As the clock neared midnight Monday, the Burlington City Council decided to wait another week to pick a new Burlington Telecom owner.

It was an anticlimactic ending to a four-hour meeting. Councilors were scheduled to decide between Ting's $30.5 million offer and the co-op Keep BT Local's $12 million bid. Instead, at 11:40 p.m., the council voted 8-3 to postpone the vote until November 6, when councilors will skip public forum and pick up where they left off.

Dave Hartnett (D-North District) requested the delay after councilor Karen Paul (D-Ward 6) recused herself from Monday's vote. Paul had previously backed Ting.

Paul said as the meeting began that she had discovered "a professional conflict" over the weekend relating to her work as a CPA at McSoley McCoy & Co. Paul refused to describe the conflict, though she said that the issue "has nothing whatsoever to do with the parties interested in purchasing Burlington Telecom."

One-third of Vermonters were without power Monday after an unusually widespread wind and rain storm overnight, state officials said.

There are no storm-related injuries or fatalities, Gov. Phil Scott said, and no hospitals or nursing homes were affected. However, numerous roads remained closed, 70,000 homes and businesses remained without power, and it could take until the weekend to fully restore service, officials warned.

Forecasts of strong winds Monday night could cause more outages and deliver a knockout blow to an already wobbly electrical grid. Officials described the gusty, soggy conditions as a potential "multiday" event.

"This isn't over," Scott said during a press conference at the Department of Public Safety in Waterbury. "This is just the first day."

Citibank's legal counsel sent a forcefully worded email containing a threat to sue the city of Burlington if the city council selects Keep BT Local's bid to take over Burlington Telecom.

The co-op's offer is "not even remotely commercially reasonable and not qualified," Kevin Fitzgerald wrote in an email Sunday night to city attorney Eileen Blackwood. A city council decision in favor of the KBTL bid would be "vigorously opposed by Citibank on several fronts including but not limited to immediate litigation."

Blue Water Holdings, which has loaned the city money and will benefit from the sale, also emailed the council, noting that they, too, have serious concerns about the co-op bid.

Michael Furlong, an attorney for Blue Water, expressed "serious concerns" about KBTL's ability to obtain a certificate of public good, a necessary step of approval granted by Vermont's Public Utility Commission.

Vermont Superior Court Judge David Fenster made no decision Friday in a high-profile case that touches on campus safety and free speech rights.

Fenster said he needed time to further study the legal arguments made by the prosecution and defense to decide if there is probable cause to bring a disorderly conduct charge against Wesley Richter. The part-time University of Vermont student was overheard October 1 in a campus library talking on his cellphone, allegedly making threatening and disparaging remarks about African Americans.

Richter was cited to appear in court on the charges October 5, at which time his lawyer Ben Luna argued that there is no probable cause and that the charge should be dismissed.

Friday's hearing was to determine whether the case should go forward.

Richter sat impassively and did not speak during the 40-minute hearing in a Burlington courtroom as Luna argued that there was no threat. Furthermore, anything Richter said was protected speech under the First Amendment and the misdemeanor charge should be dropped, Luna said.

"Your honor, this case not only criminalizes speech, it criminalizes a telephone conversation between my client ... and his mother. My client was having a telephone conversation with his mother," Luna emphasized to the judge.

Richter's conversation in a library computer lab presented no imminent threat to anyone, Luna continued. The state's case is "predicated on hearsay. The hearsay in this case is unreliable," Luna said.

Assistant state's attorney Ryan Richards disagreed, and argued that Richter was making "extremely inflammatory statements" in a public place, which rose to the threshold of a threat under the state's disorderly conduct statute.

Richter's remarks were "so likely to cause panic" that they were akin to shouting "fire" in a crowded movie theater, which case law has held is not protected speech, Richards said.

Luna insisted, meanwhile, that the person who overheard the conversation, UVM student Colby Thompson, did not call 911 or immediately react — proof that it didn't seem like a grave threat. Thompson sent an email to a UVM staffer hours later, a delay that suggests it wasn't an urgent concern, Luna said.

"Colby Thompson basically yawned when he overheard what my client said," Luna said in characterizing the response.

Although Luna quoted from a police affidavit when it supported his argument, he asked the judge at the outset to prohibit the prosecution from doing the same because the document has not been publicly released. But both sides referred to it often. What Richter is alleged to have said was not divulged Friday.

Under Vermont law, a judge must find probable cause before an affidavit is made public, according to Fenster and the attorneys.
About six UVM students attended the hearing and said they supported the charge against Richter.

"I would at least like to see other people be less willing to make statements like this around campus. That's something at the bare minimum that I'd want,'' said Cat Lawrence, an 18-year-old first-year student from New York City.

UVM initially told the campus community that an unidentified person had made a threat against African Americans. For Lawrence, as a person of color, the warning was "terrifying," she said.

"Imagine walking around campus knowing someone said this," Lawrence said.

Rachel Goldstein, 22, a senior from New Jersey, also attended the hearing and said she wants charges filed against Richter.

"We want the law to come down on him," she said. "We want to send a strong message that this won't fly on our campus."

Updated at 3:11 p.m.

The media merry-go-round is spinning briskly right now.

Vermont Press Bureau chief Neal Goswami is leaving the world of print media to join the news staff at WCAX-TV. The announcement comes a mere two days after Terri Hallenbeck announced her departure from Seven Days and Taylor Dobbs of Vermont Public Radio was hired as her replacement.

Goswami will make a quick move: His last day at the VPB is Friday, November 3 — and he starts at Channel 3 on Monday, November 6.

“Neal is a one-for-one replacement for Kyle Midura,” said WCAX news director Roger Garrity. Midura had been the station’s chief Statehouse and politics reporter until this summer, when WCAX’s corporate owner Gray Television hired him for its Washington, D.C., bureau. “[Goswami] has the knowledge, the background, and connections to the issues and people in the Statehouse.”

After yet another lengthy meeting full of intensive questioning, a panel of state lawmakers appeared to run out of steam and, in a couple of quick voice votes, on Thursday approved a set of sound rules for wind turbines crafted by the Vermont Public Utility Commission.

The eight-member Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules gave its final approval on a voice vote with only two dissenters: committee chair Sen. Mark MacDonald (D-Orange) and Rep. Robin Chesnut-Tangerman (P/D-Middletown Springs).

Two members who were openly skeptical of the rules and asked numerous questions of PUC officials — Sen. Michael Sirotkin (D-Chittenden) and Rep. Mike Yantachka (D-Charlotte) — either voted to approve the rules or abstained. No roll call was taken. Sen. Ginny Lyons (D-Chittenden), a vocal supporter of large-scale wind energy, left the meeting before the votes were taken.

The final rules retained the key PUC standard, which imposes a sound limit of 42 decibels during daytime hours and 39 dB at night. The PUC did remove a setback requirement for siting wind turbines, which would have mandated a buffer between a turbine and any occupied structure of at least 10 times the height of the turbine.

Well, that was fast.

On Wednesday morning, Seven Days announced that Statehouse reporter Terri Hallenbeck would leave the paper on November 3 for a position at Middlebury College.

Here it is, Thursday morning, and Seven Days is ready to announce her replacement.

Taylor Dobbs, who’s been a digital reporter at Vermont Public Radio since 2013, will join Seven Days in early December. He will take on an investigative reporting role and cover the Statehouse when the legislature is in session.

Updated at 12:35 p.m.

At least two candidates are vying to replace David Sunderland as chair of the Vermont Republican Party.

Michael Donohue, who moved with his family to Shelburne in 2016, announced his bid in an email Wednesday. Deb Billado of Essex Junction is also putting her hat in the ring.

Party members will gather at the Capitol Plaza Hotel & Conference Center in Montpelier on November 4 to elect leadership positions, including state committee chair, vice chair, secretary and treasurer.

Sunderland, who’s led the party since 2013, said he isn’t running for reelection because he needs to devote more time to his job and his family.

Five Burlington City Councilors this week will visit the Toronto headquarters of Ting, one of the finalists in the bid to buy Burlington Telecom.

The trip will cost approximately $6,500 and will be paid for by Burlington Telecom, according to Katie Vane, Mayor Miro Weinberger's communications and projects coordinator. The councilors will fly out on Thursday evening and tour Ting offices and meet with management before returning to Burlington close to midnight on Friday.

On Monday, the city council will choose between Ting or the co-op Keep BT Local as the winning bidder for Burlington Telecom.

Vermonters might have heard this before: State leaders want to ensure that more eighth graders are thinking about career options and how they’ll prepare for them. Officials have set a goal whereby more working-age adults will have a college degree or job certification. They intend to provide more unemployed people with the skills needed to get available jobs.

All those ideas have been discussed many times over the decades. But a new initiative called 70x2025vt is taking another stab at those efforts. Its organizers insist they have put together the right collaboration this time to reach a new goal: 70 percent of working-age Vermonters will have a post-secondary degree or credential that can land them a job by the year 2025.

“We must be bold and that’s exactly what 70 by 2025 is,” Gov. Phil Scott said in announcing the program Tuesday at PC Construction Company in South Burlington.

To meet the goal, 30,000 more Vermonters will need to attain some form of job training or college education, said Tom Cheney, the director of 70x2025vt.