Tag Archives: VTDigger

Congratulations to Team Scott for Scoring a Cheap Political Point Against the Democrats

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Legislative leadership has a somewhat (but only somewhat) overblown reputation for shooting themselves in the foot. They have often made Gov. Phil Scott’s job easier by giving him pain-free victories or allowing his minions to run rings around them.

The latest installment of this depressing melodrama features the complaint from House Speaker Jill Krowinski and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth about the “Vermont Strong II: Electric Boogaloo” license plates first suggested [checks notes] almost two months ago by Gov. Phil Scott.

Now, I’m no fan of the plate. It’s an obvious play on Vermonters’ partially earned self-regard, and there’s something ironic about flogging vehicle license plates to help recover from a climate change-related disaster.

Also, Baruth and Krowinski have a strong argument that the governor overstepped his constitutional authority by advancing the program without Legislative approval. Team Scott argues that he is simply extending a program authorized by the Legislature in 2012, after Tropical Storm Irene.

That seems pretty thin to me, but politically speaking it doesn’t matter. There is no way that this doesn’t end up being a strong net positive for Scott. Assuming he runs for re-election, this thing would be potent fodder for the TV ads he probably won’t have to bother airing: “Legislative leaders are so petty and obstructionist, they didn’t even want me to raise disaster recovery money with a positive, feel-good message.”

Team Scott fully realizes this. And when you look at the sequence of events, it’s pretty clear that his people leaked this story and that Baruth and Krowinski didn’t intend for this to become public.

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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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Less “Lean Management” Than “Mean Management”

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There have been numerous examples over the years of Phil Scott’s failure to build an effective bureaucracy in spite of his promises to lower the cost of government and improve the delivery of services The latest, and perhaps most outrageous, is the unconscionable handling of the extended emergency motel voucher program. As reported by VTDigger, the Scott administration is now requiring recipients to recertify once a week — and is making it damn difficult to comply by woefully understaffing its call centers and offices.

There are two possible explanations for this. Either the administration is doing its best to torpedo an extension it never wanted in the first place, or it has deliberately resource-starved the Department of Children and Families to the point where DCF can’t properly do its job. Either way, it’s inexcusable. As is the desperate display of blame-shifting put on by DCF functionary Miranda Gray.

It’s not our fault, she told VTDigger. It’s recipients’ fault for not being persistent enough or not answering the phone when DCF gets around to calling them back. It’s a caseworker’s fault for not communicating with DCF (through its terrible call center). Recipients who can’t get through by phone should go to a field office (but at least one recipient was forced to wait for hours and hours at a field office). It’s the Legislature’s fault for setting the rules (yes, they opened the door to weekly check-ins but (a) the admin sets the rules and (b) the mismanagement of the call system is all on YOU).

Meanwhile, recipients are waiting hours upon hours and living constantly in fear of losing their shelter. All because YOU couldn’t fully staff a call center after increasing your own workload by mandating weekly check-ins.

Also meanwhile, no one has received a damn dime from a disaster relief fund for the self-employed and independent contractors. And some of the applications seem to have been bungled. Wow, more management failure. And another administration official busily pointing the finger elsewhere.

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The Feds Place a Capstone on Dan French’s Tenure

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Well hey, here’s something. The U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office is investigating the Vermont Agency of Education for violating the rights of students by limiting school districts’ authority to enact public health measures during the Covid-19 epidemic and, in the Office’s words, “discriminating against students with disabilities” who were at heightened risk of serious illness.

Yes, that would be the Agency of Education then helmed by the mask-averse Dan French, labeled in this space as the Inspector Clouseau of the Scott administration. I’d suggest that the feds could have assembled quite the dossier simply by reading this blog, but doubtless their investigation has been more thorough than that. And to judge by the reaction of French’s successor Heather Bouchey, I’m guessing the feds have got the goods. In her reply to the feds’ probe, as reported by VTDigger, she didn’t claim there was no discrimination. She simply said the agency had no intention of discriminating.

“The AOE devoted significant effort throughout its COVID-19 pandemic response to ensure the equal educational access of students with disabilities including students with disabilities who are at an elevated risk of severe illness from COVID-19 exposure. If the AOE erred in its responses, guidance or otherwise, it is eager to address the error and make corrections for the benefit of students.”

That word “if” is the giveaway. Bouchey didn’t defend her agency’s performance; she tried to frame any offense as inadvertent, not intentional. And she laid out a glidepath to future surrender by saying the agency was “eager to address” any errors “and make corrections.” And don’t overlook her emphasis on “equal educational access” rather than, say, the health and safety of students. Gotta keep those disabled kids in class so they get “equal access,” you know.

But in case you needed any more evidence that the agency, under French, went too far in pressuring school districts to moderate their public health measures, let’s take a little walk down Memory Lane.

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Man, the Agency of Human Services is Really Bad At This Emergency Housing Thing

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Well, in this context, “incompetence” is the charitable interpretation. The alternative is that the responsible Scott administration officials are deliberately biffing the emergency housing effort and obfuscating slash lying to try to cover it up. Fortunately, they’re pretty bad at obfuscation, too.

Actually, there’s a third thesis, and my money’s on this one: The administration has so thoroughly starved AHS of needed resources that its staff can’t possibly handle the workload, and its leadership is tap dancing around the inconvenient truth.

Let’s go back to last week’s appalling performance before the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee, where AHS leaders presented their first mandatory report on the disposition of motel voucher recipients. For those just joining us, the last-minute budget compromise reached in late June continued the voucher program for most recipients, set some stringent conditions for those receiving vouchers, and mandated that AHS report once a month on progress toward ending the program and providing alternative housing for all recipients.

The report was an embarrassment, starting with a rundown of the 174 recipients who left the program in July. Of those 174, a mere 34 had found apartments to live in. (There was no breakdown on how many were helped by AHS in finding new housing and how many managed the trick on their own.) That’s less than 20% of those no longer in motels. The vast majority — 113 in all, a staggering 65% — left the program for destinations unknown because they had failed to renew their benefits, a process that appears to be devilishly difficult.

AHS Secretary Jenney Samuelson told the committee that “we had not been able to make contact with” those 113 despite multifaceted efforts. But a very different story was told by advocates for the unhoused.

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Promoting a Worthy Cause? Opportunism? Or a Little of Both?

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Let’s start with this: VTDigger has been doing yeoman’s work since the skies parted and the rains descended on July 10. They’ve ramped up their coverage to meet the need for information and insight, and that’s been absolutely critical in this age of ever-diminishing traditional media. And as a nonprofit organization, Digger has to meet its costs somehow or other.

So why does its joint fundraising campaign with the Vermont Community Foundation make me a little bit queasy inside?

Because, I think, it either crosses an ethical line or comes very close to it.

The details: Digger and VCF are raising money by selling a line of “Better Together” merch. The proceeds, minus the cost of the goods, is split 50/50 between the two entities. VCF devotes its half to flood relief, while Digger covers the cost of flood reportage with its share. The graphic design is, to my uneducated eye, kind of lame — of a piece with Digger’s recent website reboot. But that’s beside the point, and I’m sure the simple, direct design has its adherents. I don’t do TikTok either.

As a longtime denizen of public radio, I’ve spent more than my share of time dancing around this particular line between journalism and fundraising. During pledge drives, I’d be delivering the news one minute and begging for donations the next. Still, this Digger/VCF arrangement feels different, I think because it’s happening in the middle of a dire emergency — and looks like it’s capitalizing on the crisis. I’ve been part of public radio pledge drives, which take huge amounts of planning and organization, that were halted or postponed because of breaking news.

So I asked Digger CEO Sky Barsch about it, and she offered a strong rationale for the joint campaign. I wasn’t completely mollified, but I see her argument.

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Anything for the Unhoused? Anything at All?

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The news is full of stories about the aftermath of the great flood. Our political leaders are fully engaged on the issues of flood relief. We hear about the plight of homeowners, renters, small businesses, and the various public and private efforts to help them in time of need. But there’s one group we hear little to nothing about.

It’s the people who had no home or shelter when the rains came on July 10.

The attitude among our leaders appears to be that after all, the unhoused had nothing before the flood, so did they really lose anything?

That may strike you as an unfair characterization, but it’s kind of baked into the disaster relief system. People and businesses get help based on tangible, reportable property losses. No property, no losses, right?

This includes the 750 or so households we sentenced to homelessness on June 1 when Gov. Phil Scott and Legislature tightened eligibility standards for the motel voucher program. The state made no particular effort to track those people after their forced exit. No one seems to know where they are or what their living conditions are like.

WCAX-TV just ran a story entitled “Where are evicted hotel-motel program recipients staying?” Unfortunately, it made no real effort to answer its own question. There were estimates from Burlington about the increase in the unhoused population since June 1, but nothing beyond the city limits.

And now we’ve added God knows how many more to their number. I’m sure God knows, but I don’t see any effort by our earthly leaders to track the newly unhoused. Have there been any efforts to expand shelters that were at or near capacity before the first drop of rain fell? Has anything been done for them besides handing out tents?

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Sure, Hundreds Have Been Unsheltered, But Let’s Not Forget the Real Tragedy: Important People Have Had Their Feelings Hurt

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There’s a great deal of desperate history-rewriting going on after the disheartening political debate over emergency housing. Everybody is shifting blame. No wonder; the outcome was not a solution to the crisis, but a patchwork of compromises intended to carefully balance the suffering of the unhoused against the comfort level of Our Political Betters. It’s nothing that anybody can take pride in.

The Scott administration is blaming the Legislature for, I don’t know, failing to defy the governor’s insistence on ending the program as scheduled. Legislative leaders who were happy to kill the program until it got too embarrassing are now blaming the administration for failing to plan a transition, which is true enough but doesn’t absolve Statehouse leadership from their failure to heed the warnings coming from housing advocates and, well, people like me.

There’s one thing both sides can agree on: The real villain is Brenda Siegel.

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Why Don’t We Govern As If People Mattered?

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Two stories on a common theme appeared Monday morning on VTDigger. The first was about a “spate” (their term) of deaths in Vermont’s prison system, mainly at the Springfield facility. The second was about another rise in opioid-related deaths that puts us on track to break the all-time record set in 2022.

In both, I heard echoes of the lamentable deal struck by the Legislature and Scott administration for a partial extension of the motel voucher program — an extension loaded with poison pills. Not only does the program leave 800 or so households without shelter, it also makes the voucher experience as unpleasant as possible for its clients from now on. Who are, just a reminder, some of Vermont’s most vulnerable. You know, the ones Gov. Phil Scott likes to say he’s committed to protecting. Echoes also of a fundamental approach toward human services programs for the poor: Make the experience difficult and unpleasant so recipients are incentivized to GTFO, one way or another.

It’s like a soup kitchen that dumps vinegar into its food because if it tastes good, people won’t be incentivized to get their own damn dinner. Mind you, not enough vinegar to make anyone sick; just enough to discourage them from partaking unless they’re truly desperate.

This approach is all too common in our social programs. It’s a lousy way to meet the needs of our most vulnerable. It’s morally questionable, and if you’re not into the “morality” stuff, it’s also counterproductive in terms of financials and outcomes. People suffer needlessly and face tougher barriers to achieving self-sufficiency, which I think is what we’re supposedly aiming for.

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They Said It Couldn’t Be Done. Seriously. Over and Over. Guess It Was All Bullshit. (Updated)

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I don’t know exactly what changed their minds, but after months of insisting the motel voucher program was going to end on schedule come Hell or high water, leaders of the House and Senate are working on a deal to extend the program.

My reactions are all over the place. Wow. Finally. Thank goodness. What took you so long?

And… let’s not get carried away until we see the fine print.

Here’s what we know, courtesy of VTDigger’s Lola Duffort. The extension would apply to roughly 2,000 people scheduled to be unhoused in July. It’s an indefinite stay, meant to allow people to stay in motels until state officials can identify “alternate stable setting[s].” There will be a mandate for the Scott administration to regularly update lawmakers, which is embarrassing for Team Scott but utterly necessary due to its complete failure to plan any sort of transition before now.

And it will not apply to anyone unhoused on June 1. So, not only are those people SOL, it also means there will be another mass eviction on Thursday Friday. You may recall that hundreds of June 1 evictees were offered free two-week extensions by some motel owners. Those extensions expire tomorrow Friday. No reprieves on offer for those folks.

I don’t know why leadership is so firm on excluding the June 1 and June 16 unhoused, who number approximately 800. I guess that’s an acceptable level of human suffering.

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