It's.

state and local officials debate what should be done about the rising cost of education.

People are now wondering, did at 46 save any money?

Plus, some Vermonters seeking FEMA buyouts for flooded homes are facing opposition from an unexpected source.

The towns they live in.

And a report from Vermont's auditor reveals concerns over the state's vetting process for businesses and nonprofits who received Covid era federally funded grants.

That and more ahead on Vermont this week.

From the Vermont public Studio in Winooski.

This is Vermont this week, made possible in part by the Lintilhac Foundation and Milne Travel.

Here's moderator Mitch Wertlieb.

Thank you so much for being with us.

I'm Mitch Lieb.

It's Friday, October 11th, and joining us on the panel today, we have Lola Duffort from Vermont Public, Peter DAuria from from Vtdigger, and Kevin McCallum from seven days.

Thank you everyone so much for being here today.

Lola, let's start with you.

big education story.

There was a proposal to start, to close two elementary schools in central Vermont, part of a consolidation effort.

This was going to go before voters.

But the question will not be on the November ballot.

What happened here?

The school divided.

School board decided that ultimately, a majority of them couldn't support the proposal.

They, you know, said that they didn't feel like they had enough data to support going forward.

you know, this is the Washington Central School District.

They have five elementary schools, a union, a union high school.

And, you know, the thought was they would close two elementary schools, other elementaries that would take those kids were about five miles away.

So not exactly the, geographic isolation that we sometimes, need to consider in Vermont.

but the plan was enormously contrary, crucial, particularly in one community.

This would have closed a school in Worcester.

And callous, I mean, it was controversial in both communities, but particularly in Worcester.

and it seems like that push back, you know, convinced a majority on the board, you know, not to go forward.

of course, the school district is now going to have to head into a budget season in which it knows that it's likely to hit a tax penalty.

and so it's going to have to find other ways to cut costs.

You know, this is one school district in Vermont.

But of course, this story is a microcosm.

Some of the conversations that, schools across the state are going to be having with increasing urgency in the next couple of years.

That is just the word I was going to use a microcosm because it's an example of this larger problem.

You've been delving into this act 46 landmark law in Vermont, trying to consolidate some of these smaller schools.

People are wondering if it's working.

So you spoke with somebody who studied this.

The answer is a little more complex than it may seem.

On the surface, it seems like consolidation of schools, on the one hand, is saving some money, because administrative costs are gone down.

But spending is going up in other areas, like teacher salaries.

So critics of act 46 who say it's not working, that's not exactly right, is it?

Yeah, I would say it's not exactly right.

a small, small but important correction.

Right?

Like act 46 consolidated school districts.

It didn't actually consolidate schools.

Thank you.

And if you actually go back to like, reporting from the time the law was passed, you know, lawmakers who passed that law at that time were saying, you know, the thing we got across the finish line probably won't save a ton of money, but it will make schools, perhaps spend money in more rational ways.

Right.

It'll help them get more bang for their buck.

And so when you look at that kind of measuring stick, we actually do have evidence that the law did work.

I talked to, this woman who's now a teacher in Tennessee who, studied this for her.

senior thesis when she was at Yale.

and actually, Vtdigger had talked to her a few months prior, and she found that, you know, overall money wasn't saved, but that school districts who consolidated used money in very different ways.

They used money, you know, they spent more money on things like materials and student support services and staff salaries and less money on administrative costs, less money on contracted services.

So schools are who consolidated, spent money on the kinds of things we want schools to spend more on.

of course, the political impetus behind act 46, when you look at, you know, the slew of failed of budget failures that actually preceded that law, right?

Like what people wanted on the ground was not more efficient use of resources.

They just wanted lower spending overall taxes and things like that.

Yeah.

And so, you know, now people are bringing up act 46, mostly as a rejoinder to this kind of new, urgency, and new momentum behind closing schools because they're saying, well, I'm 46, didn't save any money.

So closing schools won't save any money.

I will say I talked to another researcher, who is, you know, been consulted a lot, by Vermont Bruce Baker.

And I was talking to him about this thesis, and he said, of course, act 46 didn't save any money.

It didn't close schools.

Right.

so, you know, whether or not we should closed schools for financial reasons of courses like that is for other people to decide.

but act 46, not saving overall money is not actually evidence that closing schools itself would not save any money.

We'll have to see if that's a winning argument.

Saying it's the way the money is being spent that matters, not the money being spent itself.

And I guess going forward, that's what we're going to have to be looking at.

Yeah.

Well, and, you know, I think, I think both and I think this is like also an overlooked part of the conversation when it comes to school closures.

Is this, this idea that like, okay, not only are we spending sort of too much money, but we're not getting enough out of it because we're duplicating services across too many campuses with not a lot of students and so I think like both overall spending and, you know, efficiency is, is a driving, force behind that conversation.

Well, another money related story, Kevin McCollum, that you wrote about in seven days recently is about this FEMA buyout program.

This is kind of strange.

You concentrated on two, situations in Barrie where there are two homeowners, so basically live across the street from each other.

both had homes destroyed by flooding, in the historic July floods.

One is eligible for FEMA buyouts to have that property bought out.

He's going to move on with his life.

The other is not.

Why?

I mean, what is happening here with some folks who are not eligible for these T-Mobile's.

Right.

And, they live across the river from one another.

Right.

And so that's what's fascinating about this, right across the Stevens Branch from one another.

in in Berry, these two, these two gentlemen got very different results when they went to their city council and asked if they could participate in the FEMA bio program.

Now, when I first heard that, I was kind of astounded because I just assumed that FEMA buyouts perceived by the homeowner somehow pleading with the federal government their case, that they deserve to be bought out, that their home is in a floodplain, it's in a dangerous area.

They've been, suffered extreme damage over and over.

They deserve to have the federal government buy their home and bail them out, basically a lifeline for them.

And when I first started looking into this, I was very surprised to see that the gatekeepers for this program are essentially the local select boards and not the councils, not the feds.

So before you can even ask the federal government to help you out of a disaster by buying your home, you need to convince your local select board or your local city council that that's something you should be allowed to move forward on, that that's the best thing, not only for you, but for the city, for the town.

And so that's where there's this real pressure, happening where some towns, some cities are saying, hold on, everybody.

We know a lot of people really are seeking buyouts, but we have to be very careful about how many of these we sign off on, because if you run off to the federal government, get $300,000 for your home, they bring in the bulldozers and knock the thing down.

You move away now.

Now we have less housing in our community, and now our grand list is not going to have a home paying taxes on it.

And if that happens five times, ten times, 50 times, I mean, Barry, had, 25 buyouts that it approved near the river and it rejected 38 more.

So that's 38 homeowners who who have a property that they feel as though they ought to have the chance to get a bailout, a lifeline.

And they're being told they can't.

And so it's very difficult for the local selectboard to deliver that news, as you can imagine.

And how did they make those decisions?

It's a really tricky.

So in Barrie, what the city staff has essentially said is, look, we're broke.

We can't afford to have our grand list undermined any further.

So we have a limited number of these that we're going to be allowed to move forward on.

So we're only going to focus the buyouts in areas right along the river.

You've got to be like basically on the banks of the river and if your home is taken down and knocked down, it has to be able to be, a floodplain needs to sort of be able to be created there, green space that will help people downstream, which is a totally legitimate type of remediation program.

post-flood.

To sort of help mitigate future flooding.

Right.

If you create areas, pockets where, where the, where the river can spread out and slow down, then that helps.

And so the difficult thing is that there are people in Barrie who are very close to the river.

They're just not close enough.

And so the guy that we, you know, featured on the front page of the paper, Gordon George, his home has been, you know, basement completely filled with muck three different times.

and this last one was worse than any of them.

And he's he's only 60ft from the river.

And so, unfortunately, the town has had to tell him a couple different times.

I'm sorry.

Your host it has is two isolated.

it's not going to create its removal is not really going to change the hydrology of of Barrie.

And frankly, we need the housing.

And so I'm sorry, that's a difficult situation.

I mean, I've talked to, you know, city officials about this.

I've talked to Nicholas Early, Castro and like, what's so remarkable to me is that city officials are so upfront, you know, they're not trying to downplay sort of the situations of the people that they are rejecting.

They're, you know, being upfront that they need this, right, that the people who are asking for this need this and that, what they are, you know, the decisions they're making have horrific consequences on their lives.

Right.

so I think you have to, like, give them great credit for sort of being super open about this and saying, we, we have set criteria and we just have to stick to them because if we don't, then, you know, it can't be that like, who has the more heartbreaking story, right?

I do think, however, this, you know, story kind of underlines this sort of second vulnerability that we have in Vermont, which is, our municipalities cannot it's not only that our residents can't afford these disasters, it's that our municipality can.

Right?

Especially places like Barry, especially.

I mean, Barry already has the highest municipal tax rate in the state, right?

and, it really can't afford, you know, I'm not endorsing their decision or one way or another, but, but, you know, this is a huge it's a huge problem.

And the reason it's so important is because buyouts are the number one strategy for how you get the hell out of the way of flooding rivers.

Right.

And, Irene, when you ask state officials how we responded to Irene and what we did that sort of helped, they invariably point to the buyout programs in Northfield that created a park that we're now the water can flow onto, and the the downstream flooding is not going to be as bad as it was.

And there's there's just innumerable examples of how that strategy works.

it's just that in this situation, it's just so painful for the homeowners to be told that, sorry, your home's not you're not not going to qualify.

I really came through in your story 2 in 7 days and you know where money goes.

Who gets it seems to be a theme here.

Peter Diorio, you were writing in Vtdigger recently about the state auditor, having some criticism about Covid era money going to some businesses in Vermont that perhaps didn't need it.

Here's what Doug Hoffer had to say about that.

If the money didn't need to go to those entities, it could have been used for other purposes, either economic development, flood resiliency, homelessness, you name it.

The government has a lot of unmet needs, but if they're giving money where it's not needed, that's in nobody's best interests except the owners of those companies.

These were all done with, care and diligence to ensure that the people applying for the funds were indeed the ones who were deserving.

So, Peter, what did you find out about this?

Was there a problem with oversight where this Covid money was going?

The auditor certainly thinks there was.

so this is about $57 million in federal Covid money.

Again, another example of kind of state actors dealing with federal money.

and this is sort of earmarked for pandemic recovery, economic development.

and the Scott administration sort of took it in and sort of had this process, to give it out to various entities housing, developers, childcare, farm private schools, etcetera, etcetera.

and the auditor, Doug Harford, took a look at that, and he said, this process is very, very opaque.

this process does not make it clear, you know, how you determined who got this money?

how you determine their level of need?

you know, the amount of money different entities got is kind of, you know, seems random at times.

and at least one of these, one of these projects that got some money is maybe sort of ineligible for regulatory reasons.

and you really relied a lot on the applicants to say we need it, and you sort of like, got this money out the door.

I do wonder about that, though, because were these applicants, there was an implication here that they were trying to game the system.

The applicant was there.

No, no, there wasn't the auditors are saying, we just don't know.

Like, we just we don't have a great, you know, visibility about how much, you know, some of these, applicants were assessed.

And he looked the auditor looked at some of these entities that got money.

And he said, well, actually, they have quite a bit of money in the bank already.

And in some cases, these projects that they got grants for would have happened anyway.

one of the things that the points that he makes that I think is really compelling is, you know, these, this, economic development money went out the door fairly, you know, in his view, fairly quickly, went out to these private entities and, they didn't have to give a whole lot of proof that they needed it.

and he was like, well, try being like a single parent trying to get food stamps.

Try trying and like, try getting housing assistance or unemployment or Medicaid.

The amount of documentation that you need to provide, is like staggering.

And this money just went out to like, you know, this developer.

So what is Doug Hoffer saying should or should not be done about this?

He's saying we need like much more transparency about how this happens, much more documentation of the process.

these decisions, in his view, were made.

and we just don't know why.

Like, there's not like records of how the state said you deserve money and you don't or you deserve X amount of money or, you know, this is the business that we think should be getting this money.

He seems to keep an eagle eye on this sort of thing.

Right, Kevin?

And you've reported on this sort of thing before, Doug Hover saying, do we really need this X, Y, or Z program?

Yeah.

This story kind of reminds me of a few years ago when he audited the remote worker program and he said, look, we're given $10,000 for people to move to Vermont, and we don't really know if they were going to come to Vermont anyway.

Right.

Like, so this reminds me a lot of that story.

And I do wonder, though, I mean, Doug, Doug does have an eagle eye for this stuff, but if you almost have to go back to the the point in time when Covid was just scaring the hell out of all of us and watching our economy just tank, right?

And people weren't going to work.

And business owners who didn't know how they were going to, you know, avoid bankruptcy, like the state's motivation at the time, as I recall, it was to really be quick about getting needed money to business owners.

And while it might be, I don't wanna say easy, but all the things Doug is saying probably, would make it more transparent and easy for an auditor to now go back and confirm that that was a good decision.

That probably would have added time, significant possibly time to the application process and maybe not.

But I'm sure the state was trying to avoid a lengthy application and documentation process, if at all possible, so that people could get money as quickly as possible.

And of course, hindsight being 2020, it's four years past the fact now.

But you're right.

At the time, we didn't know we were dealing with, a story that really doesn't have to do anything with money.

We have an update now on the second mistrial for a Franklin County sheriff.

this is something, you're aware of.

John Chris Moore.

He was accused of, attacking, assaulting a shackled, prisoner at one point.

There have been two trials now.

Both ended in mistrial.

What is going on here?

Who knows?

I mean, it is it's remarkable.

Right?

I mean, it's remarkable that this is about an event that happened on video right there.

Like, no one can contest that.

He kicked a shackled man.

but, but two times in a row, a jury has still struggled to, come to a decision about whether or not that was warranted.

you know, his his, excuse was that, he was worried the man would spit on him and that he could get sick.

so, I mean, it's just a fascinating case.

I think this this jury deliberated for 17 hours before a judge once again.

declared a mistrial.

I think it's unclear at this point whether or not there will be a third trial.

The last time, one of our reporters checked in with the prosecutor mulling it over right there.

Basically, you know, of course, every time you have a trial, it costs money.

right.

But this is also pretty high profile case.

where again, I mean, the events were caught on tape, and if it doesn't go forward, this would be sort of the second win for him, right.

His criminal case.

But then obviously the ethics stuff that went through the legislative process never resulted in any sort of ethical charges brought against him or.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, he's, he has been, sanctioned by the, the the police.

police.

I can't quite remember the name of the there is a body that oversees law enforcement, and I think they, yanked his license.

But what lawmakers were trying to do is remove him from office as the, elected sheriff of that county.

and they realized that they didn't have the authority and so tried to, you know, go forward with a constitutional amendment, that would give them more muscle, so that they could, you know, remove elected sheriffs, when there was this sort of alleged misconduct, and they couldn't get that law passed, you know, they couldn't get that reform passed.

I think it died in the Senate.

It I hope I'm being right there.

So we're basically looking at jury trials at this point and whether or not that, you know, whether or not there's a third jury trial and then if not, you know, that's well, Chris Moore's been defiant through all of this.

I want to get to a story, Peter, that you were reporting on as well.

Really kind of fascinating.

Out of Norwich University, apparently the student run newspaper there has been suspended.

And, this deals with some concerns now, perhaps about free speech.

What's going on at Norwich University's paper, the guide on.

Sure.

So, it's it's a little unclear.

the guide on has been barred from publishing the entirety of this fall semester.

The last stories.

You can go on their website.

The last stories are, I think, may mid-May.

and the university is saying, sort of expressing these vague concerns about the paper in its work and what some of the reporters at the paper have done, and they're not really naming exactly what it is.

but what is what has happened is in the past, you know, year or so, the the past spring semester, the paper has kind of gotten, like a little more serious and has gotten like, written these pretty hard hitting stories, many of which are quite critical of the Norwich administration.

and when I talk to people and sort of looked at some of these communications, the administration had concerns, particularly with, some stories that the, the guide on had had written about sexual assault on campus.

they, they suspended the paper.

They're saying we are going to look at, you know, what these student journalists, kind of need as far as preparation, sort of implying that they're not quite prepared to be doing their job.

saying, we just but like, to me and you publicly, they've said we are very supportive of a free press.

we want this paper to succeed.

We just want to make sure that the students have what they need.

a number of faculty members have.

And some students have expressed concern about that.

and said they're censoring us.

and they're upset at our reporting.

and, you know, I went I was like, I don't know, is this a normal thing?

That student newspaper is like have some sort of requirement that students have to take a class or a training?

I reached out to a number of other colleges and universities in the state.

They all said our student newspapers are totally independent.

There's no academic requirements, there's no training prerequisites.

They have no sort of administrative oversight.

So if Norwich succeeds in putting some sort of, you know, I don't know, requirements for the student journalists at this paper, that would be, as far as I understand, like somewhat unprecedented, as far as student reporting in the state.

And again, it seems like it's counterintuitive what the university is saying about these students not being prepared, not having the tools.

And yet they've been writing some very serious, hard hitting journalistic stories.

according to your reporting.

Yeah, absolutely.

They wrote about, you know, the lawsuit that that we reported on as well against, administrators there, they wrote about, you know, what they described as kind of a lack of transparency for how the university responds to sexual assaults on campus.

and I think it seems somewhat likely that that is perhaps touched a nerve.

Also, you've been reporting about a controversy over Middlebury College in the college, the chapel and the name of that chapel.

Former Governor Jim Douglas has been, critical of this.

He would like it to be named, I believe, Mead Chapel.

What is the controversy about here?

Sure.

So this is another, sort of case of kind of free speech on campus.

I think the similarities end there.

Middlebury College has this very old, chapel on campus.

It used to be called the Mead Memorial Chapel, named after another former governor from the, you know, early 1900s, and, that governor sort of gave this infamous speech in 1912 to the legislature, calling for, effectively a eugenics program, and used very, very offensive language to refer to, some of the state's residents, however many.

I'm not gonna do the math.

Years later, 2021, Vermont is in this sort of, reckoning over its history of eugenics and history of having a eugenics program.

Middlebury College, takes the Meade name from the chapel, renames at Middlebury Chapel, under former Governor Jim Douglas, Republican, filed suit on behalf of the Meade estate and says, this is cancel culture.

You had a contract with the Meade family.

He gave you some money for this chapel.

and you need to rename it or, you know, provide some sort of damages.

Not about the governor.

It's about the family name.

So, yes.

Yeah.

This is a point where, Governor Douglas is very serious, and, recently, last week, I believe, Superior Court in Vermont ruled, this case is going to get narrowed very significantly.

It can move forward on sort of very narrow grounds.

but either way, no matter what the outcome, this chapel is not going to get renamed.

The college is not going to have to rename this chapel.

That's the decision the judge made.

We have briefly time to tell you that, if you've not gotten if you want to mail in your ballots for the November election, do so by October 15th, according to the Secretary of State's office.

That's when you should have it in.

If it's past that, you're better off putting it in a Dropbox or voting in person on Election Day.

Of course, that's all the time we have for today.

I want to thank our panelists so much Lola Duffort from Vermont Public, Peter DAuria from Vtdigger and Kevin McCallum from seven days.

Thank you all so much for being here.

I appreciate you tuning in.

Hope you have a great week.

We'll see you again next week on Vermont.

This week.