wouldn’t be close. When Shumlin won by a shoestring, I thought my idea was irrelevant. The election was a more effective shitkicker than I could ever be.

Seems I was wrong, because the Governor has quickly fallen back into to some bad habits. One of his worst is his almost-complete inability to admit that he was wrong about something — even if it’s something trivial. It makes him appear small-minded, overly defensive, duplicitous, and condescending.

This habit is again on display in the foofaraw over releasing documents related to single-payer health care.

For those just joining us, when the governor announced in December that he was ditching single-payer, WCAX’s Kyle Midura asked a provocative question. Here’s the exchange, as reported by Seven Days’ Paul Heintz:

“Will you waive executive privilege for all backdated documents at this point related to this question so we can see what you knew when?” Midura said.

“There is nothing to hide on what we knew when, so we’d be happy to show you any documents you wish to look at,” the governor responded.

Emphasis: “any documents you wish to look at.” And Midura’s use of “this question” is generally seen as referring to Shumlin’s decision on single-payer.

Naturally, multiple media outlets made public-records requests for any related documents. And that’s when Shumlin backtracked: the administration withheld “hundreds of pages of documents related to single-payer,” reports VPR’s Peter Hirschfeld.

Shumlin never wrongShumlin says he never intended for him comments on Dec. 17 to mean that he’d release all internal communications related to single-payer.

“Now no governor ever divulges inter-staff conversations, but what we did divulge was all the data that led us to the conclusions that we came to,” Shumlin said.

Okay, I can see that point of view. But why did he promise, on Dec. 17, to release everything?

Evasive maneuvers, Mr. Sulu!

So far, we’ve heard two different explanations.

In an email to Heintz, the Governor’s legal counsel Sarah London asserted that Midura’s question referred narrowly to “the specific question of Medicaid reimbursement rates.”

On the other hand, Shumlin told Hirschfeld that he thought the question referred only to documents involved in a lawsuit by Rep. Cynthia Browning.

“Well as you know we had a fairly well-publicized court case … where we were asked to divulge all the data, studies and information about every detail that led us to the disappointing conclusions that we came to about public financing,” Shumlin said. “I assumed that his question was simply, are you going to continue to withhold that data? Or are you going to share it?”

It got even worse when Shumlin tried to clarify his position at a news conference yesterday:

“If you listen to the entire question, I answered it very clearly. And what I said was, the question I understood — I had it played back to me, so I think I got it — was, ‘Are you going to release the documents that, frankly, hadn’t been released before?’ You may recall Cynthia Browning requested them and we went to court and the court ruled in our favor. ‘Are you now going to release those documents? The documents that give us the data, all the dates, what you’ve done, all the studies?’ And I said, ‘Of course, we are. We want Vermonters to have that information.’ If you took the question as something else, you should’ve asked it that way. You didn’t.”

The Shummy Shimmy.

It’s one of his worst features: ducking and diving in a transparent effort to avoid admitting he was wrong.

I guess they could still use a Shitkicker-In-Chief.

Here’s a little free advice. Or consider it part of my S-I-C job application. Here’s what he should have said — and it’s not much different from what he did say.

“I apologize for misspeaking on Dec. 17. I should not have promised to release ‘all documents,’ because every administration needs some measure of privacy in its internal policy discussions. Any chief executive would agree with that.

“We have provided as much documentation as we can. The information we have released should be more than adequate to understanding how we arrived at our decision. I hope you, and the people of Vermont, can appreciate our position.”

There. Was that so hard?

The occasional apology would go a long way toward changing Shumlin’s image for the better. The long-term benefit would far outweigh the immediate discomfort.

 

Good grief, Bill Doyle.

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Crusty Statehouse institution Bill Doyle, Republican Senator from Washington County and close personal friend of Ethan Allen, has executed a downright elegant political pirouette. Well, it’d be elegant if it wasn’t intellectually dishonest.

Doyle told Seven Days’ Terri Hallenbeck that he’d changed his mind on the gubernatorial election. He was going to go with the top vote-getter, Gov. Shumlin, but he’s now changed his mind: he’s voting with his constituency. Washington County gave Scott Milne a substantial majority. (Of course, Milne owns a substantial business based in Barre, so he’s kind of a favorite son, but whatever.)

That’s not the pirouette part, however.

Doyle is also the author of a Constitutional amendment that would lower the threshold for election from the current 50% plus one to 40%. And this isn’t a new idea for Doyle; he first proposed this in 1974.

Put it another way: he has advocated for this change for 41 years. But when push came to shove in real life, he’s going the other way.

In the words of Mr. Spock: Fascinating. But highly illogical.

Our Proud Heritage of Shit-Dumping

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If you happened to be hanging around Fort Cassin Point on Christmas Eve, perhaps you noticed an unusual smell. Perhaps not; but I sure hope you didn’t drink the water.

The State of Vermont legally permitted the City of Vergennes to dump 467,000 gallons of sewage and stormwater into Otter Creek and Lake Champlain on Christmas Eve. Ho ho ho.

That lovely tidbit from the Facebook page of our friends at Lake Champlain International. In case you have trouble visualizing 467,000 gallons of sewage and stormwater, LCI helpfully points out that it’s equivalent to “about 65 tractor-trailer milk tankers.”

Welcome to Vermont, kiddies!

Welcome to Vermont, kiddies!

Mmmm, good. I hope the critters at the Fort Cassin/Otter Creek Wildlife Management Area didn’t mind the state’s creative “Wildlife Management Through Sewage” technique. Or perhaps they’ve gotten used to shipments of Vergennes’ untreated crap, since state regulation of sewage and stormwater discharges is downright laughable — especially for a state with such a strong, and often unwarranted, reputation for environmental purity.

The comments on LCI’s post are often endearingly innocent: “How could this happen?” “How is this allowed?” Stuff like that.

Well, not only is it allowed, but it’s standard operating procedure in our Clean, Green state.

James Ehlers, executive director of Lake Champlain International, …says sewage spills and overflows from Vermont’s wastewater treatment systems are common occurrences.

But the public is only notified when they’re exceptionally large, as was the case in April 2005, when a Burlington sewer line ruptured, spewing millions of gallons of raw sewage in the Winooski River for days before it was repaired.

That, from a July 2013 piece by Seven Days’ Ken Picard, outlining the appalling sketchiness of state policy on releases of stormwater and sewage. By law, he writes, the state is required to post online any illegal discharge that “may pose a threat to human health or the environment” within 24 hours of learning about it — but it may take days or even weeks for the state to learn of a discharge from a municipal wastewater treatment operator.

And while the state is required to post the information online, just try to find it. I tried, and got thoroughly lost in a morass of bureaucratic jargon.

Now, if there’s a torrential downpour, just about any system will be overloaded. But many of Vermont’s municipal systems are outdated. We haven’t faced the issue because, well, we can’t afford to.

This is part of our decades of noncompliance with the Clean Water Act regarding Lake Champlain, and one reason why the EPA has had to step in and force Vermont to clean up its act.

It’s sad, if not surprising. Too often, Vermont fails to live up to its own self-image. We react with horror when new things seem to pose a threat, like ridgeline wind and the Vermont Gas pipeline. We’re much more passive about the bad things we’ve always done, like inadequate water treatment, unregulated junkyards, and the discharge of particulate matter from thousands of residential woodstoves. (The latter is largely responsible for our highest-in-the-nation rate of adult asthma. Not West Virginia or Texas; good old Vermont.)

 

Honest government, if not honest elections

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Now comes a brief spurt of outrage from the Kingdom, in the form of a belatedly-organized “group” (mainly one guy, William Round, with some money and a grudge) agitating for the election of Scott Milne as governor by the state legislature.

Newly-minted Seven Days political reporter Terri Hallenbeck says Round told her that “the group started over coffee among friends and includes more than 50 Vermonters he described as ordinary residents.”

Only one of the 50 shows up on the group’s FCC filing, and that would be Mr. Round. His filing asserts that VfHG has no officers, executive committee, or board of directors, so I have to assume that its organization and funding begin and end with William Round.

The lion’s share of the $30,000 ad buy is on WCAX. The ads will run from Dec. 30 through Jan. 7, the day before the legislature will hold its usually ceremonial election. Ad buys are targeted on WCAX and CBS news programming.

The ad says nothing about the close outcome of the November election; it simply recycles Republican complaints about Gov. Shumlin — high taxes, overspending, “broken promises,” etc.

VfHG’s emergence does give Milne the opportunity to deny the validity of the November vote:

“It points out to the people that we’ve got a constitution that essentially says we’ve had no election for governor. That happens on January 8,” Milne said.

Ah, so the votes cast by nearly 200,000 Vermonters? They don’t count. Sorry. We failed to cast them with sufficient clarity of purpose.

Well, it’s just more of Milne’s self-interested pseudo-logic, nothing new there.

As for Mr. Round and his willingness to spend $30,000 in a doomed effort to re-litigate the election? I fully support his Constitutional right to waste his money.

Finally, I suppose it would be churlish of me to reproduce the evidence of ungrammatical haste in filling out an official form? Yes, it probably would.

William Round FCC form

 

Just wake me when it’s over

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Scott Milne, eyes wide shutAs predictable, and as tiresome, as the early-autumn snowfall that sends everybody running to get their snow tires on:

Milne to Delay Gubernatorial Decision — Again

That utterly unsurprising word comes from Mr. Politics Editor, Paul Heintz, who helpfully recounts Scott Milne’s oft-delayed decision on whether he will actively promote his gubernatorial candidacy before the Legislature. When last we heard from Mahatma’s secret redoubt, he was promising a decision this week. But now?

On Thursday, he told Seven Days by text message that the announcement was “sliding into next week.”

And I’ll believe that when I see it.

 

 

 

Some backstory on the militarization of our police

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Last week, while I was out of town for a family Thanksgiving, Mark Davis wrote a nice little story in Seven Days about Vermont police agencies picking up a whole lot of military-grade weaponry, thanks to a federal program designed to shore up military contractors’ bottom lines provide local police with “military equipment left over from America’s foreign wars and stockpiles.”

Which brought to mind some of my own past coverage of specific events tied to this story: a small New Hampshire community talked into buying an assault vehicle by a Rush Limbaugh-listenin’, Tea Party-believin’ salesman, and the small-scale invasion of a small Vermont town.

Instrument of peace?

Instrument of peace?

First stop in the Wayback Machine is February 2012, when Keene, NH had received a $300,000 Homeland Security grant to buy an eight-ton armored vehicle called the Lenco Bearcat. This, for a city with a population of 23,000 and virtually no history of violent crime.

But there was all that federal money dangling in front of the city fathers…

During a City Council meeting, the Mayor was heard whispering to a City Councilor “We’re going to have our own tank.”

Better than Viagra. Of course, the grant won’t pay for operating costs like maintenance, training and insurance.

The most fascinating part of the story, to me, was Jim Massery, salesman for vehicle manufacturer Lenco. His pitch was laden with fearmongering about the need for high security everywhere. In fact, one of his quotes was the following:

I don’t think there’s any place in the country where you can say, “That isn’t a likely terrorist target.” How would you know?

There was a whole lot of that, and you can read more in my 2012 post on Green Mountain Daily. Massery, as I discovered, was a true-blue conservative who believed that President Obama was trying to steal our freedoms, and that the government was spending us into oblivion. And yet he had no problem helping the government militarize local police and wastefully spend $300,000 on a Lenco Bearcat that nobody needed. (The notorious Free Staters of Keene probably thought he was an enemy agent tasked with bringing the power of the police state to their own little community.)

One of Massery’s other pitches went like this:

When a Lenco Bearcat shows up at a crime scene where a suicidal killer is holding hostages, it doesn’t show up with a cannon. It shows up with a negotiator.

And, he might have added, that negotiator shows up in grand style, hunkered down in eight tons of steel. Which brings me to story #2. In June of 2012, a man named Alfred Perreault unknowingly touched off a minor invasion of his town of Washington, VT…

A summer scene befitting a Norman Rockwell portrait was spoiled Monday morning when more than a dozen police cruisers, an armored vehicle and the big box truck that houses Vermont’s equivalent of a S.W.A.T. team set up shop in Washington to take what proved to be one unarmed man into custody.

That armored vehicle was, as it happens, a Lenco Bearcat. Purchased by the Vermont State Police with, you guessed it, a Homeland Security grant.

Perreault was known to possess a goodly quantity of firearms, hence the heavy-handed police response. Which must have triggered (sorry) a sizeable panic reaction among townspeople who suddenly saw this caravan o’death roll into town and set up roadblocks.

It all ended peacefully. But as I wrote at the time, there’s an old saying: To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Our police agencies have been outfitted with military-grade, up-armored hammers. So naturally, Alfred Perreault looked like a nail.

It’s a lot easier for the authorities to escalate a response when they have the tools of escalation close at hand — indeed, when they may well feel a need to justify the purchase and upkeep of all those hammers. Alfred Perreault clearly needed to be dealt with. But did he warrant such a robust response?

You can bet we’ll be asking these kinds of questions again in the future.

Seven Days puts on the big-boy pants

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I was wondering if someone would swoop in and pick up the pieces after the Burlington Free Press abruptly shuttered its Statehouse Bureau. And now, someone has.

As it expands its coverage of Vermont government and politics, Seven Days has hired veteran Statehouse reporters Terri Hallenbeck and Nancy Remsen.

I couldn’t be happier for Hallenbeck and Remsen personally or for news consumers in Vermont. Seven Days has been steadily upping its game in recent years, but this is a solid, decisive leap into the big time. The little alt-weekly now has a larger politics/Statehouse crew than the once-formidable Free Press. And, even more shocking, a more experienced crew.

The Free Press is supposedly hiring a couple new reporters, but you know what they’re likely to get: bottom-of-the-pay-scale twentysomethings who are proficient with multimedia technology but have little background or experience to inform their reporting. But even if the Freeploid does bring on a couple of seasoned reporters, they won’t be able to replace Hallenbeck and Remsen’s knowledge of the politics and governance of Vermont. They’ll be at the low end of the learning curve, whereas Hallenbeck and Remsen are at the peak.

At a time when newspapers and even many alt-weeklies are in full retreat, Seven Days has taken a bold step forward. Best wishes to the newly enhanced crew, especially to former scurrilous scribe Paul Heintz, now serving as Political Editor.

Really, Free Press? Really?

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I shouldn’t spend so much time bagging on the Burlington Free Press, but they just keep doing bag-worthy stuff. Like this — the current homepage on its website. Featuring News!!

Screen Shot 2014-11-21 at 1.40.26 PM

Yeah, we’re all, like Diogenes, in search the perfect pumpkin pie.

There are two additional bitchslaps to the corpse of Joe Pulitzer here. The first is that the pumpkin pie article was written by Candace Page, who used to do a fine job covering the environment for the Free Press; her byline is a reminder of better days long gone. The second is the tiny headline at the lower right: “Food donations ‘critically low'” at Burlington food bank. The gourmet foodie thing gets top billing, while the plight of the poor gets the shortest possible shrift.

But after all, the plight of the poor makes lousy clickbait.

This, on top of the Freeploid’s announcement of its new btvfoodie app, part of its ongoing pivot away from serious journalism and toward audience-friendly “content.” I have to say, this makes me feel that much better about reducing my subscription — er, sorry, account. “Subscription” is so 20th Century, isn’t it?

When I first dubbed the Free Press “Seven Days Lite,” I was half kidding. But it looks more and more like I was dead-on. The Free Press is doing its best to poach Seven Days’ ad-friendly endeavors while decreasing its serious coverage to alt-weekly levels.

I know, I know: the Free Press is in a tough spot, with decreasing revenues and a profit-hungry corporate parent mandating its every move. Given the situation, it makes sense to reposition the Free Press as a Burlington-centered, feature-oriented newspap — sorry, multimedia content platform.

I get that. What I don’t like is Michael Townsend insisting that the Free Press is still a serious force. It is, in fact, becoming largely irrelevant to those of us who (1) are interested in solid coverage of state politics and policy, and (2) don’t live in Chittenden County.  For us, the Free Press has fallen to fifth place, behind VTDigger, VPR, the Mitchell Family Organ, and — yes, I’ll say it — Seven Days.

How long will our pickle party go on?

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For a very liberal state, Vermont’s got a surprisingly lousy record on electing women to our highest offices. We’ve got the #1 state legislature for gender equity, but there’s a distinct glass ceiling above that. A recent survey ranked Vermont a dismal 39th in the nation on gender equity in political office, thanks to women’s under-representation from the state Senate and top mayoralties, their almost complete absence from statewide offices, and their complete absence from our Congressional delegation.

Dismaying, then, to read the recent words of Seven Days’ Paul Heintz in speculating on the “next generation” of Democrats who might seize the next opportunity to move up the ladder should, say, Sen Patrick Leahy retire from office:

The most obvious contenders would be Congressman Welch, 67, and Gov. Shumlin, 58, though both men feign disinterest, perhaps out of respect for Leahy. If either was to leave his current job to run for Senate, that would provide openings for the next generation of Vermont politicos — including, presumably, Speaker Smith, Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donovan, Sen. Tim Ashe (D/P-Chittenden) and Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger.

No offense to any of those worthies, but four names, four men.

Sigh.

I checked in with Heintz to see if his list was meant to be comprehensive in any way, and he responded thusly:

That list definitely wasn’t meant to be comprehensive. I included a few up-and-coming officeholders whose names are frequently mentioned as potential statewide candidates. But there are plenty of others who would be equally strong candidates, including a number of women.

There’s no question that Vermont has elected too few women to statewide office. It’s pretty shocking that we’re one of just four states to have never sent a woman to Congress. I would certainly hope that Vermont’s next crop of congressional candidates is more reflective of our population than the current crop of incumbents.

Unfortunately, when you get down to it, the longer list of ambitious Democratic politicos is almost entirely male as well. The most prominent woman on the list, and just about the only one, is former State Rep. and current Deputy Transportation Secretary Sue Minter, while the amount of testosterone on that longer list would be enough to gag a goat.

Not sure what that means, but I’ll carry on.

When that gender equity report came out, Sarah McCall of Emerge Vermont, a group trying to encourage and train female candidates, expressed concern that the next few years are a critical time. If the upcoming round of political retirees are replaced by more men, she noted, we might have to wait another generation for female leaders to take their rightful place. And we’ve already lost a generation since Madeleine Kunin was our one and only female Governor.

In response to Heintz’ list — and really, to the unbalanced reality behind it — McCall offered these comments:

…this is certainly a conversation that Vermont politicos will be having frequently between now and 2016. In Vermont, we are lucky to have such strong leaders in our federal delegation and statewide offices; and whoever follows in Senator Leahy’s footsteps has some very big shoes to fill.

… I have no doubt that there are qualified female leaders in this state who aspire to serve our state in Washington, DC and Emerge Vermont will continue to train female leaders so that women running for public office at all levels of government becomes more commonplace.

It’s a hard thing to ask a qualified male to limit his own ambitions for the sake of equity. But breaking Vermont’s glass ceiling is long overdue. And I’d ask this of Vermont Democrats: Do we have to depend on the Republican Party, which might very well feature Heidi Scheuermann on its 2016 ticket? Or are you going to actively seek to remove the glass ceiling instead of simply bemoaning its existence, while allowing Business As Usual to continue?