Well, well. I did not have a “Howard Dean for Governor” trial balloon on my Bingo card, but here we are. WCAX-TV’s Calvin Cutler got the scoop: Multiple sources inside the Democratic Party tell Channel 3 News that Dean is “seriously considering” running in the 2024 election, two decades after he left office the first time. Contacted out of state where he is visiting family, Dean did not confirm or deny the report, saying in a text message: “I’ll make a statement at the appropriate time when I’m in Vermont.” This was apparently a topic of much conversation at last night’s kickoff event for T ..read more

I’m sure it was merely a coincidence. But one day after the Senate Education Committee went all Patty Hearst Syndrome in its confirmation hearing for education secretary nominee Zoie Saunders, and on the same day the Senate panel voted 3-2 in favor of her, the House Education Committee scheduled a witness who excoriated the politicization of the Education Agency, questioned Gov. Phil Scott’s commitment to public schools, and revealed some backstage maneuverings around the selection of the last secretary, Dan French. The witness was Krista Huling, former chair of the state board of education ..read more

Yeah, well, that was depressing. The Senate Education Committee held its confirmation hearing this afternoon for Zoie Saunders, Gov. Phil Scott’s choice for education secretary. She was smiling broadly as the hearing commenced, and she had every reason to smile at the end. The committee failed to raise some very pertinent issues. When they did pose tough questions, they often carefully blunted the sharp edge. (Commitee chair Sen. Brian Campion led the league in “tell me a little bit about” questions, which is an open invitation for the interviewee to wander off in whatever direction they want ..read more

Tuesday is the big day. Zoie Saunders, Gov. Phil Scott’s pick for education secretary, goes before the Senate Education Committee in the first step toward Senate confirmation of her selection. In advance of the occasion, here are some questions I would ask if I were, saints preserve us, a member of that committee. In preparation for this post, I listened to Saunders’ interview last week on “Vermont Edition,” and I have some questions about that program as well. But first, let’s put Saunders in my entirely imaginary witness chair. There are some obvious questions I wouldn’t bother to ask becau ..read more

The Friday edition of VTDigger’s “Final Reading” was a dereliction of journalistic duty. It was a failure by reporter Sarah Mearhoff and whoever edited and approved this piece. Why? Well, the subject was the Senate Appropriations Committee’s all-afternoon discussion of the FY2025 budget. At the end of the day, the panel voted out a budget and sent it on to the full Senate. That much we know. What we don’t get a shred of information about is… what was in the budget? We read about benumbed butts and Senatorial wisecracks and staffers rushing around with revision after revision of the budget and ..read more

Gov. Phil Scott intended for his weekly press conference to be another rant against what the Legislature might do on housing reform. His basic message: Give me the bill that I want. Which isn’t how things work when you have divided government, and the Dem/Prog supermajority has just as much claim to a mandate as the Republican governor. There’s give and take. There’s compromise. It’s called governance. Eventually, the subject of Tax Commissioner Craig Bolio’s ill-fated trial balloon came up. You know, the one where he wanted to defer an unidentified bunch of school expenses for an unspecified ..read more

Sometimes when you’re a political appointee, you have to say stuff in public that you’ve been told to say. I’d like to think that’s what Tax Commissioner Craig Bolio was doing on Friday when he had the stones to approach the House Ways & Means Committee with a scheme that should never have seen the light of day. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, Bolio was sent by his superiors to propose a painfully belated, half-baked plan (to call it a “plan” is being generous) that amounted to what Ways & Means chair Rep. Emilie Kornheiser later called a “payday loan.” Without the benefit of the ..read more

Welp, the Scott administration has put out a press release trumpeting Zoie Saunders’ first day on the job as Vermont’s education secretary. Nowhere does it mention that her appointment is pending approval by the state Senate, which won’t even begin considering the matter until sometime next week. Quite the opposite, in fact. The press release says that “Saunders will travel around the state in the coming weeks” and “In the months ahead, Secretary Saunders will kick off a formal listen and learn tour.” Yeah, the fix is in. The Senate will put on a show of performing due diligence, but honestly ..read more

It appears that the Senate Appropriations Committee is ready to kill a House-passed proposal to extend the motel voucher program that shelters thousands of homeless Vermonters. So says the chatter in the hallways, which I would not take as gospel — except that the committee made its intentions more than clear in a recent hearing. On April 2, the committee heard from Commissioner Chris Winters of the Department of Children and Families and some of his top deputies. The panel had asked him to prepare a presentation on the challenges of implementing H.883, the House-passed FY2025 budget bill tha ..read more

The headline might seem outrageous, and I’m sure it won’t make anyone on the Fifth Floor happy, but it’s the plain truth. Vermont’s judiciary system is grossly underfunded and understaffed. The result is a huge backlog of pending cases measured, not in weeks or months, but in years. Gov. Phil Scott’s solution? Cut a few more positions from the courts. This is the same governor who said, in his State of the State address, that public safety was one of his top priorities. The House decided to boost the Judiciary instead of strangling it, and approved a bill that would pay for more positions in ..read more