Category Archives: local/regional

Finding a Governor in the VPR Tea Leaves

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2016: the year of surprises. Donald Trump sweeping to victory in Nevada and South Carolina this week has every pundit in the game eating crow. Bernie’s huge win in New Hampshire was unthinkable a few months back. That said, we’re going to have to wait a while longer to be surprised when it comes to the Vermont governor’s race.

The VPR poll didn’t say anything shocking on the subject of who will occupy Vermont’s top office next year. First of all- Vermonters aren’t paying attention yet, and that’s good news for the Democrats. Fully 2/3 of Vermonters are either not following the race closely or not following it at all.

It’s no surprise that Lt. Governor Phil Scott polls well. He is the only candidate in the race who occupies statewide office. He has the best name recognition. The casual reader might say that it looks like he has a huge lead. Only one-third of respondents said they could tell whom they favored in the Governor’s race so far. So, you can throw out the question that tries to stack all of the four candidates against each other. Democrats and Independents aren’t yet ready to say which candidate they support.

Republicans are clear about their choice for Governor. Phil Scott is the solid favorite on the Republican side. Bruce Lisman couldn’t hit double digits no matter how the question was asked. After all of the time, effort and (of course) money that Bruce Lisman put into Campaign for Vermont and his race the VPR poll must be a big disappointment.

Matt Dunne has a solid lead against Sue Minter across regions and demographics. Still, those who are not sure who to vote for make up the majority of Democrats, so it’s still anyone’s game. A friend reminded me today that Brian Dubie had a 20 point lead all summer long in 2010 as the Democrats were battling it out. Dubie’s poll numbers dropped quickly once the race was head-to-head.

My money says that Scott’s numbers will dive like Brian Dubie’s if one of the Democrats surges and becomes the presumptive nominee, and will definitely do so once the primary happens. August is a long way away at this point though, and a lot can happen in six months.

If Donald Trump or another wild candidate like Senator Ted Cruz wins the Republican nomination it won’t help Lt. Governor Scott’s chances of winning in November. While the conventional wisdom says Scott will be our next Governor, I think 2016 is the year of the unconventional.

Matt Dunne must be looking at this poll and seeing the opportunity. He has the early advantage among Democrats and if he can introduce himself to the 2/3 of Vermonters who aren’t paying much attention yet he may be able to do the unbelievable and beat Phil Scott in November.

Vermont Yankee Entergy: wading in the shallow end of safety

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This may be a sign of just how responsibly and seriously Entergy intends to take safety concerns while the plant prepares for what the NRC calls SAFSTOR (SAFe STORage)for up to 60 years.

From VtDigger.com: The Intex “Easy Set” swimming pool retails for anywhere from $35 to $500 depending on its dimensions and it’s billed as one of “the easiest family and friend-sized pools to set up in the world.”

But in Vernon, the Easy Set is serving a much different purpose than the one advertised on the manufacturer’s colorful website: It’s being used to help manage a complex groundwater-intrusion problem at Vermont Yankee.

That news about Vermont Yankee will likely not surprise anyone who remembers how Entergy let the operating boiling water reactor’s wooden cooling tower deteriorate so badly that that by 2007 it collapsed into a pile of timber leaking water.vermontcoolingtower

Well give them credit; rushing out to Home Depot to buy a bunch of cheap plastic swimming pools for this is better than just mops and buckets.  However they might want to use the term SOTASAFSTOR (SOrT Aa SAFe STORage) to be more accurate about Vermont Yankee’s condition.

The NRC reports the kiddie pools are located in the lower level of the turbine building and are “[…] placed such that any leakage would drain into the plant’s radioactive waste treatment system,” And no need to worry: the low level radioactive kiddie pools are only temporary — until the technicians come up with a better plan.

No worries. Entergy Vermont Yankee spokesman Marty Cohn echoed that, saying “there is no health or safety impact to the public or employees from this issue.” The swimming pools are a temporary measure, he added.

“The integrity of the pools was found to be adequate and the water found to be acceptable for those types of pools,” Cohn said. “Drains near these pools lead to sump pumps, which in turn lead to a waste-processing system.”VYkidpool

And while they mop up the contaminated water, Entergy and the plant’s surrounding town are “condensing” their emergency plan capacity. Beginning in April the emergency zone shrinks to the nuclear power plant site’s boundary, and one person on site is trained to extinguish basic fires and act as liaison to local agencies

Only a “catastrophic” event — like if all the water is released from the cooling pools and the fuel then reheats — would require a response from outside towns. And even then, according to plant owner Entergy, an emergency would unfold slowly.

“We’d have anywhere from 10 hours to 10 days to react,” said Brattleboro Fire Chief Mike Bucossi, “and reverse the process of those fuel rods.”

Yes VY, fill up the pools! Even in a catastrophe — according to Entergy — there is “anywhere from 10 hours to 10 days to react” — time enough to wade in the shallow end.

Dr. Strangedrug or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big PhARMA

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I watched the Super Bowl with my father, and as a cord-cutting member of the millenial generation I will admit that the most expensive ad buys of the year are a guilty pleasure. My fave was definitey Mt. Dew Kickstart’s “Puppy Monkey Baby”. Great dose of weirdness for a product I will never buy.

The real shocker though was an ad for a new drug, taking care of a problem one would like to think only a small, small minority of Americans face. Surely the market of people suffering from Opioid-Induced Constipation is not so great as to justify a multi-million dollar Super Bowl ad buy…. but apparently it is.

According to CNN there were 259 million prescriptions for opiates in 2012. Percocet, Vicodin, and the big daddy of them all OxyContin. The U.S. Pain Foundation says 1 in 3 Americans are in pain. If the market keeps growing the way AstraZeneca thinks, there will be 10 times more people who are suffering from OIC in 2019 than there are today.

The reaction to the ad was swift. Federal, state and local law enforcement took to Twitter to voice their disgust. Gov. Shumlin weighed in saying,

“The irrational exuberance with which opiates are handed out in America is driving the addiction crisis in this country…Now is the time to change that, not attempt to further normalize long-term opiate use by advertising a drug to help people take even more opiates during the most watched sporting event of the year.”

There is a huge disconnect between the public health crisis of opiate addiction and the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries promotion of these drugs. The fact that these drugs relieve terrible pain in a powerful, some would say “miraculous” way isn’t a justification for their liberal over-prescription.

My high school friend died from a heroin overdose, and got started by using pills like OxyContin. Another friend found his teenage son dead. These deaths are preventable. We could decide to treat these drugs with greater care. Limit their availability to those who are severe pain for whom non-opioid pain relief isn’t enough. That is not what we do. Opiates are the go to for post-operative pain management and chronic pain management.

I once went to the doctor with a friend who had a severe sore throat that wouldn’t go away. She walked out of a short visit with a big bottle of Hydrocodone. It was like prescribing a bazooka when a BB gun would do. She ended up just taking some Tylenol and resting up for a couple of days.Is the elimination of pain really a healthy goal for a society when the side-effect is the death of our children? Why are we doing this?

The answer is so obvious and so banal, it’s become cliche: PROFITS. Last year Forbes did a profile of the Sackler family and their $14 Billion net worth. It’s a sickening read. It describes the way in which the Sackler’s company, Purdue Pharma took generic Oxycodone, added a time-release mechanism to “prevent abuse” and expanded the market far beyond the cancer patients that a powerful opiate like this was originally prescribed to treat.

“Someone looking for a fix could just crush the pills to break the time-release mechanism, then snort the powder for a heroin-like high. Addiction, overdoses and accidental deaths followed, and Purdue Pharma found itself facing charges that it had misbranded OxyContin as far less risky than it was.”

They ended up paying $635 million in fines in 2007. I bet they still crack jokes at parties about the tiny percentage of their billions this amounts to. I wonder how many people they know are hiding their opiate addiction from their families, switching to heroin when they can no longer afford the pills and dying as a result of the Sacklers’ greed.

Yesterday I attended a “Congress in your Community” event with Rep. Peter Welch. Former State Senator Sara Kittell talked about the need for more support for treatment and recovery programs. We discussed the success of some local law enforcement efforts. Everyone looked at me like I had two heads when I brought up the idea of limiting the amount of prescriptions being written for these drugs. Before you work on the symptoms of blood loss from a patient, don’t you staunch the bleeding?

Local politicians pay a lot of lip service to this issue, but they haven’t been willing to demand that we do healthcare differently or put up the resources for access to treatment and recovery programs. We have got to have a shift in policy at the federal level, no doubt. However, we could do some things at the state level that would make prescription opiates less available. This requires challenging the pharmaceutical and  healthcare industry and our culture’s obsession with pain.

In a way I wonder if we’re all addicted to opiates. I’m not willing to watch people in my life become addicted to opiates and die from them and then pretend that there’s nothing we can do to prevent more deaths. We know what we have to do, but I fear we don’t have the will to do it. The fact that it has become acceptable to promote the sale of a drug to treat a side-effect from opiate use during the most-watched sporting event of the year should be evidence enough that we have a huge problem.

Welcome back, Jon!

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Nothing could please me more than sharing this news: Jon Groveman, a dear friend to sustainability, is returning to the Vermont Natural Resource Council after serving as General Counsel for the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources (since 2011), and as Chair of the Natural Resources Board (appointed in 2015.)

Jon will be the new Policy and Water Program Director at the VNRC, but the benefit of his experience and passion for the work will no doubt be felt throughout the organization.

Having served above and beyond the call as Water Program Director and General Counsel at the VNRC for a number of years, Jon accepted the appointment at ANR in order to see that agency into a new and more meaningful role under the stewardship of Secretary Deb Markowitz.

In the interim, VNRC has grown in size and influence with the commingling of its skills and resources with those of Vermont Conservation Voters to become the keystone of Vermont environmental policy and education that it is today. (Full disclosure: I am proud to currently serve on the board of the VCV.)

With Jon rejoining the ranks, we can look forward to a dynamic future of advocacy for sustainable living at the VNRC, that matches the demands of twenty-first century policy questions.

If all this ‘endorsement’ sounds unusually florid, even for me, it is because Jon was an influence on me at the dawn of my late-flowering grassroots involvement.

For more than ten years, as we, of the Northwest Citizens for Responsible Growth fought to save our local economy and prime agricultural soils from Walmart, Jon was our legal representative and so much more.

We have Jon and his family to thank for the time they sacrificed together so that all of the little legal battles on the way to the big one could be fought in turn. Some of those battles brought important victories for water protection that will benefit Franklin County despite the fact that we were ultimately unable to stop the store from being built.

In the interim won by Jon’s hard labor, market influences within Walmart and the economy as a whole have worked to minimize the store’s ultimate impact on the area. Unlike in Williston, the success of the Walmart application has not resulted in the explosion of secondary growth that was expected to follow.

At this writing, St. Albans’ Walmart (like the cheese) stands alone in the middle of a vast tract of undeveloped property with only a small credit union on the corner of the lot to keep it company.

As it turns out, this may be fortunate for St. Albans, since Walmart has recently announced closure of hundreds of stores and the lay-off of thousands of workers. Walmart is no longer the anchor store it once was, and the big box store is rapidly approaching the same fate as conventional department stores that went the way of the dinosaur.

Jon remains a hero to many friends in Franklin County.  As we look with foreboding to the critical significance of water issues in our future, we are comforted to know that Jon Groveman will be our champion in the courts and beyond.

Welcome home, Jon!

Tales from the Trail: Bernie NH Canvass

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I went down I89 and crossed over into the full swing of primary election GOTV insanity today. I rode into Claremont with my friend Nick, who happens to be managing Matt Dunne’s campaign for Guv. I’m proud of Matt for being one of the few Vermont pols to endorse our hometown hero. He’s walking the walk too, knocking on doors during the last push before the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.

I teamed up with a Claremont local volunteer and went to work. At this stage the campaign is totally focused on turning out likely Sanders supporters, so the doors we were hitting were almost entirely friendly, if not enthusiastic.

One guy I spoke with was reluctant to tell me who he was supporting, but by the end he admitted he would be voting for Bernie in this, his first, primary. I guess there’s some truth to the notion that Bernie has the millennial vote locked up.

There were more than a few voters who would qualify for a senior citizens discount on my list, and many of them shook my hand and thanked me for helping Bernie win. One guy sent me across the street to talk with his son, and they both said that the primary was “serious business” and they’d be voting for Bernie on Tuesday.

At the field office, Franklin county native Lindsay Hunn and her sister Claire were  checking in volunteers and cutting turf for canvassers. It’s not surprising that  Bernie is doing so well in NH when some of the best field organizers from Vermont are staffing the campaign. Great to see them rocking it.

I’m hoping to take Tuesday off to hit the doors again on Election Day. Ain’t democracy beautiful?

 

 

 

 

Garrett Graff: You can’t get there from here

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Garrett Graff , a former editor from The Washingtonian and Politico magazine, has run headfirst into residency requirements and has decided not to run for Lt. Governor. Candidates for Lt Gov. are required to live in Vermont for four years before running for the office.

In November the 34 year-old left his job with Politico Magazine in Washington DC and made it known he was moving back to Vermont and planned to explore a run for Lt. Governor. graffgaff

Graff grew-up in Montpelier; his father was for many years the AP’s Vermont bureau chief covering the statehouse and currently is media spokesman for National Life.

 

Graff-the-younger seemed to be taken by surprise when he found himself at odds with residency eligibility laws. He had lived outside the state for 10years, but kept a state drivers license,was still registered to vote and claims Vermont remained his “mental home”.

He complains that the residency rule “[…] is going to discourage precisely the types of people that we would want to be involved in state government,” Shouldn’t residency, he wonders, be measured by a different mix of “physical presence” and “intent to return” — specifically those former residents who left the state for academic or professional enrichment and wish to return. Lucky for Graff  unabashed enlightened self interest isn’t frowned on too much, because the type of people he says Vermont should encourage for state government also happen to be mostly …well,  mostly him.

In a VtDigger.com commentary, Graff expresses support for certain residency requirements: “to ensure that someone running for office has ties to and knowledge of the state of Vermont.” Well, he might have wisely stopped there (note to Garrett: as of 2009 almost 50% of Vermont’s population was born outside the state)…but he adds: “I don’t want some flatlander like Jack McMullen arriving to buy a Senate seat any more than the next Vermonter.” But keep out the riffraff and millionaire flatlanders?

Poor Jack McMullen will forever remain the classic flatlander punching bag (see Fred Tuttle). You know, for all his many faults and the credible carpetbagging charges, he did actually have knowledge of the the state’s eligibility requirements before running for office.

Graff defines his own eligibility…

by pedigree: “But I am no flatlander and have the credentials to prove it. Born at Central Vermont Hospital and reared in Montpelier, I am a product of the city’s great public schools — and our family ties go back centuries. One of my ancestors was even a Green Mountain Boy at Fort Ticonderoga with Ethan Allen.”

Perhaps the residency requirements do need refining. However, I have to wonder, can Graff be totally unaware of how his clamoring “I am no flatlander” might be off putting to other new Vermonters… you know: some residents outside Montpelier and Washington DC. Even flatlanders are allowed the vote now- if they meet residency requirements.

In his legendary primary race against Fred Tuttle, Jack McMullen demonstrated  just how tone deaf to statewide political sensibilities a person can be. And young Graff,back after ten years, found a shortcut to display his own tone deafness to Vermont voters -he did it without entering a race at all.

Criminal history and all, Vermont loves captive insurance companies

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How much are they loved? Well, a former head of the Vermont Captive Insurance Association once called captives the “crown jewels in the state’s tiara” and swooned “There is maple syrup and skiing and cheddar cheese and captive insurance. What more could you want from life?”VT captive

The State of Vermont licenses more than one thousand captive insurance agencies (which exist to insure their parent companies). Once almost alone, but now one of eight states and the District of Columbia that currently have legalized captives in the US, the state fights for a share of the pie. “Vermont’s focus will always be licensing quality companies and regulating them in an appropriate manner commensurate with their risk.” says Dave Provost, Vermont’s Deputy Commissioner of Captive Insurance.

This isn’t car insurance. These are complex companies set up by (and captive to) a larger business in order to handle their own liability risk insurance needs. Essentially, an enterprise forms and manages its own insurance company as a subsidiary, and the enterprise’s other operating subsidiaries purchase insurance from the captive. 

For modest licensing fees, a small tax on premiums, and a friendly regulatory climate, Vermont provides a host of advantages for large corporations and wealthy families toward forming captives. Corporations can substantially lower their insurance costs, and captives provide shelter from certain federal corporate taxes. Premiums on small captives, also known as “cell” captives, hold special tax benefits for corporations. The benefits are so good, in fact, that in 2015 captive insurance was on the IRS’ “Dirty dozen” list of abusive tax scams

So then, how friendly are Vermont’s captive regulators? Well, only one member of each captive insurance board of directors is required to be (or become) a resident. And only one in-state meeting per year is required. But even that small demand is “waived” away by regulators : We do understand that the annual meeting requirement can be a hardship and have made many allowances over the years […] for last minute health or weather problems that made travel difficult.

In 2015 there were 33 new captives who chose to take shelter in Vermont. One notable captive with a colorful criminal history is Marubeni, a large Japanese commodity trading corporation.

Between 2012 and 2014 Marubeni paid $88-million and $56.6-million in US criminal penalty violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This bit of unpleasantness is part of a long line of scandals going back to accusations of hoarding rice to profit on the black market in the 1970’s. In the 1980’s Marubeni executives were arrested and charged with bribing Japanese government officials to favor Lockheed Aircraft in Japan. These arrests lead to several suicides and the resignation of the prime minister. They followed that up with a round of bribery scandals involving Philippine President Marcos and several national development funds.

Every year the Vermont Captive Insurance Association hosts a weeklong conference. This gathering is attended by those directly associated with captives. It is also a magnet for the likes of Governor Shumlin and Lt. Governor Phil Scott, both of whom never seem to tire of reminding the captive insurance visitors that we are the kindest, warmest, most wonderful regulators a captive could ever want.

Conference attendee Lt. Governor (and gubernatorial candidate) Phil Scott said our captive regulator model should be expanded to all Vermont’s regulated sectors.“Imagine if we had a governor’s office that treated every sector in the same way” said Scott recently.

Sure, can’t you see Killington or Stowe welcoming Marubeni Corporation, perhaps advertising as the new second home to criminal “captives”? And is this vision of a corporation-colonized Vermont a place you want to live, when we’re paying the taxes they’re avoiding?

Shaking Entergy’s Piggy Bank

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Does anyone other than me find it a little disconcerting that Entergy has managed to spend-down fully 10% of its decommissioning fund for Vermont Yankee in 2015 alone?

I don’t know about you, but I would very much like Vermont Auditor Doug Hoffer to take a look at how the decommissioning fund is being managed. He’s done a masterful job of casting a dispassionate eye over the efficiency of many government agencies, so I think he has more than demonstrated his mastery of such matters.

So far, Vermonters have nothing to rely upon other than Entergy’s own say-so that growing the decommissioning fund is right on track.

I know that we don’t get to say thing-one about matters of safety…like, for instance the plan to keep thousands of spent fuel rods on site in unconcealed casks, easily visible to nefarious fly-overs; or the fact that emergency planning is about to go away.

But, as the decommissioning fund arguably belongs to Vermont as much as to Entergy,
it seems entirely appropriate to ask that our auditor take a gander at the books.

(I write this as me, myself and I. Although I am pleased to be associated with Fairewinds Energy Education in a purely non-technical capacity, this diary was written with no input from Fairewinds.)

McAllister crashes FC Legislative Breakfast

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As the Senate grapples with its ethics bill, one man who is untroubled by that process is suspended senator Norm McAllister (R)who has apparently not gotten the memo that his ministrations are no longer wanted by Franklin County constituents.

Yesterday’s St. Albans Messenger carried a picture of McAllister seated, arms defiantly crossed, next to Rep. Dan Connor (D) of Fairfield at Monday’s legislative breakfast in Swanton.

I haven’t yet seen the Channel 16 coverage of the breakfast, but am told by a reliable source that Mr. McAllister actually tried to chair the meeting before Rep. Kathy Keenan (D) reminded him of his status.

There doesn’t appear to be any rule as to who gets to sit at the Big Boy table; I suppose even a constituent with chutzpah could take a seat.  Apart from Kathy Keenan’s intervention, I understand no one said anything about the elephant in the room, but photos in the Messenger show a bunch of distinctly unsmiling Republican representatives.

McAllister may be many things, but self-aware isn’t one of them.

Save local parental hearings

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Congratulations are due to Governor Shumlin for recognizing that it is unacceptable to balance the budget on the backs of low income expectant mothers.

That would have been a pretty sad legacy for his administration.

I won’t belabor that point (pun intended), but it seems an opportune time to discuss another matter that threatens many down-and-out families in my neck of the woods, Franklin County. Unfortunately, I can’t link you to Michelle Monroe’s excellent piece in the St. Albans Messenger, but after reading it, I felt compelled to share the issue with our Green Mountain Daily readers.

Judiciary shortages continue to plague the state. There are many whose lives are disrupted by the lack of speedy attention to their issues, but no where is the need more pressing than when it involves the fate of children in family court.

The Vermont Supreme Court has determined that it is not necessary to hear parental custody arguments close to home, and that the efficiencies available from consolidating these proceedings in a single Chittenden County location outweigh the argument that they should be easily accessible to parents who are already struggling with issues that have pushed their families to the breaking point.

These are hearings to terminate parental rights, the chilly acronym for which is “TPR.” How horrifying for the parent who has no car and a whole lot less luck, yet must find some way to appear in the court of another county in order to fight termination of their parental rights!  Not to mention the strain on Franklin County case workers who must add travel to and from Chittendon County for court appearances to their list of duties.

With TPR cases on the rise, especially in Franklin County, “outsourcing” the hearings seems a counterintuitive approach to the problem.

It isn’t the first time that vulnerable Franklin County families have gotten the short end of the stick. Remember the much touted state-of-the-art women’s prison that was built in St. Albans, with facilities especially planned to retrain female prisoners for a more functional life on their release? It’s proximity and conducive ambiance allowed families to visit incarcerated loved ones in a less stressful situation so that the important bonds of early childhood might be protected.

At least, that was supposed to be the idea.

Almost as soon as its doors opened to receive prisoners, the building was abruptly redirected for the use of male prisoners and the women were shipped to Chittenden County.

Nice.

Is money the issue holding up expansion of Vermont’s judiciary? I’d really like to know. How is it that we could give a million dollars to a multi-billion dollar corporation (Global Foundries) as some sort of wedding present when they took over IBM in Vermont, but year after year, we can’t find the resources to run our courts as they need to be run?

I am well aware of what the Enterprise Fund is and what it was supposed to be for; but the optics of the thing are awful. This is not something that desperate Franklin County parents, who may be holding down multiple jobs while trying to minimize the trauma of divorce on their children should be expected to understand.

The public may comment on the proposed amendment to the Rules for Family Proceedings with regard to termination of parental rights (TPR) until Tuesday, February 16.