We just received this press release:

HODES OPENS UP VERMONT YANKEE MEETING TO THE PUBLIC

As News Of New Radioactive Leak Further Rocks Trust In The Plant, Hodes Successfully Opens NRC Briefing To The Public

Hodes: Yankee Needs To Be Shut Down Until All Leaks Are Found And Fixed

Washington D.C. – Today, Paul Hodes announced that he has successfully opened to members of the community the publicized “non-public” meeting which was scheduled between officials from local governments, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and executives from Vermont Yankee. Hodes has worked with the NRC to ensure that area families are able to access the same health and safety information that government officials receive. New reports of radioactive cesium-137 leaking into the soil have created even more concerns surrounding the troubled plant and further underscore the importance of a public dialogue.

[…] The NRC briefing, which had previously been slated to be non-public, has been opened to the community after Hodes put pressure on meeting organizers to make this meeting open to the public. The meeting will be moved to April 12th. Details on the time and location will be determined.

Normally I don’t like to redistribute press releases, but this was too important and I’m with limited access throughout the day and just wanted to get it up.

It was about a month and a half ago that I posted this piece, specifically noting that:

…if you read this piece, it looks as though the plan being discussed will exclude non-union shops from participating.

Here’s the thing, though: it doesn’t.  It merely requires them to hold their employment standards to a certain level.  This makes for a better bid process, because it prevents the contractors with good and solid labor practices from losing out to other companies which will just go for really low bids and pay their employees lower wages and benefits.

But, of course, hackery abounds.  In this specific case, the hackery takes more than one form.

In the Times Argus we hear that:

Vermont lawmakers have weighed in as well. A letter signed by the chairmen of the House and Senate transportation committees asks New York officials to dispense with any PLA that has “the effect of putting Vermont contractors at a competitive disadvantage” or would force them to “go outside their usual labor pool.”

“We’re paying for half the bridge,” Patrick Brennan, chairman of the House Transportation Committee said Friday. “We may as well get some work out of it.”

This, of course, is hyperbole.  No one is a competitive disadvantage here unless they are unwilling to abide by certain minimum standards.  If Hirschfeld had bothered to contact anyone other than right wing anti union hacks in “researching” this piece, he would have known this.

And speaking of research, our research here at GMD notes that the vice-chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, Phil Scott, is “co-owner of DuBois Construction Inc.”  

Right.  No possible conflict of interest there when it comes to a bridge contract.

I just gotta say, if the media were doing its job on this sort of thing, it would save me a lot of time.  Okay, a little time.  But still, just because I can spend 15 minutes using Google doesn’t mean that people who are paid to do research for a living shouldn’t do a bit better.

The mind is a very strange thing.  For some reason, I’ve been thinking about my friend Christine lately.  

Christine and I were close to the same age and she was one of the first people I became good friends with after I moved to Providence.  

She was funny, wicked smart, and looked at the world differently from pretty much anyone I knew.  She was also unhealthy for most of her adult life, chronically depressed, yet still strove to find good in almost everyone, even when she was actively shutting them out of her life.

I had spent much of my adult life alone.  She wasn’t hearing any of that, and on Thanksgiving one year, she invited me to come.  It turned into a thing, where I was actively expected each year.  For years, I would sit with her and her family.  I think partially it was for cover.  She and I were usually the only vegetarians there, so it gave her opportunity to cook more of the food she wanted.  When I got diagnosed with diabetes, she was intensely supportive, never pushing me to eat more than I should and always making a point of stopping anyone else from trying to guilt me into eating more (a common plague of social situations that revolve around food).

When I turned 30, she called me.  She wanted to know if I was freaking out (I wasn’t).  She had completely freaked out a few months earlier when it happened to her.  To me, it was just one of those things.  I had more trouble with 36, because that meant I was closer to 40 than 30.  That kind of freaked me out a bit, but that just gave me time to get over it.  Today, at 42, I’m back to being unconcerned with age.  (though I anticipate a major freakout when I turn 46).

Christine didn’t make it this far.  She went to bed one night.  She didn’t wake up the next.  It might have been intentional on her part.  It might not have.  I’ve never asked.  I didn’t think her mom needed to be put through that sort of question.  Knowing Christine, I could have easily seen it either way.  I always kind of felt she was constantly wondering if she was ready to check out of the world.  

I got that, in a pretty major way.  I wasn’t so sure at the time I wanted to stick around either.

I hadn’t seen Christine for more than a year when she passed.  I’d moved away from Providence and found it hard to work up a desire to return.  Her memorial service was what got me to come back.  I hadn’t known until then that she’d had Lyme disease for half a decade.  She hadn’t known either.  She’d finally gotten treatment for it in the year before she’d died.  She was healthier and more active than she’d ever been as an adult.

What a way to go.  When you’re finally healthy.

After she died, I saw and heard her in various ways for about a week.  I don’t mean I believe she was actually there.  I mean, I would be doing something, and I’d hear her voice saying something to me.  It was generally something funny and clever.  One time I got into the car and looked in the rear view mirror and saw her, just for a moment.  And then I heard her say “make sure you don’t crash into anything” and that was it.  This happened off and on for about a week.  Then it just stopped.  And it never happened again.

That was a long time ago.  A lot of small things have changed.  A few big ones have, too.  I’m not going to go into details about that. I’ve written about many of them in the past, and some of the more deeply personal ones, I will most likely never write about, but I will share them with close friends when the time is right.  

I don’t mourn Christine.  She had a short, but incredible, life, one filled with richness of experience, creativity and moments of major joy.  I adored her.  I miss her still sometimes, but I stopped mourning her a long time ago.  

Today, as a diabetic, as someone struggling with health, someone who spent so much of her life just not very active, I think back to friends who have died and find myself thinking “move.”  

Even as I write this, I think, “I want to get up.”  I’m ansty to get back on the treadmill again.  I’ll do that, very soon, but first I want to just say: I spent too much time, too many years wallowing in my inability to make progress with my own health.  I spent too much of my life trying to convince myself that because my medications have weight gain as a side effect, this was an excuse for not being healthier.  I spent too much of my life thinking that I wasn’t worth self improvement.

So this is where it stands:

I deserve better than I have thought of myself.

I deserve better than I have allowed myself.

I deserve better than I have treated myself.

From this day forward, I honor those who have passed by living my life by living it.  I honor myself by treating myself better than I think I deserve.  

I’ve stopped thinking I might have the strength to do this. I’m beyond that now.  Now I’m just doing it.

How about you?

I consider Mike Mrowicki a friend, and I wish him no ill.  I do, however, feel like I can’t just let this sit, despite our friendship.   I find this to be an extremely difficult post to write, but it’s necessary.  So…

In yesterday’s Brattleboro Reformer, Mike had a letter to the editor:

Howard Weiss-Tisman’s March 17 article clearly articulated the dire circumstances facing child care providers and the Agency of Human Services.

A vital omission though is that I did not vote in committee for these cuts in the administration’s proposed budget. I’m well aware of the importance of having people who can meet, face to face with those seeking help.

I agree with Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin’s statement that, in this instance and many others, cutting position funded in part or fully, by federal dollars, is senseless.

[…]

The fact of the matter is simply that Rep. Mrowicki (along with 122 other members in the house) voted for these cuts when it came to the broader vote outside of committee.  You can see the whole bill outlined here with the complete roll call here.  

Nearly everyone in the legislature supported this.  It’s going to cause us serious problems that I think need major undoing, but in order to figure out how to work through these problems, it does not serve us to compartmentalize our behavior so well.  I’m sure voting for this was very difficult for Mike, and I can respect that.  What is problematic for me is the choice to write a letter which implies that the vote came without his help.  I know Mike can do so much better than that and it’s part of my obligation to push him to do so.

An article from today’s Rutland Herald caught my eye.  There’s a $7,500 appropriation to the Boy Scouts for a veteran’s day parade in the budget, and there’s controversy over it because the scouts have an anti-gay policy with respect to their volunteer pool.

I get the arguments in support of this money– it does fund a veteran’s day parade, but still it creates problems to have state money going to support an organization which is overtly homophobic.

So I have a proposal: appropriate the money, not to the Scouts themselves but to fund a veteran’s day parade, and allow the scouts to volunteer to do the work in putting it together, but don’t allow the money to be used to promote the Boy Scouts in any way, shape or form.

It still allows the good work to be done, without using state funds to promote an organization which is openly hostile towards lesbians and gay men.

Per today’s Rutland Herald, in a piece about Snowboard manufacturer Burton moving its production facilities out of state:

David Mace, a spokesman for the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, said… the state had worked with Burton in the past to create jobs, most recently in 2008 when the company was authorized to receive $1.6 million in Vermont Employment Growth Incentive payments. The cash payments are made to companies that create jobs and make capital investments.

Mace said Burton was authorized to receive VEGI payments based on the creation of research and development jobs. He said to date the company has not claimed any incentive payments.

He said the loss of the Burton jobs is an example that the state needs to do more to reduce costs for businesses, including high taxes, workers’ compensation and burdensome regulations and mandates.

Okay.  So.

We need to reduce costs for businesses, but Burton turned down $1.6 million in money we were ready to hand them?   And this couldn’t, possibly, have anything to do with the controversy over Burton’s risque snowboards from a couple years ago?  Burton’s relationship with Vermont changed quite a bit after that and that could easily influence whether a company stays or leaves a state.  Losing partnerships with local resorts makes a big difference to this sort of thing.  

But hey, why dig deeper when you can just blame high taxes and regulations (you know– the sort of things that keep products from killing, wounding or maiming us) for everything?

This was a good week to be photographing hawks (among other birds).  This red-tail gave me some good looks at it:

This mallard was doing a mating display:

The other red-tail I spotted was having none of it when I tried to photograph it:

Other birds included this flock of canada geese:

And this rare Greater White-Fronted Goose (visitor from across the ocean which sometimes pops up around here in migration times):

Well, I have to say, it’s a good thing that “the environment” is not in any danger.  Otherwise, I’d be a little concerned that VY is waiting until April to start repairing its leaks.  The reasoning?  

Because it is near impossible, during plant operation, to get into the pipe tunnel where a leaking pipe is located, the repairs will have to wait until it is offline for refueling…

But it’s all good, because they have a “conceptual plan” to take care of that.

Now, just a bit of history: this leak was discovered in January.  Specifically, January 6th.  And April is… let’s see… too damned many months to be leaking radiation without shutting down the plant for repairs.

Oh, and we’re not talking early April.   We’re talking April 24. That’s 108 days later.  But hey, at least they’ve got cool toy robots investigating:

A small robot that was exploring the underground pipe tunnel believed to be the source of the radioactive tritium leak at the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor has fallen victim to one of the contributing factors of the leak – radioactive “mud” from deteriorating concrete and radioactive water.

I feel better now.

Per today’s Rutland Herald:

Larry Smith, spokesman for Entergy Nuclear, said Monday that the hole was located in an elbow in a 1-1/2-inch pipe, and he said the company was investigating what caused the hole and whether to replace the elbow or patch it.

[…]

The water coming from the hole is not reaching the environment, since it is in an underground pipe tunnel and the water goes into a drain, where it is eventually treated, Smith said.

So just to make this clear: there is a hole in this pipe, but there is no danger to “the environment” because the liquid goes through other underground pipes before being released into “the environment.”

Anyone else see the… hole… in this suggestion?

So here’s something interesting:

Federal Waiver

In order to derive maximum benefit from the redesign, the state will seek a Global Commitment-style super-waiver from Washington that covers all human service programs across a number of federal agencies, including HHS, USDA, and HUD.  The waiver will provide for unprecedented flexibility from federal requirements.  The state will pass the flexibility granted by the federal government through to its service providers.  Additional flexibilities should not be construed to release the state or providers from obligations to ensure that consumer rights are protected and payments are appropriate.

While a federal waiver is preferable, the overall redesign should not be contingent on the waiver.  In fact, the overall project should be structured on independent tracks, so if any one track fails, the other tracks would be unaffected.  As tracks ultimately intersect and join together, the whole of the project will be greater than the sum of its parts.

I recently posted about the Challengese for Change document which the legislature placed into law without any real notification or warning to the general public.  Today, I’d like to focus on the section quoted above.

So this concept of a “federal waiver” intrigues me.  It specifically intrigues me because federal requirements for social services tend to be there for specific reasons.  Given that the section immediately following that piece is about technology as preferable to “the old service paradigm of a client waiting in a line, finally talking to an agent across a desk or counter, and the agent doing data entry.”

Another aspect of what that agent does is to help people who do not understand or comprehend what it is they are being asked.

I’ve blogged previously about my trouble simply applying to Catamount.  A lot of the issues I had with those applications had to do with the fact that everything was done remotely.  Simple paperwork requirements took months to complete because they did not tell me everything they needed.  They kept telling me one thing they needed, then the next, and so on, until I finally ended up finding a full time job which insured me without Catamount.

But if we rely on technology as a substitute for this human contact, where does this leave us?  I’ve been hearing stories about people trying to work with economic services who are having an extremely hard time making their way into the system.  What I’ve been hearing specifically is that those who are already in the system are fine, but getting into the system at all is a nightmare.  Not as in “it’s a little tricky,” but as in “no, we can’t accept your paperwork in person at this office.  Here’s a number you can call,” which leads to a number that no one answers.

So are these requirements for providing proper, good and acceptable service, that we’re seeking to get a waiver from?  Are we looking for “unprecedented flexibility” to dramatically reduce access for the disabled or illiterate?  Are we looking to be able to avoid “obligations” to provide fair and reasonable access to our most vulnerable members?

I don’t know that the people involved in this decision making process even know the answers to these questions.  I don’t see any indication that there’s been the proper amount of time to assess these issues in a reasoned and deliberate fashion.  This vote came fast, too fast, and our legislators and other candidates for higher office need to go on the record as to exactly what they expect this legislation to do and how they expect it to happen.