(Doug, thanks for fighting for this one. Jack – promoted by Jack McCullough)

GMDers – thanks for the calls – Doug

MONTPELIER, VT – Senator Doug Racine (D-Chittenden) today offered an amendment to the budget bill on the Senate floor. Racine’s amendment proposed to use some of the state’s “rainy day funds” to fill the hole that exists in the budget as proposed to the Senate. On the floor, Senator Tim Ashe (P-Chittenden) proposed a slight change to the proposal – so the amendment as offered stipulated that if “Challenges for Change” did not result in the needed $38 million in savings for FY11, any remaining budget gap would be filled with the reserve funds.

“Let’s put this money into the budget, continue with the Challenges process, but make sure the expenses are covered and pass a responsible budget,” Racine urged.  

He explained his reason for offering the amendment by saying, “I have heard two different stories about how Challenges for Change is going to work. The first story is that we are going to find these savings before we go home, and it will all be worked out. I don’t believe that will happen.

“The second story is that we’re going to walk out of here having faith that the process will get us where we want to go. That would be abdicating our responsibility,” Racine insisted. “The fact is, the budget in front of us is not balanced, and it is our responsibility to pass a balanced budget. This amendment would get us there.”

The budget that was presented assumes an additional $38 million in savings from the Challenges for Change process, which will continue at least through the rest of the week, and possibly longer. “This budget has the potential to do serious damage to Vermont by cutting services for our most vulnerable neighbors, reducing funds to economic development programs, and shifting corrections costs to local communities.”

In addition to Racine and Ashe, nine other senators voted to support the amendment – not enough for it to pass.  Joining the two in supporting the bill were Senators Cummings, Hartwell, Illuzzi, Kittell, MacDonald, McCormack, Starr, and White.

Racine later voted against the budget on the Senate floor, explaining his final vote by saying, “This budget would have us take the easy way out. I cannot vote for a budget that is not balanced. It is our responsibility to balance the budget, and we are letting Vermonters down by giving that responsibility to the administration.”

The budget will now proceed to a conference committee, and the Senate will work on the Challenges for Change bill in the coming week.

##30##

http://dougracine.com/

I started working on unemployment cases back in the 1970's, even before I graduated from law school. This was partly because it is possible for nonlawyers to represent claimants in unemployment cases, and partly because of the vital importance unemployment benefits pose for unemployed workers. Representing unemployed workers in the unemployment system is fighting for workers' rights.

Like most states, Vermont's unemployment trust fund is in deficit spending because of the severe financial crisis that has hit the country. To the extent it's been caused by any local condtions, it is not because of overly generous benefits here in Vermont, but because of a decades-long policy of holding unemployment taxes down, a policy that subsidized employers by enabling them to pay less than they would have had to pay to keep the system on a sound footing.

Now that the fund is in trouble, the Douglas Administration is trying to “share the pain” by cutting eligibility and benefits for unemployed workers. That's right–when the administration looks around for someone to pay the bills, what better target than workers who have already lost their jobs?

National experts agree that this is not the way to go.

Vermont – The National Employment Law Project (NELP) today criticized proposals being considered in the Vermont State Senate that would cut benefits as part of a legislative plan to restore solvency to the state’s unemployment trust fund.

“The benefit restrictions are among the most severe being proposed in the entire country,” said George Wentworth, a policy analyst with NELP who specializes in unemployment insurance policy. “There are currently 34 states that have seen their trust funds go in to debt since the beginning of the Great Recession, but none has adopted a package of cuts as tough on the unemployed as the one proposed by the Douglas administration.”

NELP cited proposed changes to the formula for calculating an unemployed worker’s benefits as particularly harmful. In testimony before the Senate Finance Committee last month, Wentworth pointed out that only four states – Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana and West Virginia – use “the 4-quarter averaging” formula which drives down weekly benefits by placing added emphasis on any recent gaps in employment. The average benefit amount for an unemployed Vermont worker is currently about $304 – which ranks 25th in the nation.

In addition, NELP criticized the proposal to bring back the idea of a “waiting week” for unemployed workers – a provision that was repealed from Vermont law ten years ago. The proposal would impose a one-week disqualification on the first week of every claimant’s unemployment.

In his testimony last month, Wentworth noted: “At a time when over 40% of (unemployment insurance) claimants are unemployed for six months or longer, does it make sense to start every worker’s bout of unemployment by de-stabilizing the worker’s family finances? …Jobless workers get no waiting week on their rent payments, mortgages or utility bills.”

NELP spoke last month in support of proposed increases in the wages that are subject to unemployment insurance taxes and has cited Vermont as one of many states that did not engage in the necessary forward financing to withstand increases in jobless claims.

“The insolvency of Vermont’s trust fund is not the result of workers exploiting an overly generous system. Insolvency is the result of a prolonged recessionary economy and years of under-funding the UI system. …(T)hese cuts are not necessary to make Vermont’s trust fund solvent. They are merely further punishing the victims of a tough economy,” said Wentworth.

Earlier this month, NELP released “Understanding the Unemployment Trust Fund Crisis of 2010,” which lists the trust fund balance of every state and jurisdiction in the country as of March 31st, and estimates how many months of remaining funds each state has. The study found that, at the time of publication, 33 states had fully depleted their unemployment benefit funds, forcing them to borrow billions from the federal government in order to maintain the safety net for millions of unemployed workers.

ACTION ALERT!!!!!!

GMD has learned that  Doug Racine is  planning on introducing an amendment during third reading of the budget today calling for the use of rainy day funds to close the $20 million budget gap.  
 
Calls to the Sgt-at-Arms (800-322-5616 or 828-2228) with messages for senators to vote yes on the rainy day fund amendment would demonstrate support for that action.   The Senate is scheduled to convene at 10:30.

Republican Chairman Michael Steele’s Admission That the Party of Lincoln Betrayed African-Americans by ‘Focusing on the White Male Vote in the South’ for 40-Plus Years Predictably Draws Fire From White GOP Conservatives, But the Republicans Are Still Using Their ‘Southern Strategy’ — This Time Against Hispanic Americans

Demonstrators hold up a giant American flag during a mass demonstration in support of comprehensive immigration reform on the National Mall in Washington in March. In an extraordinary admission, Republican National Chairman Michael Steele acknowledged that his party — founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party — betrayed African-American voters in 1968 by openly appealing to conservative Southern whites opposed to the civil rights movement. But the party’s infamous “Southern Strategy” is far from dead. With GOP-dominated Arizona’s newly-enacted crackdown on illegal immigrants, combined with incendiary anti-Latino rhetoric by several prominent Republicans on the immigration issue, the GOP is now running a serious risk of permanently alienating Hispanic Americans — the nation’s fastest-growing voting bloc. (Photo: Ryan Roderick Beiler/Sojourners Magazine)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, April 27, 2010)

By SKEETER SANDERS

An extraordinary thing happened in Chicago last Tuesday night.

In a speech at DePaul University, Michael Steele, the Republican Party’s first African-American national chairman, told some 200 students that black voters “really don’t have a reason” to vote for Republicans.

“We [Republicans] haven’t done a very good job of really giving you one,” he said.

In a remarkably candid assessment of his party’s standing with black voters, Steele told his audience that the GOP had lost sight of “the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans.”

Noting that the Republican Party was founded in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854 by anti-slavery activists, “This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass,” Steele said. “The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties, Their parties walk away from them.”

CONSERVATIVES BLAST STEELE — FOR TELLING THE TRUTH

Steele’s candor didn’t sit well with a number of conservatives. In an e-mail to Washington Post blogger David Weigel, conservative economist Bruce Bartlett slammed Steele’s remarks as “his biggest gaffe so far.”

Bartlett acknowledged that “The term ‘Southern strategy’ is such a loaded term, like ‘states’ rights,’ that it’s hard to use it without conveying a certain racial stereotype. The fact that Steele used that term is, therefore, significant in and of itself.”

“Ironically,” Bartlett noted, “the Voting Rights Act is what made it possible for Republicans to compete in the South. Once blacks could no longer be kept from voting in primaries [where winning the Democratic nomination was tantamount to election], there was no longer any reason for whites to remain Democrats. Many found the Republican Party more attractive. Of course, the national party reached out to them, but the idea that they used racial code words like ‘law and order’ is nonsense. . .”

Bartlett said he thought that it was “too bad that Steele gave Democrats reason to believe that their distorted vision of how Republicans came to dominate the South is correct. It may be his biggest gaffe so far.”

Greg Alexander, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise institute think tank, was even more dismissive in his own e-mail to Weigel. “For four decades, national GOP strategists and candidates have certainly valued Southern white voters,” Alexander wrote. “At the margins, that’s meant accommodating them on some racial issues. But notice that Nixon did not repeal and instead enforced the ’64 [Civil Rights] Act, did not ‘retreat’ on school desegregation nearly the way he has been indicted for doing, and launched affirmative action and minority business contracting as we now know them.”

BLACK REPUBLICANS DID HAVE A HAND IN FOUNDING THE NAACP  

Steele was historically inaccurate about Frederick Douglass. He wasn’t a co-founder of the GOP, but he was a staunch supporter of the party until his death in 1895 and often conferred with President Abraham Lincoln — and even his Democratic successor, Andrew Johnson — on the treatment of black U.S. soldiers during and after the Civil War.

But Steele was right about Republicans having a hand in the founding of the NAACP. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization, was co-founded on February 12, 1909 — the centennial anniversary of Lincoln’s birth — by several prominent black Republicans, including W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells and Archibald Grimke.

The NAACP was founded six months after a deadly race riot in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois in 1908, in which angry white mobs attacked and burned the city’s black residential and business district to the ground, killing scores of the city’s black residents.

BLACKS REMAINED LOYAL TO THE GOP — UNTIL AFTER WORLD WAR II

For nearly a century after its founding, African-Americans were the Republican Party’s most loyal voting constituency. This was, after all, the party of the “Great Emancipator.” The fact that the Democratic Party was far from friendly to blacks — especially in the Deep South, where Democrats wrote, passed and strictly enforced the region’s blatantly racist “Jim Crow” segregation laws — didn’t leave African-American voters (That is, those outside the South who could vote) much of a choice.

Things began to change in 1947, when President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, issued an executive order to desegregate the Army and introduced civil-rights legislation to Congress the following year. This resulted in conservative southern white delegates walking out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention in protest. The southerners later formed the States’ Rights Party — which came to be known as the “Dixiecrats” — with South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond as its presidential nominee.

By the 1960s, the Democratic Party was a house bitterly divided — pitting northern liberals against southern conservatives — over civil rights for African-Americans. It took the support of Republicans in Congress, mostly northern and midwestern liberals and moderates, to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

President Lyndon Johnson, a southerner from Texas, confided to his aide, Bill Moyers (now a prominent TV newsman and commentator) after signing these two landmark bills into law, that “We’ve lost the South for a generation.”

By “we,” Johnson meant his Democratic Party. But what Johnson didn’t anticipate was that the Republicans were about to lose Black America for a generation — and longer — when Barry Goldwater won the GOP nomination in 1964. Goldwater voted against both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act (which he publicly regretted years later).

The damage to the GOP’s standing with African-Americans had only just begun.

A TOTAL REVERSAL OF FORTUNE FOR BOTH MAJOR PARTIES      

Enter Richard Nixon. In a bold and determined comeback bid eight years after losing his first run for the White House to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Nixon devised an electoral strategy for victory in 1968 that forever altered the character of the Republican Party — and turned the fortunes of both major parties completely upside-down.

It was a formula best described by Kevin Phillips, a top Nixon campaign strategist, in a 1970 interview with The New York Times: “From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the [African-American] vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

“The more [blacks] who register as Democrats in the South,” Phillips continued, “the sooner the [anti-black] whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”

NOW REPUBLICANS RISK LOSING LATINOS OVER IMMIGRATION

But after more than four decades — and despite the election of a black man as its national chairman — the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy” is still very much alive and now threatens to alienate another entire segment of the electorate: Hispanic Americans.

Unlike blacks, however, Latinos are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population — and of the electorate. A recently-released study of U.S. Census Bureau data by the University of New Hampshire predicts that non-white births will likely outpace white births sometime this year — and that the Latino birth rate already is outpacing the white birth rate in the Southwest, particularly California.

Republicans in California have been paying a devastatingly high political price ever since they pushed through Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative designed to prohibit illegal immigrants from using the state’s social services, health care, and public education.

The measure, introduced by Republican state Assemblyman Dick Mountjoy and strongly backed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson, passed with 59 percent of the vote — only to be struck down by the federal courts on the grounds that immigration is the exclusive domain of the federal government.

With the California Republican Party having so strongly backed Prop. 187, Hispanic voters — who now comprise 40 percent of the state’s electorate — have severely punished Republicans at the ballot box, handing control of both houses of the legislature and four of the five top statewide offices to the Democrats in every statewide election since Prop. 187 passed.

In that same period, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — a moderate who is himself an immigrant from Austria — is the only Republican who’s escaped Latino voters’ wrath and win a statewide race in California.

IMMIGRATION ISSUE TRIGGERS A REVOLT INSIDE GOP THAT BURNS BUSH

The debate over illegal immigration proved too hot for Republican President George W. Bush to handle. For Bush — who has a sister-in-law and two nieces who are Latina — the issue became personal. He lobbied hard for Congress in 1997 to pass a comprehensive immigration-reform bill that would pave the way for many of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. to become legal residents.

But an open revolt by conservatives in his own party sank the measure.

In one of his last interviews before leaving office, Bush warned his fellow Republicans not to turn the GOP into an “anti-immigrant party.” Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Bush said the GOP “should be open-minded about big issues like immigration reform, because if we’re viewed as anti-somebody — in other words, if the party is viewed as anti-immigrant — then another fellow may say, ‘Well, if they’re against the immigrant, they may be against me.'”

But Bush’s warning to his fellow Republicans has apparently fallen on deaf ears.

OUTRAGE OVER NEW ANTI-IMMIGRANT LAW IN ARIZONA

Last week, Arizona’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer, signed into law a measure passed by the GOP-controlled legislature which allows police to question and detain anyone in the state they believe may be an illegal immigrant.

Critics of the new law warn that it would lead to widespread discrimination against Latinos, including Mexican-Americans, who make up nearly a third of the state’s population, according to 2007 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Police in Phoenix reported Monday that vandals smeared refried beans into the shape of a Nazi swastika onto the glass doors of the state Capitol building. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, a sharp critic of the new law, accused many supporters of the measure as being not just misguided but also racist.

“It’s just morally wrong,” Gordon, a Democrat, told CBS News Monday. “This country is not about having people wear arm bands with Jewish stars or in this case, Hispanic brown symbols.”

Gordon branded the law “clearly unconstitutional.”

GOP FACES HUGE LATINO BACKLASH AT THE BALLOT BOX

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) has vowed to challenge the measure in court. And — in a possible repeat of what happened in California — Latino community and political groups across the state have vowed an all-out campaign to oust Republican lawmakers who voted in favor of it.

Even a Fox News analyst openly warned that the new law will be “a disaster for Arizona” and trigger a huge backlash against Republicans by Latino voters.

Appearing Friday on “Your World with Neal Cavuto,” Napolitano, a former federal judge, bluntly warned that “Hispanics — who have a natural home in the Republican Party because they are socially conservative — will flee [the GOP] in droves.”

The new law is “gonna bankrupt the Republican Party and the state of Arizona,” Napolitano predicted. “Look at what happened to the Republicans in California with Proposition 187!”

Napolitano added that the measure “is so unconstitutional that I predict a federal judge will prevent Arizona from enforcing it as soon as they attempt to do so.”

# # #

Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

(In keeping with GMD’s policy of front-paging diaries posted for state-wide office, here is the latest from Susan Bartlett. – promoted by Sue Prent)

This coming week I will bring the budget to the senate floor.  It has been a difficult year and when I was presented with an additional $17 million in deficits as the bill came from the house, I was worried about how we could make ends meet.  

The new $17 million hole was caused mainly by the non-certification of the state hospital and the cost of the new federal health care bill.  I am happy to say the budget is balanced, without making more reductions in services to Vermonters.

Read on …

Without a doubt, this budget is the most difficult that I have ever had to construct.  Balancing the needs of Vermonters of all kinds is never easy.  It appears that our revenues are holding and that there are definitely signs of a turn around in the economy.  But Vermonters are still hurting.  The business community is seeing some good signs, but we are still in the woods.  Next year will be just as difficult.  

This budget balances the needs of all Vermonters. One does not profit at the expense of another and no one gets everything they want.

There is an old saying that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  That certainly applies to looking at the state budget.  The job in appropriations, the job that I have had as chair for many years, is to balance the well-being of the whole, not just the parts.

It is always easy for one part of our society to say, “If you don’t do this for me, you don’t support us.”  Sometimes you have to say no to an idea that in isolation sounds good, but doesn’t work as part of the whole.   This is when leadership is difficult, you have to not only say no to good ideas, you have to convince others to say no.

Now more than ever we have to carefully watch our spending while maintaining important programs that work. As I have said for many years, “Prove to me that it works, not with nice stories, but with results.”  Fiscal responsibility means paying for the programs that work and being willing to end programs that do not work.   I believe that by working together we will come out of this recession stronger than we went into it, working smarter to do more with less.

Difficult times require difficult choices.  Difficult times require calm, reasoned leadership.  

“We always knew about them,” he said. “They were not unknown at all to us.”

(NRC knew about underground pipes at VY, Brattleboro Reformer, 04/26/10)

That quote is attributed to Jim Noggle, “NRC Region 1’s senior health physicist” according to the paper. Mr. Noggle is referring to those non-existent underground pipes that were found to be leaking last year.

Actually we already knew this as previous reports have detailed a 2005 underground tritium leak that was duly reported to the NRC (but not Vermont) by Louisiana Entergy.

So what have we? Louisiana Entergy lies to all of Vermont by claiming there are no underground pipes carrying radio nuclides, and our federal government’s own Nuclear Regulatory Agency is fully aware of this lie … BUT … the NRC won’t speak up on behalf of the people of the United States of America.

Oh, and what is the reaction from our advocates in Vermont state government?

Sarah Hoffman, the director of public advocacy for the Vermont Department of Public Service, said while it would have been nice if the NRC had corrected the statements made by Yankee representatives, it wasn’t their responsibility.

(ibid)

Yeah … that’s right … a great big yawn!

Entergy lies, NRC covers up and our state government couldn’t give a shit … nice.

The Savannah Sparrow may be one of my favorite sparrows, and it’s difficult to explain exactly why.  It might have something to do with their similarity to other, more common sparrows.  I can be out looking at birds and see this perfectly normal song sparrow or something like a song sparrow when I suddenly catch a flash of bright yellow eyebrow or a buzzy insectoid note mixed in with their sing song call and know I’ve got something considerably less common.  

They are strikingly beautiful birds, but this year they’ve taken on a new meaning for me.

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece, Alive about living on when others have passed.

I didn’t write about one aspect of death then, because I wasn’t ready to form it into words yet.

Recently, a casual friend of mine passed away.  I’m not going to go into a lot of details here– it’s someone I worked with on projects on occasion and a lot of people from work knew her far longer and better than I did, but I have felt this profound sense of inability since her death.  Usually, when someone I know very well dies, I find ways to process it, to honor them in ways that are meaningful and powerful.  In this case, I didn’t feel like I knew her well enough to know how to do that.

The situation presented itself.  I didn’t know this at the time but she really loved my photography, and I mean, raved about it to other people.  She never told me this, which is kind of like her.  Not knowing this, I had tried to get her one of my photos when she was ill (I made one photo into Christmas cards and wanted to make sure she got one), not knowing at the time how ill she was.  She died shortly after, and I don’t know if she ever did get the card.

Someone I don’t know very well approached me at work this week.  She wanted to know if I had a photo I could provide for them.  They’re presenting a gift to her husband, from all of us, and they thought one of my photos would be ideal.

I hadn’t even thought of it at the time, I’d taken the photo above during break.  Earlier in the week, I’d sent them a few photos as ideas.  On Friday I thought about it and said, how about this one?  The sparrow was in one of the trees a group of us planted last fall.  As part of the ceremony where we present the photo, we’re planting a tree on her behalf.  It just seems so right: a bird found on our facilities, in a tree we’d planted, and truly just one of the most spectacularly beautiful photos I’ve ever taken.  

I feel like, for the first time since she died, I have something I can do for her that’s meaningful, personal and appropriate.  

So this week’s Dawn Chorus is dedicated to Susan, whom I didn’t know as well as I’d have liked.  If we’d had more time, I’m sure we would have become really great friends, and I’m sorry you had to leave this world so soon.  

So onto the birds.  I’ve got some really nice photos of Black-Capped Chickadees before but there is something about the colors in this one that I find really compelling

One of the nice things about the new camera is how many frames per second I can get: 5.5 frames/second is a LOT more opportunity for action shots than 3 f/s, and it lets me get photos like this on occasion:

See above; usually when a bird is hopping from one branch to another I just get the bird on one branch and then the other.  Now sometimes I can get the in-between:

On, and speaking of strikingly beautiful birds:

I’ve been trying to get a photo of a Louisiana Waterthrush for years now.  I finally found one within walking distance of my house.  Heard, then spotted, then photographed.  Yay life birds!

Anyone able to help me ID these mystery Sparrows?

These Wood Ducks were VERY far away.  I’m amazed I got any photo of them at all:

Common Merganser

Long-tailed duck

Northern Flicker

Northern Harrier

Northern Pintail

Pilleated Woodpecker

Red-Bellied Woodpecker

red-tailed hawk

As usual, these are all smaller versions; the full sized photos with details (where and when taken, which camera I used, etc.) are available by clicking on them.  

Oh, and I’ve added something new to the site: one of those “people who liked this photo also liked…” lists below the photo.  I’m curious how that works for everyone.  

Hope you enjoyed the story and the photos.  I feel like I’m finally getting to the point of pushing my photographic talent to a new level with some of the shots I’ve been getting lately.  

There’s a piece in today’s Burlington Free Press about the possibility of banning BPA.  BPA, or Bisphenol A, is a chemical frequently used to line tin cans and to harden the plastics in water bottles and pre-packaged meals.  There is serious controversy as to its use and there are some very good arguments for banning it.

But that’s not why I’m writing this.  I’m writing this because of three words that pop up in the article: American Chemistry Council.  

Fortunately, I’d recently been watching Rachel Maddow:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And I thought I wonder what “American Chemistry Council” really is?

So I looked them up and Sourcewatch gave me an answer:

The American Chemistry Council (ACC) is a top trade association representing North American chemical manufacturers. ACC represents represents nearly 150 companies and has a $100 million budget. The group spent more than $2 million on lobbying in 2003.

and…

Bisphenol-A Website is a website “sponsored by the Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group” of the American Chemistry Council (ACC) to respond to concerns about the health impacts of the use of Bisphenol A in plastic products.

I don’t mean to nit-pick.  I actually think the Free Press article is mostly excellent. But… okay, I do mean to nit pick, but… seriously… when your piece’s defense of BPA comes from an organization which is an industry flack, you should state who they are when you quote them.  “American Chemistry Council” sounds, on the surface, like a research and development group.  It’s a lobbying group for the chemical industry.  

It is not intended to inform.  

It is intended to promote.

(Continuing site policy of promoting diaries by officeholders and office-seekers – promoted by GMD)

Vermont is facing the greatest fiscal crisis in its history and the Douglas-Dubie administration’s response to address this crisis is spending $120,000 on web filtering software for state computers.

First of all…I in no way favor our state employees spending their work days focused on anything but their job, let alone pornography, but this is yet another example that the Douglas-Dubie administration just doesn’t get it.

To begin at the most basic level, slashing funding for our most vulnerable Vermonters and proposing to eliminate economic development programs that create jobs are bad investments in this state’s future.  When you take into consideration that the state instead is spending money on filtering software – software that has been shown to be ineffective – it becomes borderline reckless.

This proposal does not help create jobs and grow Vermont’s economy. It also furthers the growing schism between the administration and those serving our state.  It is yet another example of the misplaced priorities and the damaged culture in Montpelier that makes rushed and panicked decisions that don’t create 21st century jobs or move Vermont into a new era.

If there is money for this, where else is there money wasted that could be used to invest in our economic future?

I put forward a proposal to replicate technology approaches used in Washington, D.C and Los Angeles, cities larger than the state of Vermont, to save millions of dollars.  On the issues section of my website (www.mattdunne.com) I’ve outlined a proposal to explore cloud computing solutions that can save money and improve performance.

This idea was proposed over a year ago, and it was ignored.

The filters won’t create jobs here in Vermont.  A change in leadership which brings innovation, fresh ideas and a new approach will.

Finally, the current debate on this issue reflects the damaged culture in Montpelier.  The thought that this software will be used for spying on state employees (which it can do), generating a report every time someone is on-line for more than 15 minutes, demonstrates how little trust remains between the administration and those serving our state.

Frankly, given the terrible state of Vermont’s state websites (the legislative website has consistently been ranked as one of the lowest in usability and e-governance in the nation) I can’t imagine spending less than 15 minutes finding anything, including properly registering a concern over how a policy decision is being handled within an agency.

As we move to transform Vermont into a 21st Century Government, there must be trust between the CEO of the state and the civil servants who will be carrying out the a new approach to delivering services to Vermonters.  We can be much more efficient and deliver better results, not through fear and threats of 1984-like tactics, but by bringing people together around a clear vision, transparent measures of success and empowering people to succeed.

That’s what we did when I was director of AmeriCorps*VISTA, an $85 million 6,000 person organization nearly the size of Vermont state government.   We were able to establish a foundation of trust throughout the entire organization.  Because of that, we were able to improve recruitment efforts to the highest level of participation in the history of the program.

As mentioned before, no one wants state employees using their time inefficiently or using state property to search inappropriate content.  But the filters issue only highlights the need for new leadership and fresh ideas in Vermont.  It exemplifies what is wrong in Montpelier and why we need change to bring our state into a new era.

(Continuing site policy of promoting diaries by officeholders and office-seekers. – promoted by GMD)

(posted by Amy for Doug)

Today I voted against a provision of this year’s tax bill. The proposal to the Senate was to raise $10 million for the general fund through property taxes. Vermont decided several years ago to insitute a statewide property tax to pay for public education. We made a promise to Vermonters that we would not use the property tax to pay for general fund expenditures.

I intend to keep that promise. The proposal that was before us in the Senate today would shift part of our state’s budget problems to local property taxpayers. That is why I spoke up and voted against it. Five of my colleagues – Republican and Democrat – voted with me because they understand the implications of using property taxes to pay for things that have not been education fund expenses. This proposal would take money away from schools and put it in the general fund.

The result will be local property taxpayers blaming their schools for their rising property taxes. It is very difficult to balance the budget, and this is the easy way out, but it balances the budget on the backs of local communities.

I say we must instead face the situation that we are in and take a balanced approach to balancing the budget. We must balance the budget openly and fairly – with a combination of cutting where we can and using revenues that have already been paid by Vermont taxpayers – the rainy day funds.

-Doug Racine

http://dougracine.com/