I had it on good intelligence this morning — this chilly, windy, Feb. 29 — that there is a leap day baby who works in the Statehouse. My nose soon led me to the cafeteria, where I found supervisor Nate Corson busy prepping for the daily lunch rush.
Corson turns 15 today — or, by another count, 60. He’s worked in the cafe for five years, where his job entails pretty much “everything,” he said, as a colleague stood nodding nearby.
What’s it like to have a birthday only every four years? “The anticipation is overwhelming. You feel like you have to tell everybody about it,” Corson said with a laugh. “You don’t get to celebrate your birthday every year, so when you get to, you like to go big.”
Going big, for Corson, has usually meant a trip to a sandy beach or to a snowy slope. Both seem like fitting escapes for the longtime ski bum, who also spent a decade-plus working at a steakhouse and nightclub in Killington.
But this year, Corson said he pulled the plug on a trip to Florida after getting notice that his lease, on a home in Plainfield, is not being renewed. Corson said he has an option to buy the place, but he doesn’t think he can afford to do so.
Corson said he’s not sure where he and his two roommates — a black Lab named GiGi and a chocolate Lab named Ahi — will go next. He’s considering buying a camper, he said, because he doesn’t think that he can swing much else.
“I think I’m leaving Vermont,” he told me. “It’s too expensive to live here.”
Corson’s words are timely. Affordability has been the throughline of many policy debates in Montpelier this year. Gov. Phil Scott made the issue the focus of his weekly press conference on Wednesday, and lawmakers have grappled with projected steep property tax hikes from 2025 school budgets that, for some districts, will appear on Town Meeting Day ballots in just a few days.
“It’s an unfortunate situation,” Corson said of his own, now firing up the grill. A line was starting to form at the cafeteria entrance, and it was back to work.
— Shaun Robinson
In the know
A proposed state constitutional amendment to set qualifications and removal procedures for elected county officials has reached a dead end in the Legislature.
On the Senate floor Wednesday, leadership moved to send Proposal 1 back to the Government Operations Committee — instead of putting it to a vote as scheduled. It was the third time in five weeks that a planned vote on Prop. 1 did not materialize.
But this time, its proponents explicitly said they were tabling the proposal because it couldn’t get enough support to clear the Senate. It needed the backing of two-thirds of the chamber, or 20 votes, to move forward.
— Tiffany Tan
Trissie Casanova, a Department for Children and Families family services division worker and a union leader, repeated a dire message in testimony Thursday to the House Committee on Human Services: the department is in crisis.
Increasingly, family services employees are forced to “staff” kids — a term referring to situations in which DCF employees watch over youth who may be violent, struggling with mental illness or charged with crimes — in “alternative settings” like apartments or offices, the department has said.
Years ago, those same kids might have gone to Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center, the secure facility in Essex where Vermont once sent some justice-involved and high need youth. But in 2020, Woodside closed following abuse and neglect allegations — allegations that have only grown — and since, Vermont has not had a secure facility for adolescents.
Casanova reiterated the increasingly urgent message from DCF that the state needs to open a new secure facility for youth.
Amid that call to action, Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, the committee’s chair, wanted to get something off her chest. It was wrong, she said, to close Woodside without a functioning alternative.
“I feel like we should apologize for condoning that decision,” Wood said, adding that information on Woodside admissions were “manipulated” to show “zero or little need” for the facility. “It was a precipitous decision that has resulted in these longer term impacts.”
“I just wanted to say that in public,” Wood went on. “It wasn’t right to close Woodside.”
— Ethan Weinstein
Lawmakers and advocates clashed with Gov. Phil Scott’s administration this week over a cost estimate for a bill that would increase the amount of renewable energy in Vermont’s electric portfolio.
On Tuesday, Scott took aim at the bill, H.289, in a statement to the press after his administration estimated it could cost Vermont ratepayers $1 billion over the next decade.
But advocates and lawmakers who support the bill say the estimate is flawed, likely inflated and not based on data specific to the bill. The planner behind the number later acknowledged it was inexact.
In fact, interviews with department officials, advocates, lawmakers and economists show that despite its progress toward passage, there is not yet an accurate cost estimate specific to H.289.
— Emma Cotton
On the move
In what appears to be their sole gun control bill of this year, Vermont lawmakers are taking aim at an elusive target: ghost guns.
The term refers to firearms that are either assembled from separately purchased parts, or by 3D printing, instead of being purchased through a licensed gun manufacturer or dealer. That means these fully functional firearms lack serial numbers, rendering them untraceable, and they’re obtainable outside of state and federal background check processes and waiting periods.
S.209, passed by the Vermont Senate this week, seeks to close what Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, called a loophole in Vermont’s existing universal background check laws.
“I wish I could say that they truly were universal, but they weren’t,” Baruth, the primary sponsor of S.209 and a longtime gun control advocate, said on the Senate floor Wednesday.
— Sarah Mearhoff
One theme came up again and again in recent public forums that the Vermont Judiciary held statewide on diversity, equity and inclusion in the courts, said Rep. Barbara Rachelson, D-Burlington: People weren’t seeing judges who looked like them.
Rachelson was speaking on the floor of the Vermont House Tuesday, urging her colleagues to support H.780, a bill intended to broaden the pool of people applying to be judges in Vermont, with an overarching goal of having more diverse judges and other officials on superior courts and the state Supreme Court.
The bill, which passed the House Wednesday by voice vote, makes a slate of changes to the process by which state officials fill a vacant judicial position.
— Shaun Robinson
Visit our 2024 Bill tracker for the latest updates on major legislation we are following.
It’s Miller time
It looked like a joint session, but it was really a big ol’ party: Lawmakers, committee aides and other statehouse rats packed into the House chamber at lunchtime Thursday for a ceremony honoring Sergeant-at-Arms Janet Miller, whose tenure is set to come to an end on Friday.
Miller is leaving her post — which includes many ceremonial duties, as well as overseeing the Capitol Police Department and the Legislative Page program — after nine years. Tomorrow, the House and Senate will convene again to elect Miller’s successor from one of two candidates.
Vermont State Curator David Schutz emceed the festivities, telling the chamber that Miller is “a person who has devoted herself to all of us for many, many years.”
Most recently, Schutz said, Miller was “the person, in fact, who has led the Statehouse and this Legislature through a pandemic — a flood. And after tomorrow, she will no longer need to worry about things like that.”
When Miller walked into the chamber, Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, placed a paper crown on her head and seated her in a chair in the center of the room. Schutz said the chair was a gift, but noted that it was not “one of those beautiful, black, university-type chairs with the Vermont coat of arms on the back that we have given other honored individuals in the past.”
Nay, he said. Miller was instead getting a humble, wooden chair — a sort of payback for her past decision to put some of Schutz’s beloved statehouse furniture in basement storage, where it was later damaged in last summer’s flooding.
“I think the only chair I can spare at this point is a cafeteria chair,” Schutz said with a smile, drawing laughter from across the room.
Afterward, the festival shifted to Cedar Creek Room, where hors d’oeuvres, and a truly large sheet cake baked by Vermont Court Administrator Teri Corsones, were up for the taking.
Miller drew additional plaudits on the House floor this afternoon with the reading of a concurrent resolution honoring her work.
— Shaun Robinson
What we’re reading
A pandemic era program that created and rehabbed hundreds of apartments will be extended, Seven Days
Help signs to aid migrants in distress, already used along Mexican border, are now being installed along northern border, New Hampshire Public Radio
Raised in the West Bank, shot in Vermont, The New York Times Magazine