Irene, jobs will headline State of State

The governor’s State of the State address, scheduled to get underway about 90 minutes from now, will focus largely on “Irene, jobs, and how those things are connected.”

That’s according to Chief of Staff Bill Lofy, who said the speech clocks in at 28 minutes, give or take.

Peter Shumlin’s inaugural State of the State will no doubt be a feel-good affair, with nods to the heroes of Tropical Storm Irene and odes to Vermont Exceptionalism. About midway through the speech, he’ll unveil the “Vermont Strong” license plate, a money-raising initiative to support survivors of the floods.

Aides to the governor are setting up a pair of sleek teleprompters right now. Last year, the devices failed to work in the early going, but finally activated about three minutes in. Hell was paid. It won't happen again.   

We’re unlikely to hear anything too controversial today. Next week though, when the governor drops his budget proposal on lawmakers, the partisan sparks will fly.

Quiet so far, Brock campaign laying groundwork behind the scenes

For a guy who’s trying to unseat a popular incumbent governor in an election year, Randy Brock has been awfully quiet.

Since announcing his candidacy four weeks ago, the Franklin County Republican hasn’t issued so much as a press release.

“I’m pretty sure the last thing voters want to see is full-blown political mode,” Brock said this afternoon.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t plotting a strategy against Democrat Peter Shumlin, who, while playing coy about his reelection aspirations, has deftly used the power of incumbency to burnish his public image.

On Wednesday, Brock squeezed in a skull session with Republican operatives Darcie Johnston, founder of Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, and Mike Bertrand, executive director of the Vermont GOP. The trio could be seen walking together outside the House chamber.

“They’re among the people I’ve been consulting with,” Brock says.

Who else is in on his strategy sessions?

“I’m not going to name names right now, but there are a number of people with whom I’m talking,” Brock says.

He doesn’t have a campaign manager, and doesn’t anticipate bringing one on in the immediate future. He is however nearing final contracts with a pair of fund-raising consultants, including one who will run the money-raising show in Vermont (he wouldn’t name them, citing ongoing negotiations).

Brock says he “really is focused on the issues in the Senate for right now.”

 

Occupy The Golden Dome? 99% prep for State of the State

We just got an email from the Occupy Vermont movement, which is planning to occupy the State of the State address this Thursday. The email says:

Silently displaying their feelings about details of the Governor’s assessment of the state of the State, using hand signals indicating approval, disapproval or withheld judgment, Vermonters from around the state will line the House chamber to occupy the state of the State address on the third day of the 2012 legislative session.

Dressed in green, with personal messages for the Governor taped to their chests, Vermonters identifying themselves as the 99% will make themselves visible in a peaceful and respectful demonstration of their position at the center of government.

The point, organizers say, is to draw attention to the needs of the regular people of the state, who are hurt most by the budget cuts.

occupycentralvt.org

Galbraith ripped over loss of reapportionment duties

Rarely do lawmakers tangle over procedural issues on Day 1 of the session. But on the Senate floor Tuesday morning, Sen. Peter Galbraith let it be known that he, for one, was none too pleased with the appointment of a free-standing committee to oversee his chamber’s legislative redistricting process.

Galbraith, a Windham County Democrat on the Senate Committee on Government Operations, had been under the impression that his five-member committee would be handling reapportionment.

The House, after all, leaves that task to its government operations committee.

Upon learning that the Senate would in fact appoint a separate, seven-person panel to oversee what promises to be a controversial process, Galbraith let loose on Senate President John Campbell.

“I think in fact this can only be interpreted as a vote of no-confidence in the committee on government operations and its chair,” Galbraith said.

Campbell chided Galbraith for his “unfortunate” choice of words and said the decision has nothing to do with confidence in chairwoman Jeannette White and everything to do with assuring broader geographic representation.

Sens. Dick Sears and Dick Mazza, veterans of the body, tried to assure their first-term colleague that the appointment of a larger body is in keeping with longstanding Senate tradition. White herself said she supported delegating the reapportionment duties to the larger panel.

Galbraith, though, was unmoved. He said he could only take the creation of the committee to mean that Campbell believes “the Committee on Government Operations is not capable of carrying out its mandate.”

The Senate proceeded to pass a resolution approving the committee. Galbraith was the lone 'no' vote.

The seven-person panel includes Republican senators Vince Illuzzi (Essex County) Bill Doyle (Washington County) and Peg Flory (Rutland County). Democratic members include White (Windham County), Sears (Bennington County), TimAshe (Chittenden County) and Dick McCormack (Windsor County).

Missing ANR emails found?

MONTPELIER – State officials say they may have recovered the missing emails that raised questions last month about the integrity of Vermont’s open-records policies.

Administration officials in December disclosed that a series of email correspondences had been erroneously deleted following a public-records request filed by the state workers union.

The emails, to which the Vermont State Employees Association had won access in a court ruling, related to the layoff of a scientist at the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Richard Boes, commissioner of the Department of Information and Innovation, said Tuesday that members of his staff have since recovered 3.5 gigabytes of stored memory that may include the requested e-mails.

“I cannot specify what the content of the e-mail messages are … but we have provided access to all recovered e-mails to people at ANR for them to review,” Boes said.

Deb Markowitz, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources, said her staff is currently combing through the 35,000 individual emails contained in the recovered files to see whether they include the correspondence sought by the VSEA. Doug Gibson, head of communications for the state workers’ union, said no one from his organization had been informed of the developments.

The retrieval of the e-mails could help undo an episode that, in some quarters at least, undermined confidence in the public’s ability to access government documents in a digital age.   

Top officials in the Shumlin administration last month blamed protocols put in place under former Gov. James Douglas for the permanent deletion of the email records, which had reportedly been deleted shortly after Gov. Peter Shumlin took office last January.

The destruction of the documents prompted Abigail Winters, associate general counsel of the VSEA, to pen a harshly worded letter to Administration Secretary Jeb Spaulding, in which she said she had been informed that it “is a practice of the state information technology personnel to permanently delete state e-mail accounts of high-ranking government officials shortly after they leave office.”

Winters said she was told of that policy by John Groveman, lead counsel at the Agency of Natural Resources.

“Any advocate of open government shudders to hear that high-ranking government officials have absolutely no accountability to the public with respect to e-mails they send and receive,” Winters wrote.

Spaulding vehemently rejected the charge. The deletion of the emails, he said, occurred just weeks after Shumlin’s inauguration, while many top officials were still acclimating to their executive branch positions.

“It came to my attention in my very first week on the job that it had been practice to delete an exiting employee’s email files, and I put a stop to it immediately,” Secretary of Natural Resources Deb Markowitz said Wednesday.

As it turns out now, the e-mails may not have been deleted permanently at all. Boes said the e-mail records were stored in an archive before the accounts were permanently deleted.    

“We have an archiving system that’s separate from our email system, so when an account gets deleted, our current process is to archive that account before deleting it, and that retains the emails,” he said.

Boes is working with Secretary of State Jim Condos to craft a retention policy for state email records, an issue on which state law is currently silent.

 

Shumlin's veto of water-testing bill to stand

The Vermont Senate has sustained Gov. Peter Shumlin’s lone veto of the 2011 session, but supporters of the law, which would have imposed new testing mandates on residential water wells, say they’re already working on a compromise measure.

The bill, spawned by a case of arsenic poisoning in Addison County, would have required water testing on any newly installed wells. Shumlin’s surprise veto last May angered some lawmakers, who encountered little resistance to the legislation as it made its way through House and Senate committees.

“It passed from committee unanimously and by voice vote out of this body,” said Sen. Ginny Lyons, chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources.

Lyons said the bill received similarly uncontroversial treatment in the House. But it met with a quick death at the hands of Shumlin, who said the mandate would add hundreds of dollars in unnecessary costs to residents ill-equipped to handle the testing fees.

Shumlin said Tuesday that only a small portion of the state’s groundwater reserves are vulnerable to contamination from arsenic.

“I want to see a bill passed by the Legislature that requires testing only in areas where a person is susceptible to arsenic, and that’s one-half of 1 percent of Vermont,” Shumlin said.

On the Senate floor, Lyons blamed the veto on a miscommunication between her committee and the administration. She said she now “understands the governor’s message to us.”

“While we may not completely agree with the governor’s reasoning in this case, we also understand the need to work closely with the governor as we find a solution,” Lyons said.

Flood, Oliver in role reversal at AHS

Gov. Peter Shumlin today announced a managerial mash-up that will see Deputy Secretary of Human Services Secretary Patrick Flood swap positions with Commissioner of Mental Health Christine Oliver.

The two have worked closely together since Tropical Storm Irene, when heavy floods forced the closure of the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury. Under considerable scrutiny from hospitals, mental-health advocates and the media, the pair has spearheaded the administration's quest to deliver a permanent, albeit controversial, replacement plan for the 54-bed psychiatric facility.

That plan will require an enormous lobbying effort in the Statehouse, a "legislative and strategic challenge for which Patrick Flood is uniquely qualified to address," Shumlin said in an administration press release.
Oliver's "extensive management and legal experience," meanwhile, are needed at an Agency of Human Services "facing a host of unanticipated management challenges due to both Irene and federal budget cuts."

"Christine and Patrick have both done an extraordinary job under difficult conditions over the past year," Shumlin said in a written statement. "As I have worked closely with them in the wake of Irene, it has become clear to me that at this unique moment, Christine's background and talents are better suited to managing the Agency's overall work, while Patrick's legislative and state government experience make him best suited to helping realize my vision for creating a comprehensive, post-Irene mental health system."

$26M Dialysis clinics offer withdrawn

A few weeks after state regulaters cast a negative opinion on the purchase of Fletcher Allen Health Care's dialysis clinics by a for-profit company, the company,  Bio-Medical Applications of New Hampshire, has withdrawn its application to purchase Fletcher Allen Health Care’s outpatient dialysis clinic, according to the state insurance regulator, BISHCA.

From the press release:

Bio-Medical Applications, a for-profit company, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fresenius Medical Care Holdings, Inc., itself a wholly-owned subsidiary of a German corporation. The withdrawal of the application for a Certificate of Need approving the sale follows the release by BISHCA of a proposed Statement of Decision denying approval on the grounds that the sale would result in lower quality services at higher cost without any improvement in access to care. 

“Bio-Medical’s decision to withdraw closes the docket in this matter,” said Clifford Peterson, BISHCA’s General Counsel. “The Department will work with Fletcher Allen to assure continued delivery of high quality outpatient dialysis treatment to Vermonters.”

November state revenue results are in

Secretary of the Agency of Administration Jeb Spaulding has released the November revenue results for the state, and things are looking better than last year - state revenues for Nov. 2011 were $78.6 million, or about 2.9 percent ahead of the forecast. That puts the state about $12 million ahead of the forecast for the fiscal year thus far.

“Naturally, we are pleased that General fund revenues continued a positive trend for the month and
through the first five months of the fiscal year. All four of the major tax sources - Personal Income,
Sales & Use, Rooms and Meals, and Corporate Income - are ahead of target and last year’s actual
results, for the month and year to date,” Spaulding said in a press release announcing the results.

The forecast was approved by the Emergency Board in July; the next meeting of that board - made up of the Governor and the chairs of the four 'money' committees in the House and Senate - comes on January 18 of 2012. At that meeting, the E-Board will also take up a number of mid-budget year requests for adjustments on the expense side, including a request for more district technicians from the Agency of Transportation (which are somewhat related to Irene recovery efforts, but the agency is also recommending become permanent), and a new need from the Dept. of Fish and Wildlife, which is facing a budget shortfall. Irene accounted for $25 million in shortfalls in this year's budget so far, according to officials.

While personal income and corporate tax receipts, and consumption taxes like the Sales & Use tax are ahead of forecast, real estate transfer taxes are down, more than 30% below the forecast for November and more than 11% below the fiscal year to date forecast.

Transportation Fund receipts are up, which helps provide more bonding capacity for VTrans, according to Spaulding, while the Education Fund non-property tax income was ahead of forecast for November, but still lagging slightly for the fiscal year to date. 

“It is definitely good news that the General Fund has exceeded target for the fourth consecutive month. However, uncertainty from the continuing global economic instability and the unknown extent of federal budget cuts require us to remain cautious. While the current results indicate a positive note for the current fiscal year (FY 2012), there remains a good deal of uncertainty for FY 2013. We look towards the January Consensus Revenue Forecast revision, scheduled for consideration by the Emergency Board on January 18, 2012, with interest and what we hope will be a clearer picture of the revenue future for our three major funds," Spaulding said in the release.

State is liable for abuse of elderly Vermonters, new lawsuit claims

The state of Vermont has failed to adequately investigate hundreds of alleged cases of elder abuse, according to a law suit filed this morning by Vermont Legal Aid.

The suit, which has backing from a former human services secretary as well as a number of disability-rights organizations, says the state’s failure to follow statutory mandates has resulted in the abuse of vulnerable adults.

Vermont Legal Aid said it filed the suit only after concluding that negotiations with the Division of Adult Protective Services would not rectify the shortcomings without some kind of formal intervention.

“It is unfortunate that we have come to this point, but it is painfully clear that APS is not protecting our most desperate elders and we must now look to the court to remedy this ongoing failure,” said Jim Leddy, a former state senator and state president of AARP.