Money back, not ... guaranteed

The state yesterday eagerly announced its victory in an enforcement action against the parent company of TJ Maxx.
The announcement said the state will be putting "a portion" of the $272,600 levy into the AG's Consumer Protection Unit; no word on the rest. Presumably it's headed for the slush, errr, General Fund.
As somebody who had their ID stolen twice in a year (once at TJ Maxx, once at Hannaford's) and possibly a third time at the national level (without explanation, we just got new cards in the mail with instructions to destroy the old ones ASAP), I'd love to get some of that settlement. It's disruptive and expensive to have to replace credit cards, particularly when you have regular withdrawals scheduled against those accounts. The settlement, made on behalf of consumers, ought to go to those consumers who suffered losses, shouldn't it?
I also have a problem with government entities pursuing private ones, then using the money gained to keep themselves afloat. It doesn't engender trust that there might not be overeager, even frivolous actions by people who know it's prosecute the retail sector or go find a job there.
So pardon me if I'm a little less than enthusiastic about this big "win" on "our" behalf ...

Long and windy road

Spent an old-fashioned Father's Day yesterday, which is to say, we went for a drive, down Route 7 as far as Danby, then west into the hills.
We had an intended target: The Middletown Springs strawberry festival.
But by the time we got there (15 minutes early), the boys were both asleep in the back seat and it was pouring rain, so we headed west down to Poultney, picked up some berries at Brown's farm stand in Castleton Corners  -- where the boys finally woke up -- drove home and made our own strawberry shortcake. I was glad to see they got the festival in despite the weather, btw.
Now family drives used to bore me silly, so I had to sympathize with our 5-year-old when he told his grandmother it was a "boring" day.
But it gave me another chance to drive through some parts of the county where a developer is proposing to build a wind farm, and I spent as much time as I safely could while driving looking at the tops of mountains that may host the towers, trying to put myself into the place of somebody who lives there.
I still don't see what the big deal is. Who's to say a wind tower is a blight? OK, it's man-made. The falling-down barns are man-made, as are the rusting farm implements scattered around them as if in orbit. But we have come to see these as pleasantly rustic, along with the muddy barnyards, the piles of cow manure, and the barbed-wire fences strung along the road.
Even the plastic-covered rolls of hay are part of the rural landscape; although I miss the inaccurately named square bales -- rectangles, actually -- I did spot a couple of the ancient machines that used to make them, rusting gently into entropy, and nobody who ever did it can honestly say they miss throwing bales, but that's change at a pace that suits agriculture: First a round bale here and there, but still the essential elements of straw and twine; then fewer and fewer "square bales" until now there's almost nothing but round bales; then one year the bales started popping up in swathed in white covers like scat from an enormous chicken, the better to keep the hay without the laborious process of carting it to a barn.
One nicely manicured home had two kids riding in circles in four-wheelers on an adjacent scrub lot; there were the inevitable trailer homes perched on flat spots above the road with the detritus of family life -- riding toys and a doll's kitchen set, plastic balls and bicycles -- tumbling across the lawn; vehicles parked in the most-visible spots possible with "for sale" signs" and shingles advertising everything from freSh eGgs $2.50 / dozen to haircuts to financial planning services, and every home virtually without exception sprouting the inverted mushrooms of satellite TV dishes, often in multiples. One home -- advertised for sale -- had acres of lawn, as artificial and impeccably green in the confusion of the Vermont hillside around it as the wind towers will be artifices and impeccably white.
Why is it we see these other things as acceptable, even in many cases scenic, yet we as unacceptable a tower capturing the wind's force as emission-free electricity?
One thing I did not notice but I know are there were wires; the wires connecting the homes and farms to the grid; ubiquitous and so unseen. The closer the source, the fewer wires we need to string from James Bay in Quebec or a coal plant in the Midwest or whatever replaces Vermont Yankee in three or 23 years.
How, in the name of preserving a quaint but ever-changing vista, how can we not embrace the chance to replace the acid rain from the coal plant or the flooding of somebody else's valley for hydro or the stockpiling of even more bars of waste with a deadly half-life of thousands of years?
Build the towers; harness the wind; burn less carbon; save the planet.

Suicide: Public or private act?

It was a busy, difficult day in the newsroom yesterday.

We heard early in the day that the state police had set up their crime lab at the Farrow Gallery in Castleton, the home/workshop/display space of Patrick Farrow. At first, it seemed like some sort of foul play, as the police were treating the death as suspicious. We sent a photog and a reporter to the scene where they pretty much cooled their heels, waiting for the police to update us.

As the day wore on, it became clear it was probably a suicide, confirmed not by the police but by the chains of electronic messages between family and friends that occur at times like these. It's our practice not to cover suicides that occur in private, but sometimes external events around the death push it into the realm of news. We typically try to keep such coverage as low-key as possible, but a short, factual note on the unusual activity can help dispel rumors, so it's rare we would not do something.

For instance, school-related suicides become news very quickly, as the school community gets notification and rumors spread quickly from there. We try to focus such stories on about public service options like grief counselling, as opposed to the identity of the student involved. People who kill themselves in a very public way also require coverage, so the community understands what happened.

In the Farrow case, we couldn't duck the story even when we were pretty sure what had happened, because most of the town had seen or heard about the police presence -- the mobile crime lab parked and working all day at the gallery of a notable local artist and public advocate is news in and of itself -- so we wrote a fairly short piece and avoided as best as possible speculating on the cause of death or circumstances around it, a process made much, much more difficult because the police wouldn't confirm anything until after the autopsy.

We're working on a full profile of the man and his work for tomorrow's issue, and my thoughts and sympathies go out to Patrick Farrow's many friends and his family.

Otter Valley case

I'm seeing a few comments on "why did the Herald do this" around the case of the student charged with exposing himself at Otter Valley.
To summarize the concerns:
1) Why pick this case (how did the Herald hear about it, etc.)?
2) Isn't he a minor (why didn't the school handle it in-house, etc.)?
3) My personal favorite, "Sex sells."

1) We have a reporter in court every day, looking for serious crimes, the unusual, the important ... in short, the newsworthy ... out of the day's routine filings, evidentiary hearings and so on. On Monday, Gordon Dritschilo came back with a few cases to review. We ran two on Tuesday, the one in question and a story on a drunken party gone out of control, and one on Wednesday, the sentencing follow-up to a story we had reported on when it happened.
We chose the party story mostly based on the fact the judge thought it worth extra time and discussion, which is what we gain by having a reporter sit in the courtroom instead of just picking up the paperwork from the clerk. That's why just getting the paperwork is something we try to avoid doing.
The case of the OV student is dramatically different from the routine. Setting aside the person charged for a moment, it also involved an alleged sexual crime in a school, which seems like the kind of thing parents who read our paper probably want to know about.

2) Generally school misbehavior is handled internally. Typically, the first steps involve school counselors and/or the medical profession, particularly given how actively schools screen for behavioral disorders these days. Those are not public cases. Even if we got a tip about something happening in a case like that, we probably couldn't get enough verified information to do a story if we wanted to.
When police and prosecutors do get involved in a school setting, cases often go to juvenile court, where everything is done out of the public eye. But in this case, they decided to prosecute in district court, which means they chose to charge the person involved as an adult. That decision alone signaled to us that the school and the legal community are not treating this as a minor disciplinary incident, or a medical one, which also factored into the decision to cover the charges.
Once a person is charged in Vermont, very few bits of information are not on the public record. And once we start reporting on a story, particularly a crime story, it is our policy where possible to use the accused's full name, with age, middle initial and the street they live on. This is to avoid accidentally casting aspersions on someone who happens to have the same or a similar name to the accused.

3) Finally, the "sex sells" discussion. The story ran on the bottom of B1, next to the story on the drunken party. There's some discussion about how many extra papers you sell based on what is in a day's edition, but only on the lead story or stories. I don't know of any research to suggest anything besides those sells papers. The front page, above the fold, was given over to a fairly dry but important story on the federal stimulus and a "good news" story on the garden club looking for young volunteers, complete with photos of YES plan students doing volunteer service projects. That story is trailing this one in comments by a margin of 21-1 (Thanks Colleen, for noticing!) as I write. The top of B1 was a story on the new student rep to the Rutland School Board, with photo.

And anytime we run anything controversial regarding a young person, we can expect a healthy bashing right here and probably in our letters page, so I'm not convinced there's a net positive for the Herald in running this story, except that it's our job.

I always appreciate discussions of what we do, how and why. We publish letters critical of ourselves routinely. But in this case, I wouldn't do it differently even if I had the chance for a do-over.

Election day

The polls are open today for Rutland City residents to vote on bonding for five water projects around the city.
That's appropriate if you live along Church Street near the Middle/Intermediate school, as a main break has left several blocks without water today.
I got a note from a resident the other day complaining that we hadn't run the story on the front of the local section. It's one of those judgement calls, as it was competing for space with two graduations and the popular "Street Talk" column. Rather than squeeze the graduation photos down to nothing, we ran the pictures larger and bumped the election story to B5, where it could get a decent-sized headline.
I prefer using more of the paper to start stories on; others like it better when everything is squeezed onto A1 and B1 and then jumps elsewhere in the paper.
Your thoughts on the matter are always welcome ...

Trail walk

A group of interested people got a chance to walk the route of the proposed Rutland Creek path this morning.
It was exciting to see how close it is to being a reality. Most of the route is set with landowners' permissions, so it's possible to see just what is there. A lot of it is surprisingly pretty already (despite the five, count 'em five shopping carts along the route. There's room for at least one pocket park en route. It should be a nice attraction for the city to tout in attempts to attract development or for businesses hoping to attract good employees to the area.

School day

Spent an interesting morning talking with two Learn-to-earn classes at Rutland High School, along with schools reporter Cristina Kumka.
The program involves area businesses talking to rising sophomores about the practical value of an education by discussing our careers and the possibilities for the kids.
The original plan (foiled by the combination of the school's firewall and the antivirus software on my laptop) was to put video of the event up live from the classroom. Stay tuned and we'll have an edited version of the kids talking about their career aspirations and the story of the day shortly.
Thanks to the school and Nancy Burzon at the Rutland Region Workforce Investment Board for setting up the program, and to the kids and teachers for their participation.

Shame on little wobbly wheels. That squeak.

It's embarrassing, putting a story on shopping carts on the front page of the paper.
It's more embarrassing that this is the longest-running issue in four years since I got here and there's no end in sight. Which is why it's on the front page.
Especially as the solution is as plain as the sidewalk for anybody to see: Carts with wheel locks lined up at the Price Chopper exit to the Plaza where they've been abandoned because they won't roll any farther. There must have been 15 carts there one evening last week just after the post-work shopping rush; you had to step off the sidewalk to get around them. But they weren't in the neighborhoods or blocking downtown sidewalks. Put a lock on every cart and the problem is solved. Nobody steals anything, nobody gets charged with a crime.
And yes, before you ask, that is the exit you can see from all the windows on the west side of City Hall.
So instead of another interminable round of meetings without a defined agenda except hand-wringing (I keep waiting for somebody to ask whether we can draw down federal stimulus money to pay for a cart enforcement officer), we could have a single meeting between the city and the stores laying down the timetable for getting locks on all the carts. It shouldn't be onerous for the city to keep up to the few carts that get dragged down the street with one wheel immobilized.
Next issue, please.

The Ford scam

OK, so we've all seen the Nigerian scam and its many and various offspring ... those emails from exotic countries telling us we've won a lottery we never entered or somebody needs our help transferring money out from under the nose of a dictator.
Today's was a new twist ... offering me 35 percent off a Ford car or truck:

"Due to the World Economy Recession, Ford Motor Company, Inc undergo a statistic fall in Sales and result in a drastic financial crisis this last season.
The Government has given us the opportunity to bounce back on our feet, but unfortunately we have not achieved the fund necessary.
Therefore, we offer you the opportunity to purchase a very good Auto at 35% discount of the price. We decided to pull the sales of 1.000 cars from United Kingdom at a very low price for us to aquire the capital needed to bounce back in business and to use this medium to increase the scale of our valued customers.
The payment shall be made in installments through the bank at 1 month after signing the contract. If you are interested in this offer please fill out the application form, A representative will contact you about this application within five business day.
Sincerely,
Ford Motor Company
P.O. Box 6248
Dearborn, MI 48126"

The offer came with an application form complete with a drop-down list of vehicles and prices, and I have to say, they're not a whole lot lower than what the real auto dealer is already offering for rebates ... and I don't have to send my bank account number to my local dealer to set up a test drive ...

Credit where credit is due

Saw the same city dump truck on the same street today. Going slower ... waved a jogger across the street at a stop sign.
Baby steps.