All posts by Sue Prent

About Sue Prent

Artist/Writer/Activist living in St. Albans, Vermont with my husband since 1983. I was born in Chicago; moved to Montreal in 1969; lived there and in Berlin, W. Germany until we finally settled in St. Albans.

Does the Vermont Remote Worker Grant Program Earn Its Keep?

local/regional, Uncategorized, ,

The Vermont Remote Worker Grant program is the latest “incentive” give-away to fall under the critical eye of Vermont’s intrepid state auditor, Doug Hoffer.

Auditor Hoffer has just released an audit report that suggests that the governor and enabling legislature have once again put the cart before the horse, failing to establish meaningful benchmarks and sufficiently detailed parameters to ensure that the program actually gives real value for the investment of tax dollars.

After evaluating the Agency’s “compliance with statutes and guidelines of the program, the report offers a summary of the “compliance and judgment” issues that were identified:

1 The Program used seven percent of its funds ($18,120) to reimburse grantees for security deposits, which are expenses that are also assets temporarily withheld and then returned by landlords if certain conditions are met. The Agency has no mechanism to recover these funds when grantees move and retrieve their deposits.


2 The Agency did not establish guidelines or caps for certain types of reimbursements. For example, one grantee enjoyed a prepaid year of high-speed internet. Another grantee received $5,000 for a 100-yard underground conduit for broadband cables, which adds value to the property and will not be recovered by the State at resale.


3 The Agency reimbursed some grantees for storage of possessions in Vermont covering storage periods prior to grant approval. 


4 The Agency did not verify the actual costs necessary for grantees to perform their jobs or whether such expenses were job-related.  


5 The Agency did not always exercise due diligence when verifying grantee claims. For example, the Agency permitted one grantee to sign as employee and employer, and it approved another grantee with inconsistent employer data.

While an audit report does not make recommendations, it does provide feedback on the existing program that should inform Legislative decisions about changes that might be needed to make it more effective; or if indeed it should be suspended altogether and the funding devoted to a different priority.

Mr. Hoffer’s findings are not encouraging.  It would seem that, urged on by Governor Scott, who has never met a growth incentive he can’t love, and in their haste to counter the narrative of a dwindling and aging Vermont workforce, the program’s framers too quickly seized upon an idea that was attractive on the surface but rather under-baked at its cored. Department of Economic Development Commissioner Joan Goldstein seemed to anticipate problems, early on, and the bill’s co-sponsor, Becca Balint, agreed last year that the program was not really ready for prime-time:

“It’s disappointing we didn’t do a thorough enough job for her to have the information she needs, but I don’t find this alarming,” Balint said. “When you have committees that only meet from January to May, there are going to be details that need to be dealt with and parts of legislation that need to be tweaked.”


Balint added that she believes the committee will be able to get Goldstein the information she needs next year, before anyone submits an application for reimbursement.


“If she feels like she has not gotten enough guidance from us, I believe her,” she said. “It was really uncharted territory. She has tried her utmost best to make sure this can launch successfully.”


As for Goldstein, if she doesn’t get the details she needs in time for the program launch, she said, “we’re going to proceed with the ambiguity, because what other choice do we have but to follow the law?”

As for Goldstein, if she doesn’t get the details she needs in time for the program launch, she said, “we’re going to proceed with the ambiguity, because what other choice do we have but to follow the law?”

…And so, apparently, they did.

This is precisely why input from the auditor’s office is of timely value, even if it does give a less than flattering impression of one of the governor’s pet programs.

Go Home, Hillary.

National, Uncategorized, , , , ,

Correction: A couple of days after the New York Times quoted Hillary as saying Gabbard was “being groomed by theRussians”, they were forced to issue a correction. What she had, in fact, said was that Gabbard was being groomed by the “Republicans” to run as a third party candidate. A “horse of a different color”, I would say, if red wasn’t favored both by Republicans and Russians.

…and take Bill with you.

Hillary Clinton has succeeded in distracting everyone from Donald Trump’s very, VERY bad week; so much so, that one could as legitimately ask if she is a Russian asset, as she suggested someone in the 2020 Democratic lineup might be.

What a waste of time.

Tulsi Gabbard assumes that she was talking about her, and perhaps she was.  Nevertheless, Hillary has only succeeded in breathing new life into Gabbard’s feeble campaign, so that she might rise from 1% to a higher single digit.

I actually heard voices on the Saturday morning talk shows opining that Hillary “must know” what she’s talking about since she’s had do much personal experience with Russian interference!  Pu-lease!

This is the kind of conspiracy theory rumor mill that wound-up Crazy Donald and the Donaldettes in the first place.  She of all people should know better!

What possible value did Hillary imagine her little sideshow would bring to the already fraught but critical process of selecting a viable general election candidate?

She’s slipping into her Bill’s habit of wrong-footing it into the limelight just in time to provide new talking points for her opposition.

With “friends” like these, who needs enemies.

By the way, who’s to say she WAS referring to Tulsi Gabbard?  Knowing Hillary’s center-right hawkish leanings, she could have just as well been referring to the current second lead, after her fav Joe Biden. ‘Talk about wrong-footed!  Joe’s been hemorrhaging money and credibility, and just can’t seem to make it right.

Enter: Hillary, being “helpful.”

If she has any sense remaining after the Republicans have bounced her around like a football for the past two decades, she should apologize for musing out loud, blame cold-meds or some other reality-altering substance; then return to her novel for the duration. She has well and truly worn-out her welcome.

Welcome to the Impeachment

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Well, we’re in it now.

There was a certain inevitability to Donald Trump’s investigation for impeachment.  It’s as if he’s been trying to bring it on ever since he found himself, to everyone’s surprise including his own, the duly elected president of the United States.  In the early days, Republicans kept insisting that he would become more “presidential” the longer he served in office. 

Instead, with every outrageous tweet or insult, he steadily grew less presidential.  It was the Republican party itself that grew more and more Trumpian as the horrifying months careened by.

Yesterday, I went out and bought myself knitting needles and wool, resigned as I was to the lengthy spectacle of can’t-miss testimony and “ah-HA” moments that is about to unfold before us.  Americans from my generation are old enough to have been here before.

We’re a different nation now than we were back in 1972 when the Watergate investigation began to unfold.  After a brief moment of unity in 2001 following 9-11, the country began a slow motion decline into dissolution.  How many times was it repeated that the expressed purpose of Al-Qaeda in attacking the capitol of American capital was to “destroy the American way of life?”

An honest observer from the future would have to agree that they have succeeded; but it wasn’t the direct actions of the terrorists that did it.  We did it to ourselves, descending into twenty years of continuous war, tribalism and self-harm, claiming to do so in the name of the very values and institutions the hijackers had despised. 

In the good ol’ days of Watergate, Republicans hadn’t yet sold-out completely to Wall Street, the NRA, Big Oil, Big Pharma and Fox News.  We were still singing from more-or-less the same songbook, and both parties were still courting the so-called center. 

Republicans were all about small government, capitalism and minding everyone else’s business globally.  Democrats were about the social safety net, equal rights and avoiding international conflict.  Both sides liked Social Security, Public Education, infrastructure investments, farm subsidies and cheap oil. Neither side fully appreciated the urgency of environmental issues.

Religious differences were to be carefully avoided in conversation and it was mutually agreed that racism was a bad thing.

I remember how tired we all became with the endless Watergate hearings, but they provided a real service to the country in bringing the public along gradually to majority agreement on at least one thing:  Dick Nixon had to  go. And go, he did; voluntarily, and one might even say presidentially.  He knew when the jig was up and preserved enough of his shredded dignity to say a tearful “goodbye” from the steps of Airforce One.

After that, we never saw our government through quite the same eyes. Nevertheless, the presidency  survived, separation of powers survived, and the hero of the ordeal was a young Republican in the Nixon administration who gave evidence against him.  John Dean went to jail for his role in enabling Nixon’s crime, but emerged older, wiser and equipped to provide valuable perspective on the corrupt reign of Donald J. Trump.

As much as Michael Cohen apparently fancies himself to be the John Dean of this story; so far, no one has come near to earning that distinction.

Donald Trump proclaimed that his administration would appoint the “best people” to run things.  After roughly 75% of his appointees have been replaced, sometimes with multiple changes in rapid succession, we have yet to see any of the “best people” that he promised. Character is in remarkably short supply.

Although quite a few of the folks who exited through the rapidly swinging doors readily dished on the president and first family, most were too thoroughly intimidated by the Oval Office Godfather to delve very deeply into his corruption.

The people who really know where all the bodies are buried are all immediately related to Donald Trump.  Chances are they’re just as guilty as he is.

With no John Dean in the wings and a soul-less vampire clinging to the ledge of the Oval Office, our poor battered constitutional democracy might not survive to 2024.

McClaughry to the planet: “Get offa my lawn!”

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If there were a Clueless Curmudgeon award (perhaps a likeness of Mr. Magoo) John McClaughry’s editorial tirade against plans for the upcoming Climate Strike would place him in strong contention.

He doesn’t think Vermonters like himself should be “inconvenienced” by high school students’ efforts to call attention to the threat climate inaction brings to their very real future…a future put in peril by prior generations of Americans’ inability to deny themselves any convenience or passing pleasure, regardless of its impact on the long-term survival of the biosphere.  

Belonging to the Trump universe, in which America’s inherent ‘superiority’ means preternatural entitlement, Mr. McClaughry doesn’t even appear to understand to what the concept of climate justice refers.  

He even has the nerve to invoke Rosa Parks as an example of what he considers an acceptable method of protest, presumably because he thinks Rosa Parks didn’t ‘inconvenience’ anyone with her historic ride.  I doubt the bus driver would have agreed; otherwise, why did he have Ms. Parks arrested and jailed?  Presumably Mr. McClaughry would object to the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott, as that act of civil disobedience most certainly inconvenienced a great many people!

‘Too bad that righting systemic wrongs sometimes demands sacrifice, and always requires ‘inconvenience.’

Mr. McClaughry sneers at science, erroneously suggesting that the only evidence of anthropogenic climate impacts relied upon by activists is the extreme weather we are increasingly experiencing.  Although such evidence  is pretty compelling,  the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is not based on empirical evidence alone but is reinforced by carefully collected data, analyzed according to accepted principles, steadily growing in volume and urgency.  If science isn’t to be relied upon, what does Mr. McClaughry suggest as a substitute, and what evidence can he provide that his substitute would be more reliable?

No; he doesn’t bother to go there.  He just proclaims that acting on what the scientific community is telling us would be inconvenient and therefore, we should choose the easier route of denial, regardless of the consequences.

That’s fine for him.  He assumes he won’t live long enough to be ‘inconvenienced’ by Climate Catastrophe.  Would that that were so!  A few more summers of arctic wildfires like we just had and we may see projections on planetary collapse moved-up by half a century.

And I promise you, nuclear energy won’t look so attractive to Mr. McClaughry when the melting permafrost releases not just CO2 and methane, but all that hidden radioactive waste buried improperly in Siberia.

Inconvenient?  I should think so!

Ballad of Bernie and Elizabeth

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It’s happening again.  Media presumptions and lazy polling are hurrying Democrats to put all of  their eggs in one basket,  Last time it was the Hillary basket.  Hillary Clinton was the easily-recognized middle-of-the- road candidate; a sure-fire fund-raiser, linked to a popular past administration.

The same can all be said of Joe Biden.

With the ugly evidence tweeting daily right before our noses, that taking a chance on a charismatic candidate with a transformative message can blow convention right out of the water, the pundits still insist that Biden is our safest bet for 2020.

Nobody seems to believe he is our “best” bet, just the “safest;” and in that i think they are dead wrong.

Authenticity is what the majority of American voters respond to.  With the entire Republican Party hog-tied and submissive to an outrageous lout, that lout remains the only authentic Republican on the national stage.  That he is authentically ignorant uncurious, apparently incapable of telling the truth and incredibly offensive to three-fourths of the population doesn’t matter, he tells his lies with an angry conviction that the Rabid Right continue to confuse with authenticity.

Democrats have many fine and qualified candidates to choose from, but only two have a history of fierce authenticity that represents a true polar opposite to Trump’s populist appeal.

Those candidates are Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who have both demonstrated consistency and a career- long commitment to the ideas they are championing in this election.

As they must repeatedly remind us, the argument that Medicare-for-all is economically unfeasible is belied by the fact that in every other advanced nation, healthcare is a human right; costs are magnitudes lower than our own; and outcomes are better.  

Those who oppose universal healthcare suggest it would mean “throwing (however many tens of thousands) people off of their plans” without a safety net; but that is a complete mischaracterization.  

The template is here already.  Medicare, as a program, already exists.  There is no question but that it should be improved; but so should the Affordable Care Act, were we to continue with that template.  The only way to take control of healthcare costs is to TAKE CONTROL OF THEM.  That means negotiating costs for the entire country as a buying bloc; and ultimately eliminating the parasitic sick-care “ insurance” and hospital billing industries.  

This is a vision, not for January 2021, but for the very near future.  It will require careful planning and incremental adoption.  Democrats should start singing from the same songbook now, because they are the only party national that has any real commitment to public healthcare.  If they don’t think and articulate boldly, we are doomed to an ever less-inclusive healthcare system.  And that means we are doomed to become a poorer nation.

If Americans truly want to believe themselves better than everyone else, why do they accept a healthcare system that leaves us with cadillac costs and outcomes little better than those of a banana republic? 

We have to replace not just Mad King Donald, but the Senate Republican majority, who will surely be at their most vulnerable by November 2020, since it looks like we’re going to get that recession that’s been threatening. 

I’ll support whomever the Democrats nominate, but I have a very bad feeling about the race to anoint the least objectionable candidate.

‘Acting’ cabinet heads and the 25th amendment

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Donald Trump has professed a preference for “acting” heads of departments in his administration.

“I like acting. It gives me more flexibility,” Trump told reporters in January as he headed to Camp David. “Do you understand that? I like acting. So we have a few that are acting. We have a great, great Cabinet.”

The assumption has always been that the president’s impulsive nature drives that preference.

Here is an alternative suggestion: maybe it’s all about Article 25.

It is unlikely that Trump has actually read the Constitution, and even less likely that he has had it explained to him by someone qualified to do so; but I would guess that he has at least gleaned the essentials about the two ways by which he might be ejected from office: impeachment and the 25th amendment, which provides that

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

Among his other endearing traits, Donald Trump is a narcissistic paranoid. I would guarantee that he doesn’t trust his bloodless VP not to suddenly spring to life and lunge for the presidency when given half the chance.

Mike Pence would have to be a fool not to, given that the Trump presidency appears to have fatally wounded the GOP and Pence’s chance of ever successfully running for the office in the future.

The feral nature of Trump’s survival instincts would naturally compel him to look to blocking the other potential agents of his demise, his cabinet. He’s certainly seen a fair number of ex-trustees turn on him once they were released from his vice-grip.

We know how Trump’s fragmented logic tends to operate, knit together from half-truths and complete misunderstandings of the facts.

I suspect he is convinced that, if he manages to reduce the number of confirmed cabinet members sufficiently, there will never be enough people in his administration qualified to invoke the 25th amendment.

Doesn’t that sound exactly like the way his fevered mind works?

Crooked developers roll with “casual labor;” why shouldn’t the Cabinet of the United States of America?

Put up your dukes! St. Albans vs. State Auditor

local/regional, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

St. Albans City Manager, Dominic Cloud has picked an odd fight with State Auditor, Doug Hoffer over the findings of the auditor’s recent report on the City’s TIF district which identified multiple compliance issues.  

The controversy has seen City dignitaries, including Emerson Lynn, editor of the St. Albans Messenger join Mr. Cloud in circling the wagons of outraged denial with such fury that it invites comment.  Mr. Cloud has somehow enlisted the cooperation of VEPC (Vermont Economic Progress Council) to change the rules, after the fact; thus, bringing the City’s TIF decisions back into compliance.

That’s a pretty neat trick, one that many a private sector business would envy; but as a City taxpayer, I still have a few of questions.

The anger and vitriol exhibited by Mr. Cloud and his colleagues in their response to what is, after all, a professional opinion, is most unbecoming.  I have read the full report and see no cause for the tone of these responses.  

The City made some errors in administering its TIF.  VEPC’s decision to change the rules after the fact does not alter that simple fact.  We can choose to regard those as innocent errors rather than cynical manipulations to cheat the system, but it doesn’t help the situation to try and paint the auditor as some kind of villain. You know the old line about protesting too much?

The reason we have a State Auditor is that public entities in the same interest spheres as their economic “partners” (or clients) should not be relied upon to impartially judge the legal boundaries of how those “partners” manage the assets they have been given.  VEPC has rightly been characterized as a “partner” to the cities entrusted with TIF designation.  For that support, St. Albans City should rightly be grateful; but VEPC should not be in a position to arbitrarily move the boundary lines of compliance when one of its ‘clients’ oversteps. 

In any case, all of the issues raised by the audit report have not been resolved in the City’s favor.  VEPC has no jurisdiction over the taxes the City failed to pay for the Public Garage.  That issue has been conveniently omitted in the fevered reports of full exoneration.  What’s the story on that?

Auditor Hoffer looks at Clean Water investments.

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Clean water is one of the biggest challenges facing Vermont in the twenty-first century.

With an economy largely based on agriculture, we have some difficult choices to make as to how best we direct our limited financial resources in order to address the challenge.

Having lived in the Lake Champlain watershed for close to forty years now, I can say we have made disappointing progress on that front.

As part of their mission to hold government accountable, Doug Hoffer and the State Auditor’s Office recently undertook to provide a non-audit report to the Legislature, reflecting on how well our clean water investments are serving the most pressing needs of Vermont’s waterways and wetlands.

(I will admit from the start that I do not have the technical background to do justice to the topic, so this is a pretty superficial effort. I will gratefully accept correction if I have misunderstood or omitted crucial details.) 

Not surprisingly, Auditor Hoffer finds reason to question the state’s funding priorities, as they seem to be skewed more toward urban and suburban wastewater projects and less toward agricultural runoff which represents the greater environmental threat in Vermont.

Since municipalities are better resourced and more highly motivated to engage with the state and other sources for scarce funding than are farmers, guess who gets the “lion’s share” of mitigation dollars?

So, while the deposit of phosphorus on the floor of St. Albans Bay stubbornly continues to put forth noxious algae blooms to choke Lake Champlain, sewer treatment and wastewater projects intended not just to support existing populations but also to service new development seem to have the edge in clean water budgeting.

According to the Auditor’s office:
“…wastewater projects received the largest
share of State clean water funding in the (Lake Champlain) Basin
even though the share of phosphorous pollution
from this source is the lowest by far. Wastewater
accounts for 4% of phosphorus pollution, but
wastewater projects accounted for 35% of
expenditures.”

In responding to the Auditor’s observations,  Emily Boedecker of the Vermont Dept. of Environmental Conservation says that the auditor’s report places too much emphasis on phosphorus reduction, overlooking, for instance, the benefits to general sanitation and public health that arise from new sewer and wastewater infrastructure.

There is value from improvements to general sanitation, but the priority of Vermont’s Clean Water mandate should be to address the most critical threat to our waterways which, for many years, has been from unchecked agricultural sources. Subject to statutory limitations on funding sources, one would think that there would lie the obvious priority.

It should not be a matter of either/or, but it could be argued that it is the job of the Legislature, local municipalities and developers to come up with additional funding so that all of the state’s clean water priorities can be adequately addressed.  

The purview of the auditor, in this case, is to assess how effectively the state’s environmental priorities have been addressed with the limited funding available.

It is clear from the dialogue between Auditor Hoffer and Commissioner Boedecker that additional tools must be developed so that the cost-effectiveness of different approaches to water quality management may be assessed in greater detail.

As always, a checkup by the state auditor is rather like a visit to the dentist:  a little pain is to be expected; but, in the long run, the patient gets the benefit of some necessary and healthy perspective.