Letters to the Editor (3/1/23)

The State Responds…

[Re Newcomb: “State Pushed to Amend Foster Care Records Access,” February 15]: The Vermont State Archives & Records Administration and Vermont Department for Children and Families appreciate Tim Newcomb’s recent cartoon concerning foster care records and want to take this opportunity to provide additional information.

DCF does provide individuals access to their own information as allowed under current state laws: Minors in foster care or a child-caring institution can receive certain information from DCF, and adults who were in foster care and adopted can receive certain information from DCF. There is, however, a gap in current state laws: Adults who were in foster care but not adopted cannot receive the same information from DCF as minors and adopted persons. This is the gap we are striving to close.

Legislative changes can allow all individuals who were formerly in foster care to access their information. The Vermont State Archives & Records Administration, in consultation with DCF, submitted a report to legislators with recommendations. Further, and with careful forethought, we believe individuals’ access to their own information can be expanded while also protecting information pertaining to other individuals that is often included in the same case records and cannot be disclosed under other federal or state laws.

We invite stakeholders to read the Act 100 of 2022 report submitted to the legislature, including recommendations, and join us in advocating for legislative changes. The report can be found online on the Vermont General Assembly’s website.

Collaboration is key to ensure the voices of everyone involved are heard, respected and honored.

Gillie Hopkins

Montpelier

Hopkins is permanency planning manager for the Vermont Department for Children and Families.

Tanya Marshall

Williston

Marshall is the Vermont state archivist and chief records officer.

What Oversight Looks Like

Of course, police are free to get second jobs with their own cars, clothing and guns, but this private patrol crossed a line [“Crime Pays: Burlington Police Officers Land a Lucrative Side Gig,” January 24; “Burlington Police Chief in Spotlight After Revelation of Private Patrols,” January 31].

Is the answer a 2023 ballot measure authorizing a new city department and police commission to address this ongoing situation [“Burlington Voters Will Decide Whether to Create a New Police Oversight Model,” February 7]?

After discussions with my neighbors, we are voting against the new commission and department, as they are not the solution to the current dysfunctional situation. The ballot measure only ramps up the existing conflicts and blame game between the mayor, council and police.

This all started with national discussions about better police training and public safety for every citizen. Who doesn’t want that? And it takes thoughtful, collaborative and continuous work to make this a reality.

I suggest a working group with six representatives — two from the mayor’s office, two from the city council and two from the police — committed to working together to define goals, identify problems, and negotiate and implement policy solutions. The working group should also include a professional mediator and access to an expert who has experience with policing issues and solutions, successful community policing models, and knowledge of what other police departments have implemented.

If a city position were a possibility, maybe a new training officer and liaison could provide ongoing collaboration, information sharing and training.

I’m hopeful for a future with mutual respect, collaborative policies and a willingness to continue to work together for everyone’s benefit.

Steph Holdridge

Burlington

No Accountability for Proposed Board

[Re “Burlington Voters Will Decide Whether to Create a New Police Oversight Model,” February 7]: The proposed police control board, Item 7 on the March 7 Town Meeting ballot, is a fundamental attack on democracy in its constitutional form. Constitutional democracy limits what the democratic electorate can do in limiting the rights of its citizens.

Once a claim to rights has been established by constitutionally protected means, such as union agreements, then in a constitutional democracy that right cannot be violated by a fanaticism-based police control board.

First, the proposed board would give over part of the rights to discipline police to groups that are not responsible to citizens but are rather chosen by an arbitrary procedure by people who are not themselves elected representatives. If elected representatives violate people’s rights, they can be held accountable. The board would be chosen by seven community groups that are not defined, and by the director of racial equity, inclusion and belonging. There is no guarantee that any concept of the equal right of all citizens to try to be on the board would be respected. With the proposed board, its members and the people who choose it could not be held accountable.

Second, instead of making the attempt to be on the board an equal option for everyone, the proposed board would prevent anyone associated with law enforcement from being on the board.

Third, the proposal arbitrarily and capriciously would deny police their fundamental right, won through a constitutionally protected process, to grieve disciplinary measures.

Norman Arthur Fischer

Burlington

Careless Candidate

Seven Days recently reported “cribbing” on council candidate Tim Doherty’s website [“Website for Burlington Council Candidate Cribs Text From Current Councilor,” February 21, online]. Burlington Democratic Committee chair Adam Roof was reportedly furious that someone had, I guess, noticed this.

But the story is not about “gotcha” or even about plagiarism; it’s about the critical difference between substance and a sales pitch.

The candidate himself didn’t bother to read what he was “saying” to sell a supposedly superior brand of “constituent service.”

The revealing irony is that, in claiming he would be an attentive councilor who would take far more care than some others, no care was taken at all. The voice of a candidate stepping up to serve us was, in fact, not actually his voice.

Doherty purportedly stepped up after observing from the sidelines for 20 years because he was concerned about two councilors resigning. But he remained on the sidelines for the December 6 special election and the December 15 Democratic caucus. He was recruited or decided to run after Maea Brandt dropped out [“Brandt Drops Out of Burlington’s East District Council Race,” January 25].

Even if you’re U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or former senator Pat Leahy or President Joe Biden and you have a team of writers who work on speeches and website posts, you still need to read what they write. You still need to be involved and take care.

And if you don’t have the time to take care, even when you’re more than capable, it’s fair to wonder whether you have the time it takes for the seat you seek — even if there’s a political party that wants you sitting there.

Michael Long

Burlington

Prog Problems

Former UK prime minister Winston Churchill once might have said: “If in doubt, follow the Progressives — in the opposite direction.”

The Burlington Progressives do not understand the words they are using, like “clean,” “renewable” and “net-zero.” Zero net doesn’t exist; renewable doesn’t mean clean. Burning wood in the McNeil Generating Station is a dirtier business than burning coal, per unit of weight. The U.S. lowered its emissions significantly in the past 15 years because gas replaced coal. Wood-burning stations have efficiency around 25 percent, gas furnaces around 95 percent.

Ranked-choice voting is a way to get useless people into office. Because even if your candidate won, he or she might lose the election. If you have a certain number of candidates, a candidate with 5 percent of first places could beat a candidate with 49 percent. Counting second places might make sense when candidates are close, 5 percent apart; other than that, it’s nonsense. It is a mathematical coup d’état, not democracy.

If you do not want stray bullets flying over your kids’ heads, vote no on police oversight. Who is going to sit on the commission, and who is going to decide who is going to sit on the commissions? If that question passed, City Councilor Zoraya Hightower might be patrolling the streets by herself, with the help of other Progressives.

(I actually can’t wait to see Councilor Joe Magee fastening his gun in a hurry and Councilor Perri Freeman revving the engine of a cruiser going downtown in order to reach Hightower, who got herself into trouble trying to pacify, with sensitive words, some belligerent drunk).

Evzen Holas

Burlington

Flight to Safety?

There have been numerous letters to the editor in the Feedback section associating increased crime in Burlington with the vast reduction in the size of the police force. While the writers clearly don’t understand that correlation is not causation, an increase in crime and reduction in quality of life certainly should have resulted in a reduction in property values.

This is a testable hypothesis, especially since new assessments were just performed in 2021. To do this, I randomly selected 20 single-family home sales from February 2023 and August 2022. Only one house sold below assessed value. The average was 26 percent above. Certainly, a crime-ridden city with awful management should see price reductions. Yes, prices have gone up elsewhere. Yet the same can generally be said of many crimes — they’ve gone up during the pandemic nationally. Ditto for the difficulties experienced in police recruiting; in bucolic, low-crime Norwich, the force dropped recently from four officers to just one.

While of course Burlington would be well served by increasing the morale, size, pay and training of its police force, there’s no evidence that the current situation is causing an exodus and reductions in property values — though it’s certainly reduced quality of life for many.

While we can’t know the counterfactual, if you believe the current situation has made Burlington undesirable, then you have to accept that a larger police force and the assumed lower crime rate resulting would certainly create more demand, driving up housing prices even more.

Dan Gottlieb

South Strafford

Train to Somewhere

[Re “Burlington’s Amtrak Train Service Is Off to a Strong Start,” January 30]: Has the Amtrak Ethan Allen Express from Burlington to New York City attracted former riders of the Vermonter via Essex Junction to New York and Washington, D.C.? It must have.

Cited statistics that the Ethan Allen Express had 8,000 riders in November 2022 while the Vermonter had a record 11,700 riders are too vague.

How many people traveled via Essex Junction before and after they could choose Burlington instead?

The Amtrak Adirondack between Montréal and New York City had solved the customs and immigration problem before beginning the COVID-19 hiatus. How did it do it? Could the Vermonter extended to Montréal do the same?

Howard Fairman

Putney

Editor’s note: The ridership data used in the story are what Amtrak make available on a monthly basis. On Amtrak’s Adirondack train, it’s now possible to complete customs and immigration paperwork at the border, but as the story notes, Amtrak plans to move that service to Montréal in the future to avoid delays at the border.

WWJD?

[Re “Religious Conversion: Vermont’s Old Churches Offer Potential for New Enterprises — If They’re Not Demolished First,” February 15]: Is taking a wrecking ball to deconsecrated churches (an ecclesiastical demolition derby, as it were) the best the Catholic church has to offer its members and surrounding communities?

The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception was my parish growing up in Burlington, and we were devastated when it burned to the ground in 1972. I still remember weeping parishioners watching as the tower and statue of the Blessed Mother were taken down the next day.

Fifty-one years later, the language used today by some church leaders is nothing more than fearmongering and hurtful at a time when unity, community and healing are desperately needed. What are they afraid of?

Jesus is not on sabbatical. Let’s ask Him what He would do — and, for a change, listen.

Jim Leddy

Colchester

Clean Heat ‘Fraud’

The return of “clean heat standard” fraud is back [“Senate Committee Advances the Latest Clean Heat Bill,” February 17, online].

This assault on working people as well as retired Vermont citizens has a new name to fool the uninformed. This bill intends to require fossil fuel dealers to buy credits from the Public Utility Commission to finance the fraud and drive the price of heating oil even higher to discourage people from using fossil fuel to heat their homes and cook their meals. The money collected in credits would then be used to subsidize the installation of heat pumps and wood heating systems, which are very expensive to convert from existing oil and propane systems. Some businesses would be forced to downsize, abandon expansion plans, close or leave the state. That would cost jobs.

The fraud wants to create massive taxpayer subsidies for the purchase of EVs. How would the legislators extract money for repairs to roads and bridges if there were no taxes on motor fuel? Aside from EVs, what would be their plan to make Vermont all-electric by 2050? Windmills and solar are going to need backup power production, which will definitely be nuclear by 2050 when the adults will be in charge in Montpelier.

According to the secretary of state, only 57 percent of registered voters actually voted in the midterms. That doesn’t amount to much of a mandate. Why are legislators so hell-bent on requiring the people of Vermont to conform to this poorly thought-out fantasy? They refuse to see the economic damage this fraud would exact on the citizen taxpayers of Vermont.

Gordon Spencer

Lowell

Reasons to Defeat Colchester Rec Center

[Re “Potlucks and Planes: Seven Votes to Watch on Town Meeting Day,” February 22]:

Inflation. Nationwide, construction costs are running 30 to 100 percent above initial estimates. What happens when the town’s $15,907,000 proposal becomes $20 million to $25 million or higher? Despite repeated requests for transparency, voters have only been told: “Colchester is currently in the process of negotiating contracts for the project.”
Competition with private gyms. The Vermont Supreme Court has ruled that local governments shouldn’t compete with private businesses. Local gyms would face tough competition from a government-subsidized gym.
Bias. The proposed rec center would discriminate against those on limited or fixed incomes. It would be a pay-to-play facility with family memberships running $1,200 per year.
High operating costs. It would cost two-thirds of a million dollars a year to operate the center. Large numbers must sign up to cover annual operating and maintenance costs. If not, rates would go up.
Environmental impact. Colchester proposes to build its rec center in peaceful woods with a diverse wildlife habitat. In 2014, Scott Moreau of Greenleaf Forestry performed a site evaluation, concluding “red pitch pine trees on the site likely represent a large sand plain community that is considered by the State of Vermont to be endangered habitat.” Instead of disrupting a natural habitat, a much less expensive option would have been to site the rec center on town land with existing access roads and infrastructure.
Risky funding. Relying on local option tax proceeds from a few stores, even if one is Costco, is risky. Especially since capital loan payments would stretch out 10 to 15 years.

Jack Scully

Colchester

Lower Health Care Costs

[Re “Vermont Lawmakers Question Job-Creating Subsidies at a Time of Low Unemployment,” February 6]: New Hampshire spends almost $1,000 less than Vermont per capita on health care, and that expense is growing more slowly, too. Vermont has had the highest growth rate for health care in the U.S. over the past 30 years. The No. 1 thing that the legislature could do to improve business finances would be to engage and get Vermont’s health care costs and outcomes in line with the region’s.

Companies come to Vermont because their employees want to live here. Some meager subsidy 1) doesn’t compare to what other states offer (those motivated by public subsidies aren’t going to move here anyway), and 2) can’t hold a candle to the costs and increases that health care has brought to personnel costs.

Whatever resources you are putting toward job retention, put them toward understanding why we are so inefficient at delivering health care in Vermont — and fix it.

Roger Brown

Richmond

Union Man

Thanks for the great article about Andrew Tripp and his work as a union organizer [“The Long Run,” February 22]. If we could convince the Democratic Party to aggressively support unions and pass legislation that makes it easier to form and join them, it would go a long way toward winning back many working men and women who have voted for Republicans for reasons that have nothing to do with their economic prosperity.

I realize that working-class voters have often not rewarded the only political party that consistently goes to bat for them, but membership in a union can change that. Union leaders at every level are uniquely positioned to point out to their members that, however enjoyable it might be to vote based on the latest social hot-button issue, fed to you by a Republican con man, doing so does nothing for your paycheck.

Charles Taplin

Warren

Fighting Words

Calvin Coolidge Library at Castleton University Credit: File: Caleb Kenna

Readers had plenty to say about last week’s news story “Battle of the Books,” about a controversial decision to eliminate the old-school libraries in the Vermont State Colleges System. “President Parwinder Grewal says getting rid of the books and employees will save the cash-strapped colleges $600,000 a year,” Anne Wallace Allen wrote. “The staff will be replaced by one person who will run the merged virtual library.” Browse on…

Books and journals do not magically appear in a building that has been designed and constructed as a library. A trained and knowledgeable librarian, or perhaps a team of librarians, carefully selects from the hundreds of thousands of books published each year, spends taxpayers’ money on purchasing the chosen books, and creates standardized catalog records to facilitate identification and location. After a book is shelved and a journal is placed with its previous issues, the librarian ensures the physical care and ready availability of the assembled publications to those seeking information and knowledge. The librarian’s goal is to develop and maintain over many decades a balanced collection meeting the educational requirements of their community of readers and researchers.

Disassembling and redistributing such a collection constitutes irresponsible and wasteful stewardship of what has been assembled at substantial financial commitment and intellectual endeavor. Such actions will not contribute positively to the academic and intellectual endeavors of the students and faculty in our Vermont colleges and universities. Yet the February 7 announcement of changes to Vermont State University’s libraries contends that these “strategic decisions” will “preserve and enhance the quality of our education, create an engaging student experience, and revitalize our campuses and their communities.”

Harold Forbes

Castleton

The bureaucrats running the new Vermont State University plan to get rid of books in their libraries to save money. These people would get rid of nurses in a hospital!

The money could be saved by eliminating waste — that is, the many highly paid bureaucrats who do not teach. The University of Vermont recently tried to eliminate much of its education beyond how to count money.

Online “education” can only teach some skills. Knowledge gain requires face-to-face listening, discussion and debate.

Reading books is necessary. Picking pieces one already likes while scanning an electronic device is not. Too many people, students and teachers at all levels rarely pick up a book now. Eliminating books in libraries will only make this worse. Will these bureaucrats actually burn the books?

Such policy threatens to even increase the number of ignorant Donald Trump supporters in Vermont.

Geoffrey Cobden

Weybridge

The reason given, over and over again, is that removing the books is to save money. The new administration does not explain how it will save money. The librarians have to be offered positions elsewhere in the college system at their current rate of pay. The technology across all campuses has to be upgraded. Many more computers will have to be purchased and maintained. Constant renewal of multiple leases to countless publishers, into perpetuity, at ever-increasing prices for ever-narrowing resources, will have to be monitored to ensure we retain the titles we need.

The Vermont Library Association has confirmed that electronic libraries are more costly to establish and maintain than a physical collection. The plan is to renovate the newly opened areas, adding more expense. And, especially here in Vermont, it will be more expensive to heat the big, empty spaces. No one has explained how removing a single book will save any money at all. And most terrifying: Since none of the local libraries is capable of taking on even a portion of the collections, the books are bound for recycling. Once they are gone, there is no going back without spending millions of dollars to repurchase the over 300,000 books the colleges currently own outright.

We just want answers, and no one in the current transformation administration has offered the faculty, staff, students, alumni or communities a single one that makes sense.

Blithe Milks

Proctor

Milks is an adjunct professor of English at Castleton University.

It Happened in Vermont: A Science Fiction Fable by Garret Keizer

Most science fiction has to do with imagining the future, but perhaps in the future science fiction writers will tend to imagine the past. They won’t know they’re imagining the past because our descendants will be so self-assuredly advanced as to have no need or knowledge of history.

I can imagine one of these descendants concocting a tale in which an obscure researcher accidentally finds a way to enter her computer and experience the worlds encoded there. She steps “through the screen” in the way that Alice stepped through the Looking Glass. There she discovers all the realities locked within microchips, all the domains inside “The Cloud.” Google images suddenly become actual things. Virtual universities become physical ones, places with walkways, buildings and grass.

The first thing to assault her consciousness will be an overwhelming sense of depth, a dimension that humans in her society have nearly lost their sense of. Suddenly “out of her depth,” as it were, she remembers what she was taught as a young child, that depth is best understood as the space between the tip of one’s nose and a screen. Her parents often said that in any emergency involving depth her safest course would be to follow her nose to the nearest flat surface, which in her world is never out of reach.

Once on “the other side of the code,” however, she finds the walls around her are farther than any walls she has known in her life. Fortunately for her, she was accessing digitized information at the time of her breakthrough, so she finds herself inside some sort of repository — she might have died of fright had she been transported into the fresh air — and is able to follow her nose to a wall. But it is a very uneven wall, being, as you and I would instantly recognize, a tall shelf filled with b-o-o-k-s.

It doesn’t take our researcher long to conclude that she has somehow found her way to a civilization far more advanced than her own. It seems that all the information she has hitherto seen only on screens can be incarnated in these beautifully weighty objects, attractive to the eye and sensible to the touch. She can’t help laughing when she fans the pages. She laughs again when she snaps the covers closed. It’s as if she’s been given a body and a whole world besides. Soon she is able to find texts she never knew existed, texts never mentioned in the data banks she’s consulted. What is more, she finds other people enjoying these objects with her. Some of them assist her in navigating the bumpy walls. They smile at her like 3D emojis with skin. It’s like doing social media only a thousand times more social.

But no sooner has she begun to savor this utopian vision than she is accosted by a man gathering up the charmed objects and throwing them in a box. “Are you done with that?” he asks, snatching the miracle from her hand. When our explorer demands to know the meaning of this rude confiscation, the man with the box explains that all these objects — he calls them “print sources” — are going to be eliminated and their contents transferred to digital platforms. “In this way,” he says, “we will create the library of the future.”

“But isn’t that where I am?” the woman exclaims.

The philosopher whose book she was reading could have told her where she is, yes, and where she is likely to be till the day she dies. She is in The Kingdom of The Autocrats Who Always Know Best, a land of endless heartache and unimaginable folly.