The open-doors policy at Vermont’s statehouse suggests a level of citizen access that should be the envy of every other state; yet, all is not nearly so rosy as one might expect.  

Open community government is more difficult to achieve.  It’s all about who your people are and where you come from.  Sometimes it gets downright nasty.

I was drowning in a local issue when the news broke last month that Vermont stacks up abysmally to other states in the department of transparent government.   We apparently are particularly susceptible to violations of the Open Meeting Laws.

Now that I can at last see a little daylight,  I’ve got an itch to revisit that story, since conflicts of interest have most certainly played a role in nearly every local issue in which I have become engaged over the past dozen or so years.

The Better Government Association (BGA) ranks Vermont 43rd out of the fifty states on its integrity index. Wow!  Who’d have thought?

The BGA reasons that states having experienced the most government scandals have responded with transparency improvements; so Illinois, home state of the infamous Rod Blagojevich, now ranks third in the nation for transparency.

LIttle old Vermont has a relatively quiet past in terms of statewide public scandal; so, bolstering government transparency here has assumed a low priority.

This, coupled with the comfortable intimacy of a small population, has given rise to some very bad habits, which are simply not recognized as such by the people who wield the power on a local level.  A few large and well-connected families effectively hold the collective reigns of local decision making in many communities; so that we routinely see cousins issuing permit approvals to cousins.

It never occurs to most people to question this arrangement, but they should.

Compounding the problem are the extremely limited parameters that define conflicts of interest in Vermont, and the almost total lack of consequences.  If the individual executing a decision on behalf of the public good, or that individual’s spouse or immediate offspring, cannot be demonstrated to directly gain financially from that decision, Vermont law looks no further.  

It doesn’t matter whether issuance of a permit, for instance, will directly impact the value of the decision maker’s property; or if a first cousin is the applicant whose project is under consideration.  Under such circumstances, nothing in Vermont law requires the decision maker to recuse (withdraw) him or herself from the process; and these relationship conflicts routinely occur and remain unchallenged.

It is left entirely to the individual to determine whether or not he or she has a conflict of interest requiring recusal from the decision-making process.

One of my favorite stories illustrating the pitfalls of government that is just too small comes from early in the annals of Vermont’s own blue collar “crime wave,” which catapulted the state to another dubious distinction as the state having the tenth highest risk of embezzlement.  

Back in 2007, Isle-La-Motte’s Town Clerk Treasurer Suzanne LaBombard confessed to having embezzled $100,000. The Selectboard consisted of her father, who tried to mitigate the loss by purchasing her house so that she could return what she stole to the town coffers; her boyfriend who was the Chair; and one more individual who, as far as we know, had no direct relationship to Ms. LaBombard.  

That was it. That was the entire brain trust and firewall protecting the 375-strong community’s public assets. LaBombard had been Town Clerk/Treasurer for twenty-one years when she finally had to confess!  Who even knows how much went on before she completely lost control and had to fess up to the $100,000. dip?

This was a pretty spectacularly criminal example of Vermont-style conflicts of interest; but speaking just about Franklin County, the “family feasting” that goes on around public permits and patronage jobs  is notorious.  

Until the legislature gets serious about adopting restrictive language and real consequences for public officials exercising conflicts of interest, we can expect to continue our history of bad behaviors on the local level.

Those behaviors disenfranchise citizens and rob communities of the value they can get from open minds, constructive dissent, and creative vision.