It is the state auditor’s job to assess how well agencies and policies are fulfilling their mission in the interests of the taxpayers.  In theory and over time, this watchdog role takes the auditor’s office to every corner of the bureaucracy, including some that are of particular sensitivity for the public.

Nothing is more certainly sensitive for Vermonters than the need to keep vulnerable individuals safe from sexual predators.

Under Doug Hoffer, the auditor’s office has just taken a second look at Vermont’s Sex Offender Registry, first examined in 2010.  Numerous faults and recommendations emerged from that 2010 review, and Hoffer wanted to determine whether or not the recommendations had been successfully implemented, and the identified issues resolved.

The findings are not encouraging.  

Hoffer’s team identified more than 250 instances of critical errors in the current Sex Offender Registry (11% of the total number of entries), calling into question its reliability as a whole.  Significantly, the 2014 audit discovered that recommendations made in the 2010 audit still have not been fully implemented, despite some improvements having been made.

“Improper categorization and errors in the system don’t serve the public, which seeks reliable information, or offenders, who are sometimes mislabeled,” Auditor Hoffer said. “The registry is meant to provide accurate information to the public and protect the rights of people in the system. Presently, the system doesn’t appear to be doing this as well as it should.”

Act 58, adopted in 2009 expanded the Sex Offender Registry; but cautioned that this was not to be undertaken lightly.  One significant obstacle to making the Registry more accessible and effective is a provision in the law that ties electronic posting of the Sex Offender Registry to a successful audit of the procedures that are in place to ensure its accuracy.  

(2) Sec. 14 of this act shall take effect July 1, 2010, provided that Sec. 14 shall not take effect until the state auditor, in consultation with the department of public safety and the department of information and innovation technology, has provided a favorable performance audit regarding the Internet sex offender registry to the senate and house committees on judiciary, the house committee on corrections and institutions, and the joint committee on corrections oversight. Approved: June 1, 2009

Hoffer points out that, once again, the auditors office has avoided a determination of outright “failure.”  

By tying implementation to a positive audit outcome, the legislative mandate, as written, has inadvertently hamstrung the process.  It is the legislature who must find a path to making the electronic posting happen for Vermont just as quickly as possible; and the agencies involved must be held fully accountable for the reliability of the electronic registry.

We recommend that the Legislature require that the Commissioner of the Department of Public Safety, the Commissioner of the Department of Corrections, and the Court Administrator periodically report on the progress of corrective actions being taken to improve the reliability of the SOR.

We recommend that the Legislature require that the Commissioner of the Department of Public Safety, before posting addresses to the Internet SOR, certify that the process that is established to support this function will ensure that addresses of only those offenders that meet the statutory requirements will be posted.

Drumroll please…

Milne raised a total of $20,420 so far.

(Apparently he needs a little practice with the form; he reported $20,420 in gifts over $100, and another $20,420 in gifts under $100, for a grand total of, yep, $20,420. Oh,well.)

The fundraising total includes $900 from the candidate or immediate family. And $355 in loans forgiven.

The good news is, he’s only spent $600 so far (printing and T-shirts), so he’s still got some money left.

Odd factoid: Pretty much half of his total comes from a single, out-of-state family: the Boieses. David II, David III, Robin, Mary, and Jonathan Boies gave $2,000 apiece to Milne for Governor. Boies II is the famous lawyer of marriage-equality fame; the others are his wife and children. Go figure.

And only $1800 of his campaign kitty came from Vermont donors. And $1200 of that is from people named Milne. Let’s say the candidate has yet to establish broad appeal, shall we?

Odd factoid #2: Virtually all of Milne’s donations came in on the same day: last Friday, July 11. Until then, his campaign had raised a mere $5,100.

Milne fever… catch it!

This diary crossposted at The Vermont Political Observer, where I’ve been blogging compulsively on today’s campaign finance reporting deadline. C’mon by! The coffee’s hot.

Crossposted at The Vermont Political Observer. Come on by for a visit; you’ll see my reports on campaign finance filings, the obnoxious cover of Jim Douglas’ memoir, and the increasingly incoherent spluttering rage of the VTGOP. Yeah, good times.

The daily work of government is unremarkable, in the literal sense: it’s not worth remarking on. The roads are plowed, the mail is delivered, checks are cut, benefits distributed, contracts are signed and executed. We don’t even think about the vast majority of what government does.

It’s only on those relatively rare occasions when government (1) fails to function properly, or (2) impinges on something you or I want to do, that we notice. And take umbrage.

Which is how government bureaucracy, which does many things quietly and well, becomes a symbol of dysfunction and denial. I’m not saying it’s perfect by any means, and there ought to be a constant striving to make it work better. But sometimes, its quiet function becomes very loudly and obviously useful.

Case in point: one of this summer’s construction projects in Montpelier is a reworking of the sidewalks around the intersection of Elm, Court, and School Streets. This is the corner where the Uncommon Market, that fine little grocery/deli, plies its trade. The main goal of the project is to make the intersection more accessible; it will also make the Market itself more accessible.  

But the project’s been put on hold because a routine inspection found something completely unexpected. The city’s Assistant Public Works Director (now there’s a grand old bureaucratic job title) Tom McArdle explained in a letter to all concerned parties:

Soon after the project was begun, we were made aware of a potential public and contractor safety issue concerning an adjacent brick building housing the Uncommon Market. …the brick wall appeared to be pulling away from the structure and may come tumbling down.

Oopsie. A structural engineer was summoned. The findings:

… it was determined that the brick exterior wall had partially detached from the building and separated from the underlying structure. From that inspection, the structural engineer reported that the wall is in imminent danger of at least a limited collapse and recommended the public sidewalk and parking lane remain closed with fall protection. The engineer further advised that any significant vibration from construction activities could trigger a collapse.

Double oopsie with nuts.  

So the project is on hold and the area next to the “partially detached” wall has been blocked off. The building’s owner will have to arrange for repairs, and then the project will be rescheduled.

And the lesson, my children? If it wasn’t for this routine inspection by some damn government bureaucrat, that wall most likely would have collapsed on its own. It could have caused injuries or even deaths, and it would have mightily inconvenienced the building’s occupants — the Market and the apartment dwellers on the upper floors.

Instead, we should see an orderly, preventive repair.

The bureaucracy. It works.  

 Former ambassador L. Paul Bremer recently spoke at his local library renovation fund raiser in Weathersfield, Vermont.

Frankly, I don’t much think about L.Paul Bremer, former U S Ambassador and head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004. Probably hadn’t since  noticing in 2005 that he had a summer place in Southern Vermont. I found out this real estate fact when I came across a Washington Post article in the style section titled: From Diplomacy to Demi-Glace, His Classically Inspired Menu Gets Some Touches Acquired in Iraq. Bremer is a foodie too, classically inspired!  

He also once managed Henry Kissinger’s international consulting business and was part of a fix-it crew brought in at the “end” of the fighting in Iraq. This bunch, including Condolezza Rice, was advertised as the pragmatic second team who could supposedly clean-up earlier neo-con blunders.    

His talk, presented at the Weathersfield Meetinghouse to raise money for the local library renovation fund, was titled: Is America Still An Indispensable Nation? The VNews.com report doesn’t say how big a room it was, but it was said to have been “packed”.

So it seems the event was probably a success and good for the library fund. Happily, during the Q & A Martha Hennessey did stand in the front of the room with a sign reading simply: “Paul Bremer unindicted war criminal.” Thank you Martha.    

What'd he say!  

What did L.Paul Bremer have to say?  Well, in broad terms he claims we need to re-assert US power in the world conflict arena and suggests:

“We went from leading from behind to effectively sitting on the bench,”

The man who disbanded the late Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army rejects the idea that the new Iraqi army was not properly trained and blames Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for the recent debacles in facing Islamic insurgents. He also must have misremembered some key recent history when he said:

…the decision of the Obama administration to withdraw troops from Iraq in 2011 directly contributed to the deteriorating security situation in the country today, where insurgents currently control large swaths of territory.  “It was a mistake,” Bremer said. “Effectively what it meant is we no longer had people on the ground to do counterterrorist training, to do intelligence collection, to help conduct special ops against targets.”

What Bremer doesn’t bother to recall (and the VNews correspondent, Zach Despart, or sadly his editors, don’t bother to enlighten readers about) is that it was not Obama’s decision. The troop withdrawal agreement that Obama implemented was signed in 2008 by George W. Bush and Nouri Al-Maliki. Certainly Bremer knows and remembers this inconvenient fact.  At the time, Mid-East expert Juan Cole said Bush’s agreement was :

The price the Iraqi parliament extracted for allowing the US troops to remain [2008] was an iron-clad guarantee that they would all be out by the end of 2011. Bush and his generals clearly expected, however, that over time Washington would be able to wriggle out of the treaty and would find a way to keep a division or so in Iraq past that deadline.

That is kind of an important detail for such smart man to um…overlook.  

This recent history is so quickly being forgotten and intentionally blurred by those in power at the time. It’s worth remembering the human toll and vast amounts of wealth poured into Iraq that were wasted.  

At the end of the Iraq war, vast sums of money were made available to the US-led provisional authorities, headed by Paul Bremer, to spend on rebuilding the country. By the time Bremer left the post eight months later, $8.8bn of that money had disappeared.    The CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) maintained one fund of nearly $600m cash for which there is no paperwork: $200m of it was kept in a room in one of Saddam's former palaces.

I, for one, would love Bremer explain those reports. Maybe he will another time at another library event.  

 Locally, candidate for Vermont Lt. Governor Dean Corren is highlighting the dangers of big money in his publically funded campaign. He says:  

“You have to believe who is paying the piper is calling the tunes,”

I had that in mind while reading this in NYTimes.com

Republican candidates for governor are in a strong position to retain their current 29 governorships and perhaps gain two or three. The improving economy and Obama’s approval rate are factors. One other weapon is a huge funding advantage.  

[…] campaign money is gushing into national Republican groups that focus on state capitals, including the Republican Governors Association, whose chairman, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, has set fund-raising records for the group even under the glare of multiple state and federal investigations.

A couple Vermont links pop up here and there in this drama. Chris Christie, New Jersey’s money-man, visited the VTGOP this past winter in an effort to boost money and morale. He seemed to fail to do much more than help them pay down some existing debts. Despite glowing reports following the closed-to-the-press fundraising dinner the Vermont Republicans were reportedly only “no longer broke”. That’s Christie’s magic, Vermont GOP-style.

Nationally he hauls it in…

But nationwide Christie hauls it in big-time.

The association raised $100 million during the 18 months ending in June, dwarfing the amount it amassed in 2010, and had $70 million in cash at the beginning of July. The chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont, said his group would be outraised by about two to one.

No slouch when it comes to fundraising, Peter Shumlin is left in Christie’s shadow.

Both groups get a share of corporate and billionaire money with the DGA getting more labor union donations.

The governors associations of both parties raise substantial amounts of money from overlapping lists of heavily regulated industries such as tobacco, health insurance, and telecommunications. But Republican groups have had far greater success this election cycle in persuading the party’s leading individual donors to invest in the relatively less glamorous world of state elections.  

By the end of March, eight individuals or couples — including the industrialist David Koch, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the hedge fund manager Paul Singer — had contributed $1 million or more to the RGA. [added emphasis]

One million dollars or more from eight individuals could buy a lot of influence in governor’s mansions. You know it is just free speech according to the Supreme Court. I’d bet eight individuals are likely to get their calls answered almost one million times faster… or more.  

Lately, in the drive for campaign finance reform, Vermont is really earning its progressive stripes.

For one thing, our most senior senator, Patrick Leahy, has just brought a proposal to amend the Constitution out of committee, headed for a full Senate hearing.  

That new constitutional amendment would establish campaign finance limits that have been gutted in recent Supreme Court decisions.

For its own part, Vermont is leading the way in this initiative, having become the first state to pass a resolution calling for a new constitutional convention.

It’s still a long way from bringing about change.  Even if the convention were to actually take place, passing a constitutional amendment requires the assent of thirty-eight states: a tall order even in less divisive times.

Nevertheless, this is movement in the right direction at last; and that deserves a round of applause.

“Our country has flourished because we have worked hard to ensure that more, not fewer, Americans can take part in the democratic process,” Leahy said in his statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. “That is why common sense campaign finance laws are so vital in protecting our democratic institutions.”

There are those who suggest that Sen. Leahy should consider retiring, but this is a pretty good example of why we shouldn’t hope for that any time soon.  

It has taken many, many years for Leahy to reach the level of seniority and influence he currently exerts on Vermont’s behalf in Washington.

We are a teenie-tiny state with bold, progressive ideas.  We have benefited from the luxury of far more influence on the national debate by virtue of the Senator’s honed skills and seniority than we are likely to have anytime soon, once he retires.

At no time has that influence potential been more critical to maintain than in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision.

And that’s not all we’ve got going for us…

As the Senate’s only bona fide independent senator, Bernie Sanders has license to follow his own instincts.  He may not enjoy the enviable access to Capitol Hill’s inside track that Pat Leahy does, but his frankly populist touch rallies a much broader progressive audience; one that hasn’t felt at home with party politics.  

The Senator is currently  focusing  on an effort to expose and counter the inordinate influence enjoyed by the infamous Koch brothers, whose extremism reaches so far beyond legitimately “conservative” views that they beg a new label.

Closer to home, Progressive candidate for lieutenant governor Dean Corren, having successfully struck his own blow for campaign finance reform by qualifying under state law for public matching funds,  has adopted my own favorite answer to Citizens United,  and is advocating for universal public financing of elections.

Meanwhile, we’ll know very soon if Americans will simply follow the glut of money in casting their 2016 ballots.

I’ve got a feeling we may be pleasantly surprised.

We’ve certainly seen it happen time and time again in Vermont: a super wealthy candidate tries to sweep an election with an avalanche of media buys, but only succeeds in irritating the electorate and gets soundly trounced at the polls.

Can you imagine how sick and tired swing state voters are going to be of Koch-financed media blitzes.  Could Republicans be in for a rude shock if burnt-out GOP voters simply don’t show up on the big day?  One can only hope.

Crossposted at The Vermont Political Observer.

Ah, Vermont. Home of picturesque farms, covered bridges, general stores, and…

… private estates with their own tennis courts.

Vermont had the largest percentage of single-family home listings boasting a residential tennis court on the real-estate website Trulia.com as of May 30.

… The percentages in every state were small: In Vermont, 0.77% of single-family home listings mentioned a tennis court. In New Mexico, it was only 0.17%. And only 0.23% of the combined listings in the 50 states included a court.

So, Vermont, yay?

This is the Other Vermont, the one concealed at the end of long private driveways behind locked gates and groves of mature trees. The one that, according to Governor Shumlin, pays more than its share of our tax burden. It was only a little more than a year ago that Shumlin was hell-bent on cutting the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor, while insisting that the wealthiest Vermonters were ’bout ready to flee the state if they had to pay a penny more in taxes.

You could take this surprising tennis-court factoid two ways: On the one hand, it’d be awfully hard to pack up a tennis court and take it with you. On the other, hey, if there are a lot of tennis court-laden properties on the market, perhaps the Great And Good Of Vermont are already on their way out the door. Hard to tell.

Anyway, as I reported during last spring’s tax kerfuffle, Vermont imposes a relatively high 8.95% tax rate on top earners — but because of the way we calculate taxable income, wealthy Vermonters actually pay only 5.2%. Which explains why they can afford to maintain all those expanses of carefully-manicured lawn.  

From the Facebook page of Dustin Degree, distinguished Republican candidate for State Senate:

Ooh, there’s an enticing offer. Drive all over Franklin County wasting gas and spewing exhaust in the vain hope of being the first to spot and photograph a Dustin Degree campaign sign — and all you win is a three-pack of crappy Degree campaign materials?

Wow.

Y’know, if I lived in Degree Country, I’d be tempted to go find his stupid sign, win the contest, and have a nice little public T-shirt burning.

p.s. As our younger readers are surely aware, “tag” is slang for graffiti. So I guess Mr. Degree is asking us to vandalize his first sign.

Note: You’re invited to my new blog, The Vermont Political Observer, for thoughts on Scott Milne’s turn to conventional Republican rhetoric, Art Woolf’s latest eruption, and signs that health care reform is working.