Burlington writer and activist Greg Guma says he's considering challenging Mayor Miro Weinberger in next March's election. 

"I'm not happy with what I've seen in the past three years," Guma says. "There's a rush to redevelopment. There's a move away from the kinds of balance and progressive vision we had for 30 years."

In an email and blog post Wednesday, Guma said he plans to hold a meeting with supporters in two weeks to assess whether there's sufficient enthusiasm for a challenge to the first-term Democrat. If he runs, Guma would join a growing list of contenders, which includes former Department of Public Works chief Steve Goodkind and could include Libertarian Loyal Ploof. 

"I'm available if there's sufficient energy," Guma says.

The Maple Street resident has a long history in alternative media. He has served as editor of the Vermont Vanguard Press, co-founder of the Vermont Guardian and executive director of the Pacifica Foundation, which owns Berkeley-based Pacifica Radio. During Weinberger's first run for mayor, in 2012, Guma covered the race for VTDigger.org. 

Gov. Peter Shumlin spent nearly a million dollars in his quest for a third term and outspent Republican Scott Milne 4-to1, according to new filings released Tuesday.

But despite the tremendous cash advantage, the incumbent Democrat beat the political novice by just 2,434 votes. Since neither candidate reached the 50 percent threshold, the legislature will choose the next governor in January; Milne announced earlier Tuesday that he won't decide until next month whether to keep fighting.

The latest filings with the secretary of state's office cover the last two days of the campaign and the 13 days since Election Day. They show that Shumlin spent nearly $63,000 in that period, compared with $30,000 by Milne.

The governor's final expenses included a $37,000 payment to Klose Communications, the Washington, D.C., firm that produced his television ads, and $8,720 to Connecticut-based Mission Control, Inc., for direct mail. Milne's included a $6,340 check to Wyoming-based That Was Close, LLC, for a telephone town hall meeting he conducted the night before the election.

Throughout the two-year election cycle, Shumlin spent nearly $953,000. That's nearly three times the $329,000 he spent two years ago when he faced off against then-senator Randy Brock. And it's nearly four times the $241,000 Milne spent this time around. 

At that rate, Shumlin spent roughly $10.65 for every vote he received. Milne spent about $2.77 per vote.

When Ron Liebowitz steps down from his post as president of Middlebury College next June, he'll be succeeded by a woman — the first female president in the college's history. In an announcement today at Mead Chapel, the board of trustees introduced Laurie L. Patton as the 17th president in the liberal arts college's 214 years.

The board selected Patton, 53, from a pool of 260 candidates. The board unanimously voted to approve Patton's appointment at a meeting Tuesday morning. 

"I can't wait to get here," Patton told students, faculty and staff at Mead Chapel at noon, after praising the college for its innovative spirit, commitment to education and environmental stewardship. "I am delighted to begin work with you as your 17th president," she told the crowd, before riffing on a Wendell Berry quote. "Here, in all the glorious places where Middlebury lives and thrives, we will become together who we are meant to be." 

A religion scholar and translator of classic Indian Sanskrit texts, Patton earned her BA from Harvard University and doctorate from the University of Chicago. She currently serves as dean of Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, the university's largest undergraduate school. 

In a statement from the college, Middlebury's board chair, Marna Whittington, lauded Patton as an outstanding choice for Middlebury's next president. “She lives the values of Middlebury, and I am confident she will provide the leadership and innovative thinking required to maintain the positive momentum and success Middlebury has experienced during Ron Liebowitz’s tenure as president,” said Whittington. Later, in a press conference, Whittington noted that the board heard a clear desire for a female president from college constituents during the search process; nationally, women head only 26 percent of colleges and universities. 

Prior to her work at Duke, Patton taught religion at Emory University in Atlanta for 15 years. She's the author of nine scholarly books on South Asian history, culture and religion, as well as two volumes of original poetry. She's married to Shalom Goldman, a professor of religious studies and Middle Eastern studies at Duke; Goldman will become a tenured professor in Middlebury's religion department.

Liebowitz announced his decision to step down as president last December. He'll have served 11 years in the role when that decision takes effect on June 30. He has shepherded the college through a number of changes, including the acquisition of the California-based Monterey Institute of International Studies and the creation of 23 new sites for study abroad. During his tenure, the college sent two teams to the U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Decathalon competition and created the Center for Social Entrepreneurship — both indicative of a new focus on innovation, entrepreneurship and technology. Under Leibowitz's watch, the college's endowment grew — despite a national recession — from more than $700 million to $1 billion.

"The reputation of Middlebury has never been at a higher point," said trustee Al Dragone, Jr., on Tuesday. Dragone chaired the presidential search committee. "Academically and financially we are seen as a leader in higher education. The stability we currently enjoy is in no small part due to Ron’s leadership over the last 10 years." 

In a press conference this afternoon, Patton said that aggressive fundraising aimed at further growing the endowment is on her to-do list. She expressed a commitment to encouraging socioeconomic, sexual and racial diversity on campus, and spoke of her collaborative approach to leadership. She also noted that given the growth and expansion Middlebury has experienced in recent years, one of her jobs will be to help the college make sense of its multiple identities.

"I think the key question there is, how can the Middlebury identity expand, and still remain the Middlebury identity?" said Patton.

She takes office on July 1, 2015. 

Pretty much nothing has gone according to script in Vermont’s bizarro/not-quite-over/only-got-interesting-after-Election Day gubernatorial race.

So we probably shouldn't be surprised by what went down this morning.

Republican Scott Milne was due to announce this week whether he will contest the race in the legislature, where lawmakers must chose the winner in January since neither he nor Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin cleared 50 percent on Election Day.

Late this morning, reporters across the state opened emails from the Milne camp, prepared to bring the public the news … and received yet another reminder that Scott Milne doesn’t give a flying cow pie about conventional wisdom.

Milne announced that he had no announcement.

In an appearance on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" Monday night, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) achieved the impossible: He looked like he was having a good time.

Sanders, who typically vacillates between stiffness and anger, ably parried with faux-conservative host Stephen Colbert over socialism, Denmark and even Sanders' status in Vermont's congressional delegation.

"First of all, as a 73-year-old man, how does it feel to be the junior senator?," Colbert asked. "Do you ever shake your fist at Pat Leahy? Say, 'Get out of town, old man!'"

"No, he's doing just fine," Sanders said with a laugh. "He and I are pretty good friends."

"But compared to you, he's like Rush Limbaugh. He is so right-wing," Colbert said. "He's a Democrat. You're a socialist. That's the bogeyman of Washington. Do you frighten people when you walk around the Capitol? Are they afraid you're going to take their tractor and give it to the whole village?"

This post was updated at 7:15 P.M. on 11/17/2014 to include comments from Mayor Miro Weinberger.

Last year, Burlington public works director Steve Goodkind retired after 32 years in city government. His leisure time didn't last long. Today, Goodkind confirmed to Seven Days that he plans to run for mayor of Burlington, challenging the Democratic incumbent, Miro Weinberger.

Reached Monday afternoon at Moonlight Cycles, his son's Winooski motorcycle shop, Goodkind said he's been wanting to get involved with city affairs again and he's determined that "now is the time." (In September, Weinberger said he would run for a second term.) The election takes place next March.

A resident of the New North End, Goodkind has ties with Queen City Progressives, but he hasn't decided whether he'll seek a party nomination or run as an independent. Asked how likely it was that he'll run as a P, Goodkind said, "There is some interest there, so I will look at that option." Currently, he is gathering the 150 signatures from registered voters that he'll need to get on the ballot. "I’m hearing a lot of people say, 'Do it.'" 

Law enforcement officials say they are still struggling to fix Vermont’s faulty sex-offender registry, which for years has been riddled with missing and inaccurate information. 

Testifying before the Joint Corrections Oversight Committee, Public Safety Commissioner Keith Flynn said his agency has made progress since a summer audit discovered a litany of errors with the state’s inventory of 1,200 sex criminals, including omitted offenders, people inaccurately included on the list and offenders incorrectly identified.

But Flynn made clear that any potential fixes for the problems, documented in July in Seven Days, are still in the proposal phase.

One key suggestion that Flynn offered lawmakers is to have judges make a binding decision, upon sentencing, whether or not a defendant should go on the registry, and if so, for how long.

Currently, staffers in the Department of Public Safety, who are not trained lawyers, are making that call. But it’s not a straightforward decision. Vermont’s sex-offender law is more than 30 pages long and includes numerous exemptions.

Many of the errors in the registry have been traced back to faulty decisions by Department of Public Safety employees.

“Our job at public safety is administrative. It’s not interpretative,” Flynn said. “When it becomes interpretative, there are problems. It’s something that should be coming from the bench and shouldn’t be left to an administrative or clerical person in the Department of Public Safety.”

Vermont maintains two registries — one privately held by law enforcement, the other accessible to the public — detailing the location and identity of qualifying sex criminals.

The people planning to redevelop the Moran Plant pitched their idea — and the mayor and Burlington voters embraced it — without knowing whether they could come up with the money needed to make it happen. On Monday, they announced promising news: After courting 42 possible donors, the developers say they’ve determined that their fundraising goal — $11 million — is feasible. 

Eight months ago, Burlington city officials and voters agreed to devote $6.3 million in tax increment financing to a plan to redevelop the long-defunct coal plant  on the waterfront. But that sum was far less than the estimated total project cost. Meanwhile, that number has crept up — originally $26 million, the developers are now putting the price at $34 million.

The potential Moran developers spent the spring, summer and fall figuring out just how feasible their plan was, and they hired a private firm, Resilient Philanthropy, to assess how much they could raise through charitable donations. In a brief letter sent to the mayor today (as part of a larger feasibility study) the firm concluded that $11 million is an “achievable” goal. They sat down with potential philanthropists — both in and beyond Burlington — who are capable of giving six- or seven-figure donations, according to their letter.  Names and details of these conversations won't be released, but the level of interest was, apparently, encouraging. 

The group has raised $1.4 million of that total so far, according to project partner Tad Cooke. He acknowledged that convincing people to make major donations to a brand-new organization — the group established itself as a nonprofit several months ago — is a challenge. To give prospective donors more confidence, Cooke said, they are currently trying to secure what’s called a “leadership pledge” of roughly $3 million.

In a recent photo, an infectious disease expert with the University of Vermont College of Medicine is wearing goggles, a mouth mask, gloves and a plastic blue apron over a full-body protective suit. His first name — "Majid" — is scrawled on the apron in black marker. A member of the U.S. Army and three identically dressed people stand nearby.

Ebola hasn't come to Vermont. Dr. Majid Sadigh, along with Dr. Margaret Tandoh, a trauma surgeon at UVM and the school's associate dean of diversity and inclusion, have gone to it. The two are spending six weeks in Liberia with the global health organization AmeriCares. 

They are helping to establish an ebola treatment unit in Buchannan, the country's third largest city. Tandoh was born and raised in Liberia. In an AmeriCares video shot in the John F. Kennedy International Airport before she left, Tandoh said, "I'm willing to do whatever it takes. They are my people is the way I see it. I have friends that say, 'Why don't you just send some money and you don't have to go,' but I said, 'This is home. This is where I came from. This is what made me.'"

Sadigh, who is also the global health director at Connecticut's Danbury Hospital, has blogged about his experience on the school's Global Health Diaries site. 

On November 11, Sadigh  wrote about the normalcy of the scene outside his hotel. "Even though this region lies at the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia, a spot now known on the map for the Ebola epidemic, there is little to suggest the catastrophe claimed by American media. Of course the schools have closed, but that has permitted steady streams of boisterous children out of doors, the cheery sounds of play mingling with the quick rhythm of their drums as they amble up and down the otherwise largely deserted streets."

Sadigh also noted signs that epidemic is being brought under control: "Daily reports from the local media of the decrease in seroprevalence of Ebola in blood samples collected from nearby communities demonstrate how this epidemic is slowly becoming less sinister, more manageable, not just for those of us who work here but those who live here ... "

Two days later, Sadigh described the intensity of dependence among health care workers: "We work in a chain, forming the rows of a beehive that ultimately make up a honeycombing pattern of connectivity. My survival is contingent upon my colleague beside me, on his/her attention to detail and maintenance of protocol every minute we prepare to both enter and exit a treatment unit ... Thus as I face a patient flailing with the delirium and confusion of sickness, I cannot help but think what would happen if my protective layers are accidentally punctured, if I am thus contaminated beyond the ability of sanitizing myself – not because of what it would mean to me, but for all those others who count on me."
 
In September, Seven Days wrote about another Vermonter who spent three weeks working in Liberia — Brant Goode, a nurse epidemiologist at the Vermont Department of Health. 

Two weeks ago, Ann Taylor wanted to save a towering cottonwood tree by Burlington's waterfront so badly that she chained herself to it and urged passers-by to call the mayor.

City officials said the tree had to go as part of a project to widen and improve the Burlington Bike Path. In a narrow right-of-way by railroad tracks, there was no place to move the trail, the city said.

This morning, contractors cut down the tree. "I was very close to tears," Taylor said afterward, sitting by the stump with her dog, Bode Miller. "I, in a way, had been saying goodbye for two weeks."

She said she'll always "have a vision of it being present and being a gift for us."