Tag Archives: VTDigger

The PIT Report Casts a Harsh Light on Our Political Betters

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Well, this explains a lot.

The 2023 Vermont Point-in-Time Report of Those Experiencing Homelessness is out, and it shows an explosion in homelessness over the last four years, including an 18.5% increase from last year — and a 36% hike from 2022 in unhoused families with children.

The latter figure is bitterly ironic considering the Democratic Legislature’s laser focus on helping children this session. Too bad that while they were funding child care programs and universal school meals, they couldn’t be bothered to keep roofs over unhoused children’s heads. (They could still reverse course during the upcoming veto session, which would be nice.)

The PIT Report also makes the Scott administration look even worse, which is quite the accomplishment. The numbers make clear that homelessness was exploding even as Scott was bound and determined to kill the motel voucher program that provides shelter for 80% of Vermont’s unhoused. Well, it did until last week, when the state evicted some 700 voucher clients.

The numbers also shine an unforgiving light on the administration’s failure to make any transition plan whatsoever for ending the voucher program humanely. They had to know this was happening, and yet they did nothing. It was “a crisis outrunning the state’s response,” in the words of Dartmouth College policy fellow Anne Sosin, who spent the 2023 legislative session desperately trying to get state officials and lawmakers to acknowledge the obvious.

The continuing rise in homelessness also belies Scott’s argument that the program was a response to Covid-19 and now that the pandemic is “over,” the program has to end. Problem is, even as the pandemic was waning, homelessness kept on rising dramatically. The real problem was a massive imbalance in real estate markets. There was never a policy adjustment to that change in reality.

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Nothing New Under the Sun

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In case you thought the unhousing of Vermonters from a motel shelter program was a new thing, VTDigger comes along with a history lesson that manages to deepen my anger at and understanding of our current situation. It seems that we went through the exact same thing only 10 years ago.

And apparently we didn’t learn a damn thing, because we’re doing it again.

The circumstances were different, but the outcome was the same. Funding for an emergency motel voucher program was cut, and a large cohort was suddenly tossed out on the street. Some were given tents and sleeping bags in lieu of actual shelter.

One big difference between now and then: The Democrats ran the roost. They held the governorship as well as the Legislature, and they still managed to screw our most vulnerable. That sheds some light on the capacity of today’s Democratic leaders to defund the program and accept the consequences. They’ve done it before, so why not now?

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Everybody’s Breaking Down the Door of the Emergency Housing Hall of Shame

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It’s been a bizarre week or so in Vermont politics, as Our Esteemed Leaders have just been falling all over each other trying not to address the imminent unsheltering of hundreds of Vermonters. (Which will happen on Thursday for those keeping track of such things.) They’re far more interested in positioning themselves and shifting blame than in crafting a humane and eminently doable way out of this mess.

Thursday is the day when some 800 households will lose eligibility for the motel voucher program that’s being allowed to expire for no good reason except, well, as Gov. Phil Scott likes to say, “It’s time.” Another 1,000 or so households will lose their places on July 1 or 29, depending.

The uncertainty stems from the governor’s deft sidestepping of the Democrats’ obvious ploy to trick him into signing the budget (spoiler alert: he vetoed the thing). In so doing, he managed to position himself to the left of the Democrats by allowing a ridiculous 28-day extension for some voucher clients. But not the ones about to lose their accommodations next week, no sirree Bob. The governor’s shift, which flies in the face of his previous insistence that the voucher program just absolutely had to end on schedule, was so hastily put together that this was how VTDigger summarized its impact:

It’s unclear how many people will receive the extra month of shelter. An actual breakdown was not available from state officials on Friday…

To put it another way, it’s just the latest Phil Scott clusterfuck on emergency housing. And yet, he’s in position to look like a hero — relatively speaking — not only for this inadequate extension, but also for the administration’s apparently precipitous issuance of an RFP for creation and staffing of up to 1,000 emergency shelter beds. The Democrats have no one but themselves to blame for their predicament.

Which leads us to the sad figure pictured above: former deputy secretary of state Chris Winters, seen here realizing that his soul is in a sealed jar on Jason Gibbs’ desk.

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When the Sun Expires and the Earth Is a Cold, Dead Place, Only Cockroaches and Vermont’s Remote Worker Incentive Program Will Survive

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Now comes VTDigger to ask a question with only one reasonable answer: “Amid a housing crisis, will Vermont keep paying people to move here?”

Sadly, the reasonable answer — “No” — is not the real life answer — “Of course we will.”

Yep, our Wise Political Heads may be prepared to kick our homeless where the sun don’t shine, but they seem bound and determined to continue the remote worker incentive program. You know, the one that reimburses people to move to Vermont? Meaning it helps people with enough resources to pay their moving expenses up front and wait for the incentive payment to arrive? The program with absolutely no objective evidence to support its premise?

This thing got started in 2018, before the pandemic and before the related in-migration of the affluent helped create a desperation-level housing shortage. It was the brainchild of our incentive-lovin’ Governor Phil Scott, but legislative Democrats glommed onto it like a lamprey that’s found a nice fat fish. And they’re still firmly attached; the current FY24 budget, going before the full Senate today, would provide $1 million in incentives for people who can afford to buy homes in our overpriced, undersupplied housing market.

These are the same lawmakers who routinely delay and defer and defeat good ideas over a supposed lack of evidence. A lack repeatedly and thoroughly documented by Our Inconvenient Auditor Doug Hoffer, who has looked and looked and found no evidence that the program has any tangible impact.

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Quick Follow-Up: How Many Lawmakers Have Experienced Homelessness?

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The latest installment of VTDigger’s series on legislative ethics and financial disclosure is essentially a redo of one of my all-time favorite stories about the Statehouse: Taylor Dobbs’ “House of Landlords,” a 2019 exploration of how many lawmakers are landlords, property managers or contractors, and how that affects lawmaking.

The answer then, as it is now, is (a) a whole awful lot who (b) seem disinclined to enact any laws that might affect the interests of the propertied class.

Well, the Digger story focuses on landlords versus renters and as in 2019, the former are thick on the ground while the latter are scarce as hen’s teeth. One consequence of this imbalance, now as then, is a lack of movement on creating a statewide rental registry. Similarly, there’s no action to be seen on limiting no-cause evictions. The very concept is gunned down in a hail of anecdotes about longsuffering landlords and dissolute tenants. Rarely if ever do we hear the other side of the story — hardworking tenants who pay their rent on time and struggle to get their landlords to do necessary maintenance or repair.

So let’s take the next logical step, shall we? The Legislature is deep in discussions about how to avoid — actually, whether to avoid — a crisis in unsheltered homelessness about to hit Vermont. How many legislative decision-makers have ever experienced homelessness?

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Yeah, I’ve Seen This Movie Before

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VTDigger’s Sarah Mearhoff authored an article Thursday that prompted flashbacks in this tired old brain. The story was copiously entitled “As the ‘right to repair’ debate comes to Montpelier, lawmakers face a ‘flood’ of opposition from national interest groups.”

Yep, a look back in the Google Machine reveals that I wrote the same damn story back in 2018.

“Right to repair” is a concept that ought to be enshrined in our law, except that it causes conniptions in Our Corporate Overlords. They’ve created perpetual revenue streams for consumer products by making it difficult to downright impossible for an owner to repair stuff outside of the corporation’s closed circle of bespoke parts, tools, software, and authorized repair shops.

This is fine in some ways, bu in excess it costs consumers bucketloads of extra money. You can’t, for instance, take your iPhone to an unauthorized shop to get a cracked screen replaced or a new battery installed. You’ve got to go to an official Apple shop and pay full Apple prices. And a repair shop has to pay through the nose for the privilege to be an official Apple joint. (Small Dog is no longer authorized to do Apple repairs because they didn’t want to pay the requisite freight.)

At issue in 2018 was a bill to establish a right to repair for all consumer items. It ended up as yet another study bill after hungry packs of top-dollar lobbyists descended on the Statehouse. This year, the bill in question would create a right to repair only for farm equipment. And once again, the custom-tailored lobbyists have swarmed the Statehouse. It’s the same playbook, and I fear it will once again end with the bloody carcass of pro-consumer legislation being ripped to shreds in their oh-so-sharp teeth.

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They’re Just Going to Beat This Crypto Bro Thing Into the Ground, Aren’t They?

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I don’t know what U.S. Rep. Becca Balint did to so mightily offend the journalistic nabobs at VTDigger and Seven Days, but our two most prominent political media outlets seem bound and determined to lash her tightly to disgraced crypto king (and long-lost Fourth Stooge) Sam Bankman-Fried. Hell, they’ve probably started pre-writing her obituary with the headline “Balint, Beneficiary of Fraudulent Crypto Bro Wealth and Vermont’s First Woman in Congress, Dies at [insert age here].”

Digger’s been at this for a while now. Every time there’s a fresh development in the downfall of Bankman-Fried, Digger’s political team cranks out a story that reports said development and fills out the space by recapping all the old stuff about his million-dollar donation to a political action committee that then spent it in support of Balint, and hinting at a deeper relationship between the two.

It’s a nice way to fill the news hole, but c’mon.

Digger’s latest breathless retelling of the same old story refers to Bankman-Fried as “Balint’s $1 Million Benefactor,” which is about the most sinister possible way to characterize the situation. “Benefactor” implies two very untrue things: That the two had some sort of undisclosed relationship, and that he straight-up gave her a big bag of cash.

In truth, Bankman-Fried gave a bunch of money to the Victory Fund, a political action committee that supports LGBTQ+ candidates. The Victory Fund then spent it, almost certainly at SBF’s behest, on a last-minute ad blitz supporting Balint’s bid for Congress.

And no matter how long our political media keep chewing on that dry old bone, they can’t prove that Balint knew about any of this, that she’d made a deal of some kind with SBF, or that the money made any significant difference in Balint’s primary win over then-lieutenant governor Molly Gray. They continue to hint at it whenever they can, but that’s as far as they can get.

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Our Best and Our Brightest

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One of our precious Boys in Blue, a Vermont State Trooper, is responsible for the above mess. Allegedly responsible.

This is a screenshot from a rousing game of Mad Verse City that involved several troopers. (Allegedly.) MVC is a cheap-looking online game that tests your rap skills. And I think it’s safe to say that not only did the participants freely engage in racist, ableist and misogynistic language, they’re monumentally shitty rappers to boot. (The black band obscures a variant of the N-word, which you can guess from context.)

Another (alleged) blue-shirted rapper closed his rhyme with “If being racist is right, then I’ll never be wrong.” A third used the word “retarded” in a rap that included his (alleged) real name.

Pack of geniuses we’ve got here.

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Duval Picks Up Moore’s Envelope, Rips It To Shreds, Flings Pieces Into the Air

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The storm clouds are gathering. The forces are assembling. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the Scott administration is going to war against the Vermont Climate Council and any progressive climate legislation that the Statehouse majority might send to the governor’s desk.

Last week, we saw Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore give a “back-of-the-envelope” guesstimate of the short-term costs of S.5, the Affordable Heat Act, which she herself acknowledged was probably inaccurate. Then, on Tuesday, there was an unusually aggressive riposte by Jared Duval, a member of the Climate Council. Duval pretty much ripped Moore’s testimony to little tiny bits. (Video of the hearing is here starting at the 1:40 mark; his written testimony can be downloaded here.)

Duval submitted a lengthy, detailed written statement that destroyed Moore’s testimony line by line and concluded that it was “inappropriately selective, improperly done, and deeply misleading.”

No punches pulled, then.

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Top Administration Official Invites Senators to Disbelieve Her Testimony

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Some people in the Scott administration strike me as experts in their field who don’t necessary buy official policy, but stick it out in hopes of influencing said policy. Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore is at the top of that list, as is Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine. Sometimes when Moore is shilling the company line she seems less than 100% behind what she’s saying.

But inviting lawmakers to discount her testimony? That’s a new one.

Moore appeared on January 26 before the Senate Natural Resources Committee. The topic was S.5, the Affordable Heat Act, previously d/b/a the Clean Heat Standard. Moore was there to deliver dire news about the short-term costs of the Act and the lack of in-depth research on its consequences.

She acknowledged that her “back-of-the-envelope math” could “easily be off by a factor of two here.” She even said it would be “pefectly reasonable” for committee members to be “offended” by her guesstimates. VTDigger reported these remarks but failed to express how unusual, if not downright weird, it is for a state official to cast such doubt on their own testimony.

Mind you, these caveats weren’t off-the-cuff. They were part of her written testimony. Here’s the passage in full.

The administration is openly opposed to S.5 and, indeed, to any strong steps against climate change. In that context, one would suspect that administration officials would, if anything, exaggerate the negative impacts of S.5. And Moore openly courted that kind of suspicion.

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