Today the Associated Industries of Vermont will bring together the Douglas appointees (as opposed to the impartial career experts) charged with pushing through the proposed new State land all-terrain vehicle laws. The meeting relates to the regulations (laws) governing archeological sites.

What’s happening behind closed doors, after the flip.

From the Newsguy

From nine in the morning to (roughly) four in the afternoon on Thursday, Vermont business leaders will meet at the Capitol Plaza Hotel across the street from the State House in downtown Montpelier with senior state officials – including Jonathan Wood, the Secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources, who is scheduled to be the lunch speaker – to discuss “major regulatory developments” . . .

[Archeological] rule revisions are controversial. Archeologists and their supporters argue that the proposed changes would eliminate preservation on ” lands that have potential (archeological) sites, and restrict it to known sites. That leaves us only investigating areas where there are known historical sites,” said John Crock, an archeology professor at the University of Vermont.

Mmmmmm  So what’s going on?

More Newsguy

. . . Thursday’s conference will provide an opportunity for partisans on one side of the debate – the side that wants to “clarify”( or weaken as the case may be) the rules- to spend several hours presenting their case to some of the very officials who will make the final (though not quite irrevocable) decision.

The event, in short, is newsworthy. . . it will provide some people the opportunity to try to convince those government officials to make the public policy the guests want.

Too bad the Newsguy, along with anyone else who wants to commit an act of journalism, is banned from covering this off-the-record meeting w/public officials.

And what did AIV tell the Newsguy when AIV said “no journalism beyond this line?”

“It’s not like any sort of official meeting, . . . It’s a seminar. It’s not an event for (government) agency folks to listen to us as much as an event for us to listen to agency folks. People come with the expectation that it’s going to be an off-the-record meeting.”

Isn’t that special. No lobbying, no expressing views to government officials, no attempts to shape policy, no officials answering questions about changing state policy.

We should just take that on faith, right?

So what do the lobbyists at Associated Industries tell their members, i.e., the people who are coming merely so they can (cough cough) “listen to agency folks” as AIV claims?  Well AIV tell participants that a goal of AIV is to:

“bring [them] to the table with administration officials, regulators, and legislators to engage directly in the legislative and regulatory process.”

The “regulatory process.”  That would be the regulatory process governing how you and I use (or don’t use) State lands. And “bringing AIV members to the table…to engage directly in the…regulator process” is just what they say publicly. What does AIV say it expects to deliver from government officials in private?  Guess we won’t know will we.