January 3, 2010, the Times Argus, by Louis Porter

Vermonters running for office this year are already raising and spending money, but the rules that try to limit the influence of campaign money on government are murky.

Legislators may – again – pass a bill this year limiting donations from individuals, political action committees and parties. But there will be factors that will complicate that decision.

For one thing, it is an election year, a time when lawmakers have typically stayed away from campaign finance bills. And at least four senators are already running for higher office, as are Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, who presides over the Senate, and Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz, the state's chief election officer.

Finally, a new lawsuit, brought by some of the plaintiffs and the lawyer who successfully challenged the state's last set of campaign finance laws before the U.S. Supreme Court, will move forward.

The previous lawsuit by Vermont Right to Life and attorney James Bopp, who frequently challenges states' campaign finance laws, resulted in the country's top court tossing out central parts of Vermont's rules governing money in politics, which were passed in 1998.

Since then, under the advice of Attorney General William Sorrel, the state has operated under the laws that preceded the 1998 changes. Twice lawmakers have passed a bill implementing a new set of campaign finance laws, and twice Gov. James Douglas has vetoed the measure.

Lawmakers have tried to set more stringent limits on contributions from any given donor and especially from PACs and parties. Douglas objects to the way the bills would curb giving by parties.

"The proposed party contribution limits extend unfair political protection to incumbents by establishing an obstacle for challengers," Douglas said in April 2008 when he vetoed the proposed law for the second time.

Last year, members of the Senate passed a somewhat modified version of the bill, which is now in the House. Legislators there may take up the provision this legislative session.

That is important because, despite the fact that candidates have so far lived by the pre-1998 laws, exactly what the campaign finance laws in Vermont are now is not entirely clear, some legislators said.

"If you ask five people if there is a campaign finance law you will probably get five different responses," said Sen. John Campbell, D-Windsor, the majority leader. "That tells me we have to address it."

"I think Vermont politics are very clean. You don't find influence peddling as in other places," Campbell said. But "when you don't have those clear-cut guidelines is when you get in trouble. It is important to have clear and concise language that all can follow."

Since the Senate has already voted to approve the bill, S.92, it will be up to the members of the House whether a campaign finance measure will move.

"I believe the Government Operations Committee will take campaign finance up for consideration," said Speaker of the House Shap Smith, D-Morristown.

Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, D-Windham and a candidate for governor, agreed.

"We are currently making the assumption that the old law goes into effect since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down our good law," he said.

But "I think it is critical that Vermont have clarity around the campaign finance laws," he added. "There is no better lesson in why we need campaign finance reform than to be running for statewide office and be trying to raise money. The sooner we get money out of politics the healthier our democracy will be."

Douglas, one of the few people involved in the discussion who isn't running for re-election or for higher office, said it would be better to have a new campaign finance law passed and signed. But he added that he still has concerns about the current and recent proposals from lawmakers.

"I think it is better to have a campaign finance law that is in the statutes and is enforceable," he said. "I would prefer to have a law, but given the controversy around some of the provisions, I do not think it is a priority given all of the challenges we need to address this session."

"I don't think we have had a problem over the last couple years," he added. Douglas said that as a non-lawyer he does not know if the "revival" doctrine under which Sorrel proposed reinstating the old rules for the last couple of election cycles is legally binding. "I respected it as if it were in effect."

It did get a boost from a court decision in the last election cycle in which a judge supported the idea that the old laws were in effect, according to the attorney general's office.

Another question is when any campaign finance law that might be passed would go into effect. A half-dozen or more candidates for statewide office are already raising and spending money.

"It is unusual to have election bills, particularly related to campaign finance, pass during an election year," said Markowitz. "Candidates and campaigns have already gotten going."

If new limits or disclosure requirements affecting campaigns and political donors were to go into effect in the middle of an election it could be unfair, some worry.

However, the House and Senate have twice passed a bill very similar to the one they may consider this year, so its provisions wouldn't be completely unfamiliar. And there is a need for clarity to be brought to existing campaign finance rules, now a mix of the laws that preceded the 1998 bill and the portions of that measure that were not tossed out.

"It is complicated and we have testified in the Legislature that it would be better if we had a campaign finance bill that was passed and signed into law and we could then use to educate campaigns and contributors," Markowitz said.

Shumlin said: "We should pass campaign finance reform, and it should go into effect on passage."

Another possibility is that the lawmakers could approve such a law but not have it go into effect until after this election cycle.

Meanwhile, the new lawsuit by Vermont Right to Life and Bopp is waiting in the wings. That suit challenges different portions of the state's campaign finance rules – portions that also exist in many other states and in federal rules – around the disclosure requirement for political action committees and individuals.

Those provisions – challenged on free speech grounds – dictate when such committees must identify their donors and how politically active groups and individuals must identify themselves.

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December 19, 2009, the Monthly Review, by Steve Early

Earlier this month, the Burlington had a busy weekend mustering its "troops" for active duty on several fronts, one at home and the other abroad.

On Saturday, Dec. 5, two hundred labor and community activists gathered in this leading progressive city to plan more effective resistance to job cuts and contract give-backs demanded by recession-ravaged employers.  The title of their conference --"Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Building Democratic, Fighting Unions and Defending Public Services in Hard Economic Times" -- was almost as long as the list of domestic challenges its participants face.

The very next day, on the same University of Vermont campus, another group of working-class Vermonters assembled to be fighters and defenders of a different sort.  They were the first 298 of nearly 1,500 National Guard members who will be sent from here to Afghanistan between now and March.  As reported by the Burlington Free Press, their unit's largest deployment since World War II was celebrated at an "emotional ceremony," attended by friends, neighbors, and family members at an indoor tennis court.  Flags were waved, speeches were made, a military band played, and "farewells were the order of the day."  To keep things on an upbeat note, one Guard officer proclaimed, with great enthusiasm and to much applause: "The Green Mountain Boys are coming!"

Similar irrational exuberance, in 1775, led Ethan Allen to attempt a disastrous invasion of Quebec, which remains, to this day, part of a foreign country unoccupied by the U.S.  Allen's Taliban-like frontier homeboys did much better fighting royalist intruders from New York and, early in the Revolutionary War, seizing Fort Ticonderoga.  In the run-up to the UVM labor gathering, worker skirmishing with modern-day Tories was not going quite as well on the Vermont-side of Lake Champlain.

Joblessness in the Green Mountain state -- while running lower than in the rest of the northeast -- has been high enough to leave its unemployment fund nearly broke.  The region's largest telecom, Fairpoint, just declared bankruptcy, throwing 2,500 workers into an uphill fight to defend their contract and customer service quality.  (For the back-story there, see "Broadband Redlining Targets Rural America," The Nation, May 14, 2007, on the debt-laden Verizon sale to Fairpoint that has, as predicted, landed the latter in Chapter 11.)

And then on Dec. 3, the Vermont State Employees' Association tentatively agreed to an unprecedented 3 percent pay cut for its 7,000 members, followed by a salary freeze.  (Some VSEAers are currently campaigning for membership rejection of this unpalatable deal.)  Already 580 state jobs have been eliminated through layoffs or attrition, but Republican Gov. Jim Douglas says he still faces a projected $150 million state budget shortfall next year.

In the Free Press, Douglas Administration official Neal Lunderville called the VSEA capitulation "a common sense approach that should serve as a blue-print for teachers, municipal workers, and others who receive a paycheck from tax-payers" -- a clear warning that they're next in line for pay and/or job cuts too, like their public sector counterparts all around the country.

At the Dec. 5 UVM conference, rank-and-file militants and campus socialists had a different message for Douglas.  Summed up in the rousing chant that ended the final session, it was: "They say give-back, we say fight-back!"  The difficult question that local teamsters, teachers, telephone workers, nurses, and state employees grappled with throughout the day was how to make that standard lefty bargaining position actually stick.  Their strategy discussions were aided by Labor Notes, the 30-year old, Detroit-based labor education and research project, which publishes a monthly newsletter for "union troublemakers" of all stripes.

In the fifteen-minute talk I gave to the group, which included many local stalwarts of U.S. Labor Against The War (USLAW) and the Vermont Progressive Party, I tried to connect some dots, related to the back-to-back events on the same campus.  I noted that everyone's employer is chanting the mantra that times are tough, money is short, and there must be shared national (or local) sacrifice.  In Vermont, that apparently means working-class people must, in disproportionate numbers, fight and die in Afghanistan, foot the bill, as tax-payers, for a $680 billion a year Pentagon budget (including the soon-to-be-increased $130 billion annual cost of two wars), and endure cuts in the pay, benefits, jobs, or public services that they and their families depend on.

What's wrong with this picture, I asked?  The powers-that-be (or would-be) are saying, in their usual authoritative fashion, "there is no alternative!"  But there is, in fact, an alternative.  To avoid a 3 per cent pay cut for 7,000 state workers, we could shut down the war in Afghanistan for twenty minutes and, at the current rate of U.S. spending there, raise the $2 million that Jim Douglas seeks from the VSEA that way.  To close the governor's entire fiscal year 2011 budget gap would, of course, require the additional "sacrifice" of diverting 24 hours' worth of Afghan war spending to help keep Vermont state government afloat for another year.

The following day, down at the Holiday Inn in South Burlington, where some National Guard families spent the weekend saying private good-byes, the logic of my brilliant anti-war math was not lost on a non-union waitress named Dawna.  (For the record, there is no such thing as a "union hotel" in Vermont.)  As she brought pancakes and syrup to my table late Sunday morning, everyone but Dawna was transfixed by the big flat-screen TV hanging next to the bar in the Holiday Inn restaurant.  There, we could watch real-time coverage of the National Guard deployment ceremony being held just up the road at UVM.  All the wait staff could recognize people they had served at the hotel, in the same room, just a few hours earlier.

Now, these "citizen soldiers" who had been their breakfast buffet and overnight guests were among those standing stiffly at attention, wearing field caps, camo, and combat boots.  On the platform in front of them, a parade of local politicians -- pro- and anti-war alike, including Douglas, U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy, plus U.S. Rep. Peter Welch -- praised their patriotism and devotion to duty.  Douglas has been a chicken hawk since his days as a late 1960s Middlebury College classmate of mine, when he was an outspoken, Richard Nixon-loving Young Republican.  So from his usual perch, far from the frontlines, the governor assured the soldiers and their families that "while you are doing your duty, I promise you we will do ours, here on the home front" -- presumably by slashing state programs or UI benefits?

Meanwhile, waitress Dawna was simply disgusted by the whole televised spectacle.  "I'm tired of seeing a lot of guys marching around in uniforms," she confided.  "I wish they'd turn that off and go back to the 'relax your muscles' show" -- a bit of self-help programming for sufferers of lower-back pain that was on the TV when I entered the restaurant.  By this point in her Sunday morning shift, Dawna did not seem particularly relaxed herself, in her white shirt, bedraggled tie, and sagging black waitress apron.  Although only in her 30s, she had the weary, weighed-down look common among the working poor struggling to survive in northern New England's low-wage, service economy.  Her cousin, the father of three, has been deployed multiple times overseas.  That's why, she informed me, the war is "a sore personal subject" for her.  "It's ridiculous," she declared.  "We have people living on the street, who've lost their jobs, can't pay for their homes.  And now we're sending more people over there to fight somebody else's battles?"

Observing the somber family gatherings in the hotel over the weekend had clearly not been easy for some Holiday Inn staff members.  Mistaking one mother and daughter in the dining room for a non-military family, Dawna had asked the child how she liked the hotel pool.  "I'm here to say goodbye to my Dad," the little girl sadly informed her.

"I'll feel better later on, when I get off work," Dawna assured me, as I paid for my breakfast.  "You know -- 'out of sight, out of mind, what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger?'"

At the same time, she didn't seem very convinced about the truth of those two oft-repeated but oddly conjoined phrases.  And one thing was certain: for some of the guests she had served earlier in the day, America's troop build-up in Afghanistan will prove fatal, while leaving Dawna's state, nation, and fellow workers a lot poorer and not any stronger.

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December 18, 2009, WCAX, by Andy Potter

The owners of Vermont Yankee made their offer Friday for a new power purchase agreement. Everybody involved in the Vermont Yankee license extension has been waiting for the company to release a price for the power they would sell for another 20 years before they decide if Vermont ratepayers would benefit or not.

Vermont Yankee's operations vice-president Jay Thayer told reporters the offer is to start a new 20-year deal for 115 Megawatts of power at a price of 6.1 cents per kilowatt hour. That's 50 percent more than the current price, but still, according to the company, represents potential savings to ratepayers better than power purchased at market rates.

Thayer said, "We calculate that to be worth about $500 million in projected savings over market prices over that same 20-year period."

Gov. Jim Douglas, R-Vermont, called the proposal a good step in the negotiating process.

"We have a proposal on the table and that means the Public Service Board can make a decision that is in the public interest," he said. "The Legislature should allow that to go forward. There are some in the Legislature that will come up with more excuses not to act. The leaders say this session is all about jobs, and we certainly don't want to lose the 640 good paying jobs in Southeastern Vermont. We need to secure our energy future and need to know what the future holds in terms of power generation."

But Vermont senate president Peter Shumlin, speaking for the majority Legislative Democrats, dismissed the proposal out of hand. First, he said the proposed wholesale price of the power is too high. Second: "The offer does nothing to address our concerns about the shortfall in the decommissioning fund," he said.

Thayer confirmed that the company making the offer is not Entergy, Vermont Yankee's parent company, but rather a spinoff company called Enexus, to which Entergy proposes to sell its nuclear power business. "This offer is being make on behalf of Enexus Corporation, which we feel we are proceeding with," Thayer said. "We hope to be successful with that in both Vermont and New York State, for final approval. And to be moving six nuclear power plants including Vermont Yankee into this new company."

The Democrats have more problems with the Enexus spinoff. Shumlin said, "As you know, Enexus is a highly leveraged entity. We have extreme concerns about its financial solvency."

Vermont Yankee's public announcement Friday is just part of the on-going negotiations with Vermont utilities -- the company says it will make a formal rate case with the Public Service Board in early January. Central Vermont Public Service and Green Mountain Power had reserved responses. For instance, CVPS issued a statement saying it is not happy with giving up an existing revenue sharing provision -- and will be looking for changes at the negotiating table.

Gov. Douglas said businesses and investors need to know the cost of power, but it's likely the legislature will not vote on the Vermont Yankee license extension this coming session. But he hopes politics will not come into play and says lawmakers should go on the record about Yankee's future.

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December 14, 2009, the Times Argus, by Daniel Barlow

MONTPELIER – Vermont lawmakers will begin a new year of health care reform discussions with a massive public hearing at the Statehouse in early January.

The chairmen of the House and Senate health care committees will convene a public hearing on the evening of Jan. 12, in the chambers of the Vermont House as they begin new deliberations on changes to the state's health care system, including considering a single-payer option.

January's public forum is to collect input on two single-payer bills – H.100 and S.88 – each creating a state-run health care system. Sen. Doug Racine, the Chittenden County Democrat who chairs the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, said he plans to spend the session studying exactly how a single-payer health care system would work in Vermont.

"We've been having the debate over whether it's a good idea or a bad idea for a very long time," said Racine, a 2010 gubernatorial candidate. "What I'm interested in is how it would work. There are a lot of questions. Let's answer those questions."

Co-chairing the public forum in January with Racine will be Rep. Steve Maier, the Middlebury Democratic chairman of the House Health Care Committee. He said the committees will look at the two single-payer bills – but that they are putting everything else on the table too.

"Both Doug and I will spend the first two to three weeks trying to wade through all the good ideas that are out there," Maier said.

Much of what lawmakers plan in Vermont will depend greatly on what happens in Washington, D.C., Racine said he is disappointed in the direction of negotiations in the Senate, which he says have made the public investment in expanding health care weaker.

"There will be some great things in the final bill," Racine said. "But at best it will just catch the rest of the country up with Vermont. We need to go further than that."

Maier said he is optimistic Congress will pass a federal health care bill before Vermont lawmakers return to Montpelier in early January. But if that doesn't happen – if the final bill is still in the works – Maier said there are a number of programs and initiatives that have appeared so far in all the versions of the bill.

"There's been a lot of discussion in the media about a few parts of this bill," he said. "But there are whole parts of this proposal that is not changing."

"The sooner they get it done the better."

Health care reform is a perennial issue for Vermont lawmakers, but there is evidence that this year could result in a groundswell of support for action. Throughout the summer and fall an organization called Health Care is a Human Right Campaign, a project of the Vermont Worker's Center, has held community meetings with regular citizens and lawmakers.

Organized nearly two years ago, the campaign has slowly been building a network of single-payer health care supporters throughout Vermont. More than 1,000 people attended a Statehouse rally it organized back in May and when lawmakers return to Montpelier in January, the campaign will deliver another message to them.

James Haslam, the director of the Worker's Center, said his group will deliver 3,000 postcards from Vermonters supporting health care reform to members of the Legislature. He said the rising costs of health insurance – and the continued gap in coverage for many — "cannot be tolerated any longer."

"For once I really think we have the political will to get this done," Haslam said. "If we keep on pushing, that will will be there."

Maier is fond of explaining the difficulty in passing major health care reform initiatives with an analogy of the system being an airplane in flight that needs repairs.

"We trying to remodel that plane while it's still in the air," he said. "We can't land it, because people are still using it. But we need to change it."

The public forum is scheduled for 6 p.m. at the Statehouse on Tuesday, Jan. 12.

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