The secretly drafted all terrain vehicle give-a-way of state land is a product of the Douglas administration.  To be fair to ANR, a besieged and imperfect agency just like all the rest, this problem is being forced on them and ANR is being forced to dump it on us.  

While Vermonters are hearing vaffanculo loud and clear, the message is coming from Jim Douglas’s posse and not the ANR bureaucracy.  From the beginning, this has been a political decision  shepherded by Jim Douglas’s personally selected Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Jonathan Wood. There has been no policy consideration in normal sense of the process as the Douglas administration hides behind ANR’s skirt while pulling Jonathan Wood’s strings.

Regardless of how you feel about the proposed new State land give-a-way for motorized vehicles, understand how we came to this point. The people at ANR did not spend the winter drafting these rules and waiting for the legislature to adjourn before pulling the trigger this controversy. These proposed rules were quietly drafted within a tight circle of people who had the Governor’s knowing, direct & express blessing to pull this stunt. The Governor’s team also – and deliberately – waited until just a few clicks of the lights AFTER the General Assembly adjourned in May before it announced this turkey publicly. The secrecy and timing was no accident, and it was not how a state agency works with interested parties in developing a rule prior to proposing it. The ATV rulemaking process continues to be 99% calculated politics and barely 1% off-the-cuff agency policy deliberation and rulemaking.  The process has been, and is, a joke.  

We have witnessed nothing but window dressing. Purported acts of procedural rulemaking process have covered for the failure of the Douglas administration to engage in actual policy. The ATV rules are nothing more than politically divisive acts, and the proposed new ATV rules represent an intentional failure to perform the responsibilities of government. The rulemaking process was outside of the public’s eye and done without the legislature’s knowledge or the knowledge of anyone who may have had an interest other than the crony constituency that is receiving the hand-out. It amounts to another dereliction of duty by the Republicans who have been skating around Montpelier playing office for the past seven years while letting corporations, cronies and incompetents bleed the state of economic opportunities for sustained and healthy growth.

The ATV rules were proposed with Jim Douglas’s OK, they were revised and continued on his OK, and they will go forward on his OK as part of a Republican effort of division politics.  This is not about ANR, this is manipulation coming from and controlled by the Governor’s office by a politically divisive clique that, among them, could not find first gear on an ATV with a hand clutch up their ass.