Tag Archives: Vermont League of Cities and Towns

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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Canaan Launches Purification Drive

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Oh Canaan, my Canaan. What are you up to now?

The Northeast Kingdom town, best known in these parts as (1) the home of the only public school district that never adopted a mask mandate during the Covid epidemic, (2) the home turf of former education secretary Dan French, and (3) the place where a parent threatened to “kill somebody” if his child encountered a transgender person at school, has just enacted a broad, sweeping ban on loitering — or doing just about anything else not specifically authorized by the town — on public property.

It’s obviously aimed at unhoused people, and it’s almost certainly unconstitutional. The Selectboard itself gave that game away when it inserted a “separability” clause, which anticipates a losing battle in court.

The Vermont ACLU, which has previously reminded other Vermont communities that anti-panhandling ordinances are unconstitutional, seems likely to fulfill the Selectboard’s anticipation. “[The ordinance] does appear to raise a number of constitutional concerns,” wrote ACLU Communications Director Stephanie Gomory in an email.

But wait, there’s more! The Canaan Selectboard has also embarked on a drive to clean up “junky yards,” a concept that’s clearly in the eye of the beholder.

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Our sclerotic Constitution

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In the past, I’ve tossed around the notion that Vermont’s Founding Fathers were drunk when they wrote our Constitution. Partly, that’s a matter of historic record. In those days, everyone drank to what we’d consider wretched excess; and it was common practice for men to gather in taverns to talk politics. As a simple matter of probability, those guys were hammered when they drafted our founding document.

But there’s also the matter of content. This has come up in the context of our current ethics debate, in which many lawmakers have asserted that the Constitution gives the Legislature sole authority over the ethics of its members. That seems like a terrible idea on its face.

And kind of undemocratic as well. And it’s far from the only undemocratic thread in our Constitution. At the risk of being overly cynical, you might even conclude that the Constitution was written by political elites to provide themselves a measure of protection from those pesky voters.

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