Thursday, January 28, 2016
The Senate voted late Thursday afternoon for a compromise plan, and the House is expected to follow suit on Friday morning.
The two chambers were at odds over how to fix a school spending cap they enacted last year but that ended up hitting some low-spending districts harder than higher-spenders. The Senate wanted to ditch the caps. The House wanted some spending control in place.
The deal reached Thursday raises the cap by 0.9 percent for 2017, as the House wanted, but exempts districts that spend below the state per-pupil average from any penalties for going over the cap. Penalties for others that go over the limit will be 40 cents for every $1 over, instead of 25 cents as the House had sought.
The plan repeals these caps for 2018, though House Education Committee chair David Sharpe (D-Bristol) said he's committed to crafting some sort of new cost controls for 2018 before the session ends in May.
Lawmakers are still likely to get an earful at town meetings in March about how they left local school boards hanging, but the deal gives school boards some clarity as they pitch their budgets to voters. "We would at least like to let all the schools know what the rules are," said Senate Education Committee chair Ann Cummings (D-Washington).
Tags: Vermont legislature , Act 46 , education spending , Image , Web Only
Two years after Burlington residents voted for three gun-control measures — and a year after state lawmakers dismissed the charter changes as unconstitutional — Mayor Miro Weinberger tried to make the case to legislators that there’s nothing outlandish about what the city wants to do. He argued that the three gun-control measures the voters approved are legal, doable and accepted elsewhere.
“I think we made a stronger case this year,” Weinberger said after speaking at the Statehouse. “I sense it’s being treated differently.”
Earlier, Weinberger told the House Government Operations Committee, as about a dozen gun-rights activists waited to counter his arguments: "Gun safety is not an area where Burlington is trying to chart some new path. Today, we are trying to catch up with laws in Texas, Montana, and Alaska."
Sixteen states ban firearms in bars and restaurants, according to information Burlington city attorney Eileen Blackwood supplied the committee.
Tags: Senator , gun control , Miro Weinberger , Shap Smith , Peter Shumlin , Vermont legislature , Image , Web Only
First disclosed in this week’s Fair Game political column, the email pertains to a September 2014 press conference organized by then-lieutenant gubernatorial candidate Dean Corren and attended by Sorrell. Standing in front of McCaffrey's Sunoco in Burlington, the two called for legislation requiring gasoline distributors to disclose pricing information to the attorney general’s office.
After the event, the head of a local business group raised concerns about Sorrell’s participation, prompting the AG to reply, “I care about the issue, not to mention the $4k a whole seller gave a prior opponent …”
The “whole seller” in question appears to be Skip Vallee, a political lightning rod whose Colchester-based business, R.L. Vallee, Inc., has been accused of driving up gas prices in Chittenden County. Now the Vermont chairman of Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) presidential campaign, Vallee has contributed generously to Republican candidates over the years, including President George W. Bush, who in 2005 appointed him ambassador to Slovakia.
In August 2012, Vallee and his wife, Denise, donated $4,000 to Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donovan’s Democratic primary campaign against Sorrell. Though Donovan came close to unseating Sorrell, he ended up losing the election by 714 votes, just 11 days after the Vallees made their contributions.
Tags: Bill Sorrell , Skip Vallee , Brady Toensing , Image , Web Only
As officers swarmed Stephens' Elmwood Avenue apartment, he asked police, "Who wants to die?" He taunted officers trying to break down his door to "hit harder" and raised his muzzleloader rifle when they finally entered.
DEA Agent Tim Hoffman and Vermont State Police Trooper Matt Cannon, assigned to the task force, fired 13 shots from their assault rifles, hitting Stephens seven times. Three other rounds they fired exited Stephens' apartment, and two entered a neighboring apartment. A resident there was not hurt.
Stephens’ rifle could not have fired, because he had not inserted the primer, Donovan said. Cops could not have known that, authorities said.
Tags: T.J. Donovan , DEA , Burlington , Eric Miller , Vermont State Police , Image , Video , Web Only
Problem is, the Senate chose an entirely different path last week — to repeal the thresholds altogether — and its leaders aren't budging.
"We're standing strong," Senate Education Committee Chair Ann Cummings (D-Washington) said Wednesday.
Though he characterized himself as "eternally optimistic" that the two bodies could reach accord, House Speaker Shap Smith (D-Morristown) conceded late Wednesday that he had no idea how they would.
"If I knew the path forward right now, we would be on it," he said. "But I think it's going to take a fair amount of work — the next couple days and maybe a week."
Time is not on their side. The uncertainty has left local school boards wondering how much money they can spend, even as they race to complete their budgets ahead of Town Meeting Day.
Tags: Act 46 , education , property taxes , spending threshold , Image , Web Only
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
The Montpelier native spent more than 11 years in Washington, D.C., before moving to Burlington last fall. He argued Wednesday that he meets the constitutional residency requirement for a lieutenant gubernatorial candidate: One must have lived in the state for four years prior to the election.
“Residency is always a mix of physical presence and intent to return,” Graff told the Senate Government Operations Committee. “Physical presence alone is a poor measurement of where someone might consider home.”
A better measure, Graff argued, is one based on where a person is registered to vote or drive a car, something a person can legally do in only one state at a time.
The 34-year-old former editor of Politico Magazine announced in November that he was moving from Washington to Burlington and considering running for lieutenant governor as a Democrat. Secretary of State Jim Condos and Assistant Attorney General Michael Duane have indicated they don’t think Graff meets the constitution's four-year residency requirement.
Tags: Garrett Graff , lieutenant governor , Vermont Constitution , Vermont legislature , Jeanette K. White , Image , Web Only
The spokesman, Scott Waterman, confirmed that his agency had "received a complaint of alleged criminal misconduct" from a panel of state's attorneys charged with investigating six allegations against Sorrell. He said Friday's meeting had been scheduled "to determine if an investigation is warranted and who has jurisdiction to perform the investigation if one occurs."
As Seven Days reported in this week's Fair Game political column, Waterman told the newspaper Tuesday that his agency had already launched such an investigation. On Wednesday, he told Seven Days that he had been mistaken and that the state police had not yet done so. He attributed the error to internal miscommunication at the VSP.
"We are not investigating at this time," Waterman said Wednesday. "We are going to be consulting with the FBI over the next couple of days because there's a question of jurisdiction."
Tags: Bill Sorrell , Scott Waterman , Brady Toensing , Vermont State Police , Federal Bureau of Investigation , Image , Web Only
Rep. Chris Pearson (P-Burlington) said the bill would increase the fairness of the school tax by asking higher-income Vermonters to pay the same share of their pay as middle-income property owners. Vermonters with $100,000 in household income now pay about 3 percent of their wages in property taxes, compared to 0.5 percent for households with income of $1 million, he said.
“We believe we have a way to make our school funding more equitable and, at the same time, give most Vermonters a break on their property taxes,” said Sen. Anthony Pollina (D/P-Washington), sponsor of the Senate version of the bill.
Currently, the income-based system covers only taxpayers with household incomes of $90,000 or less and only for a house and two acres. Residential property owners with more than two acres pay an additional amount based on the property’s value.
Tags: School property tax , Rep. Christopher Pearson , Sen. Anthony Pollina , Sen. Tim Ashe , Rep. Janet Ancel , Image , Web Only
That was the message that Burlington police commissioners sent Tuesday night at their first meeting since a Drug Enforcement Agency "no-knock" raid on Elmwood Avenue in December. The raid killed convicted drug dealer Kenneth Stevens, and stray rounds that officers fired entered a nearby apartment. No one else was harmed.
Little sympathy surfaced during the meeting for Stevens, the target of the raid, whose extensive criminal record included a 2012 conviction for selling heroin to a roommate who died of an overdose. He was also charged in 1996 with shooting his girlfriend's brother in the head.
Still, police commissioner Jerome F. O'Neill, a private attorney and former federal prosecutor, blasted the raid as overzealous and dangerous to law-abiding citizens who lived near Stevens.
"Hello DEA," O'Neill said after the meeting. "Get the message: You really need to do things differently around here."
Commissioners grilled Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo for an hour about the December 22 raid. The BPD was involved as a backup to the DEA, which led the exercise.
Tags: Burlington police commission , DEA , Brandon del Pozo , no-knock drug raid , Image , Web Only
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
"The President and Sen. Sanders first discussed this meeting last December when Sen. Sanders attended the Congressional Holiday Ball," White House press secretary John Earnest said in a statement Tuesday afternoon. "The two will meet privately in the Oval Office, and there will be no formal agenda."
The confab comes just days after Obama threw shade at the Vermonter in an interview with Politico, dismissing him as nothing more than a "bright, shiny object" in the campaign to succeed him. The president spoke more favorably about his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who is battling Sanders for the Democratic nomination.
Though Obama campaigned for Sanders in Vermont in 2006 and Sanders returned the favor in 2008 and 2012, the two have never been close. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that in Sanders' 40 visits to the White House since Obama was elected president, visitor logs showed them meeting privately in the Oval Office just once, in December 2014.
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