Tag Archives: VTDigger

The New Education Secretary Is Literally Unqualified for the Job, and That’s Not the Bad Part

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Well, well. After taking almost an entire year to find a new education secretary, Gov. Phil Scott sprang his choice on us with very little notice on a Friday, when news organizations are ramping down for the weekend and have no time for a deep dive on the new hire’s background.

That wasn’t a coincidence, not at all, because Zoie Saunders not only hails from Florida, the state on the forefront of smothering public education, not only comes from a position where her primary responsibility was to close public schools, but also fails to meet the legal standard for her new job. The relevant passage:

At the time of appointment, the Secretary shall have expertise in education management and policy and demonstrated leadership and management abilities.

I suppose the governor would argue that Saunders has “expertise in education management and policy” dating primarily from her five years as an executive for Charter Schools USA, a for-profit underminer of public education. But c’mon, she has never taught, she has never managed a school building let alone a district, and she has racked up a mere three months actually working in a public school system. That shouldn’t strike anyone who cares as “expertise in education management.”

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“We Didn’t Have to Do Anything”

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At his weekly press conference today, Gov. Phil Scott again pushed his affordability agenda and characterized the Legislature as tax-and-spendthrifts. And answered some pointed questions about his emergency shelter program, which saw a substantial uptick in business last night (although still well below projected capacity). A total of 34 people slept in the governor’s slapped-together, nighttime-only shelters.

The governor defended his program as “a success,” although he didn’t seem awfully confident. His voice got noticeably quieter when talking homelessness than when he was hammering Democrats about “affordability.” And when push came to shove and he’d reached the limit of his ability to emit thick clouds of verbiage, he twice resorted to that most desperate of defenses: “We didn’t have to do anything.”

Sounds like headstone material to me. Sure, you didn’t have to do anything. No one had a gun to your head. But sweet Jesus, what a statement. The fact that he wasn’t absolutely required to do anything is supposed to make his crappy shelters more acceptable? I don’t think so.

Are we supposed to judge his administration by that standard? There’s actually precious little he has to do. As Donald Trump’s presidency showed, the machinery of government largely keeps moving even if the captain is an ill-tempered, narcissistic boob with a short attention span. But if that’s all you aspire to, well, please don’t run for re-election. We deserve better.

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The Press Coverage of the Temporary Shelters Is Somehow Even Worse than I Thought

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The Gods of Time were very kind to Gov. Phil Scott when they arranged for March 15 to fall on a Friday this year. The 15th was the expiration date for the Adverse Weather Conditions emergency housing program, and that’s when the governor, in all his infinite wisdom and alleged niceness, deliberately unsheltered nearly 500 vulnerable Vermonters.

And partly because it happened on a Friday, the press coverage was scant and woefully incomplete. Almost to the point of moral bankruptcy.

It was bad enough that the coverage of Scott’s decision was slanted pretty strongly in his direction. But the lack of attention to the details of his slapped-together temporary shelter “system” may well let him off the hook entirely for an administrative failure of the worst kind

Friday afternoon is the beginning of the long, dark, largely journalism-free weekend. Staffing is minimal at best. Our biggest outlets (VTDigger, Seven Days, Vermont Public) may have a designated reporter who’s on call to cover big breaking news, and the bar is pretty high for that. The TV stations have smaller staffs but still maintain a weekend presence because they’ve got airtime to fill. But don’t expect their A-Team, such as it is. Any coverage from Friday afternoon to Monday will mainly focus on fires, crashes and crime.

With the background set, what did we get for shelter coverage from Friday evening, when the shelters opened, until now? Damn near next to nothing.

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The Press Coverage of the Shelter Situation Has Been Terrible. We All Need to Take Some Responsibility for That.

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The media coverage of this week’s Scott administration temporary shelter ClusterfuckTM has been dispiritingly spotty and incomplete. This has helped the admin play a little game of “Hey, look! A Squirrel!” with the press. Gov. Phil Scott came out swinging in his Wednesday press conference, bashing the Legislature for allegedly failing to address Act 250 reform when, in fact, the legislative process is a lengthy one and it’s way too early to declare victory or defeat. Since the environmental and development lobbies seem to be unified behind the effort, there is every reason to believe that significant reform will be enacted and Scott’s panic will prove unwarranted.

But all the whining and finger-pointing diverted press attention from the simultaneous rollout of the shelter plan, which involves kicking 500 vulnerable Vermonters out of state-paid motel rooms and into hastily-constructed temporary shelters that will (a) only be open at night and (b) will only be in operation for one week. Or less.

Starting tonight.

The press took a while to get in gear on the shelter issue. It’s a complicated situation, and most of the stories failed to get a full grasp of it. Some weren’t much better than water carriers for administration policy.

I was prepared to write a scathing critique of our press corps, and I will, but then I listened to a really good podcast this morning about the fallen state of journalism today. It made me realize that every one of us plays a part in the health of our media ecosystem, and that I should do something about it as well as complain about it.

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The Great Unanswered Question About EB-5: What Did the Shumlin Administration Know and When Did They Know It? (UPDATED)

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Update below: Auditor Doug Hoffer is working on a thorough exploration of the EB-5 mess.

Mark Johnson posted a pretty incredible two-part podcast last week. In the latest installment of his “802 News” (discoverable here or Wherever You Download Your Podcasts), Johnson spent more than two hours grilling Bill Stenger, the Northeast Kingdom developer who served prison time in the EB-5 fraud case. There’s a lot to unpack about Stenger himself, but the thing that caught my attention was what he had to say about the role of the Shumlin administration. His comments tore the metaphorical scab off the unhealed wound that is EB-5, specifically the state’s role in enabling a massive fraud.

Let’s pause for a moment and posit that no one, absolutely no one, in Vermont officialdom seems the least bit interested in uncovering the whole truth about this. With each passing day, it seems less and less likely that there will ever be a full accounting for Peter Shumlin and his top officials, many of whom (coughMikePieciakcough) continue to hold positions of influence in and around state government.

To get to the key moment: By early 2015, there was plenty of smoke if not open fire around the EB-5 projects. At that point, the state had to reauthorize two of the projects, including AnC Bio Vermont, the big flashy biotech facility that was supposed to be built in The Hole, pictured above.

In Stenger’s telling, state officials knew at the time that lead investor Ariel Quiros was committing fraud, and yet they gave the green light to continue the projects. If this is true, then (as Stenger implies but doesn’t state outright), some very prominent people should have joined Stenger and Quiros in being fitted for bright orange jumpsuits.

(Those with short memories should go back and read some of VTDigger’s reporting on the scandal, spearheaded by Digger founder Anne Galloway. This story and this one for starters.)

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Blows Against the Umpire

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It’s been a bad month for “print” media between the abrupt shutdown of Sports Illustrated, the purchase of the Baltimore Sun by a right-wing rich guy, mass layoffs at the Los Angeles Times, and the assimilation of music review site Pitchfork by GQ. There are signs that the already parlous state of journalism in America is about to get a whole lot worse.

Here in Vermont, we are relatively blessed on that front. We have robust nonprofits like VTDigger and Vermont Public and a reduced but still energetic Seven Days, plus a number of daily and weekly newspapers that are battling to produce meaningful reportage on a shoestring. A lot of energetic, smart people are doing their best to keep us informed.

But over the past couple of weeks, our media have repeatedly failed us. I feel compelled to point this out because the worse they do, the less informed we are. In the words of Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

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Phil Scott Sacrifices a Pinch of His Credibility at the Tomb of Republicanism

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So, our putatively moderate governor went and endorsed the very conservative Nikki Haley for president.

Well, kinda, but not really.

VTDigger reported it as an endorsement; Seven Days cast it as a rebuke of Donald Trump. I have to say Seven Days got it right here. He didn’t say he’d vote for Haley. All he said was that New Hampshire primary voters should choose Haley as the only viable alternative to Trump, in hopes that the November election would offer two candidates “with character and integrity, who respect the rule of law, the rights of all people, and the Constitution.”

That’s a depressingly low bar, but Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party has left Scott in the position of endorsing an ardent anti-choicer, an advocate of building the border wall, cutting taxes for the rich, increasing the age for receiving Social Security, and imposing something stronger than Ron DeSantis’ “don’t say gay” bill, among other things. Not to mention that whole playing footsie with the cause of the Civil War thing.

In short, Haley may be more presentable and less aggressively anti-democratic than Trump, but policy-wise there’s not much distance between her and her former boss. She’s no Phil Scott, that’s for sure.

But Scott, who clings to his partisan identity like a toddler with its favorite plushie, desperately wants the Republican Party to offer something, anything, of value to the American electorate.

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If They Were Trying to Devise the Worst Possible Shelter Plan, Then Congratulations Are in Order

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Well, we suspected that the Scott administration’s plan to create new shelter space would be cheap and bad. But they have outperformed expectations, and that’s not a good thing.

The full plan will be unveiled Tuesday morning before the House Appropriations Committee, but the outlines have now been reported by Vermont Public and VTDigger — oh wait, they each published the same report by the same reporter. Sigh. Our press pool isn’t shallow enough, and now our two leading nonprofit news organizations can’t even produce their own original work? Gaah.

But I digress. The plan, as outlined in the identical stories with identical titles, is just a horrific mess. Inadequate in all respects. It’s of a piece with the administration’s — and the Legislature’s — approach to homelessness: It seems to be aimed at covering official asses than in actually addressing the problem. And covering them with a teeny-tiny fig leaf at that.

It is to be hoped that the Democratic majority in the Legislature rejects this plan outright and devises a robust alternative. Housing advocacy groups are working on their own plan, which may be out by the time you read this.

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Once Again, Phil Scott Ducks Accountability for Being a Republican

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The Vermont Republican Party held its biannual, or possibly biennual, convention on Saturday. (Above screenshot from the VTGOP’s own website, although they might get around to fixing it after they read this post.) They actually had kind of an impressive speaker lineup, including Reagan-era anti-tax activist Grover Norquist (who must have been wondering how the hell his career descended to the point where he was sharing breakfast with a few dozen graybeards in frickin’ Burlington), Scott Brown, who’s gotten an incredible amount of mileage out of one lucky victory thirteen years ago, and Georgia state Rep. Mesha Mainor, who switched her affiliation from Democratic to Republican after differing with her former party’s caucus on some high-profile issues.

All of which makes me think that there are some conservative deep pockets underwriting the travel schedules of far-right figures, because ain’t no way the VTGOP could have pulled this level of “star” power in the past. But anyway…

Speakers also included professional troll Scott Presler, a gay conservative dudebro who was touted as a get-out-the-vote activist. Not mentioned in your convention program: His stint as a lead organizer for an anti-Muslim hate group, his description of the January 6 “Stop the Steal” election denial gathering as “a civil rights protest,” and his promotion of false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Oh, and his version of GOTV includes the all-out promotion of “ballot harvesting,” a common conservative complaint about Democrats collecting and delivering ballots en masse. If you’re unfortunately enough to remember the film “2,000 Mules,” which focused on unsubstantiated claims that liberal activists were harvesting huge numbers of questionable ballots, well, Presler wants to take that idea up to 11: “”I don’t want 2,000 mules. I want 2 million mules,” he told a GOP voter training session in Pennsylvania.

I can’t tell you whether he brought the same message to the Waterfront Hilton, but it seems likely.

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Responsibilities and Obligations in the Bristol Shooting Case

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There must have been some serious conversations in Vermont newsrooms on Tuesday. Good God, I surely hope so. Because the results were split, unusually: Our three commercial television news outlets and Seven Days chose to reveal the name and face of the 14-year-old accused in the fatal shooting of a fellow teen, while VTDigger and Vermont Public opted to keep his identity out of it.

There is no hard and fast rule in journalism, or in the law. But identifying a juvenile offender is generally approached with great care and deliberation. The Associated Press’ policy is to not identify juvenile suspects, but there are exceptions: “It may depend on the severity of the alleged crime; whether police have formally released the juvenile’s name; and whether the juvenile has been formally charged as an adult.”

At first, this case seemed to fit the AP’s criteria. The suspect was charged as an adult, a conviction could bring a life sentence, and authorities did nothing to guard his identity. In court on Tuesday, he was wearing shackles and a bright red prison jumpsuit.

Problem is, the circumstances may change in a way that would have argued for concealing his identity. The prosecutor, Addison County State’s Attorney Eva Vekos, seems to be struggling to explain her rationale for bringing a murder charge and treating the suspect as an adult.

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