An ongoing labor dispute in southeastern Vermont subsided on Labor Day when bus company Travel Kuz ended its lockout of bus drivers and monitors represented by the Vermont Teamsters Local 597 union.

The workers returned to transporting students enrolled in Windham Southeast Supervisory Union’s 10 schools in Brattleboro, Dummerston, Guilford, Putney and Vernon on Tuesday. 

The workers had been on the picket line for nearly two weeks since Travel Kuz locked them out from the company’s Brattleboro headquarters after contract negotiations stalled. The company brought in replacement workers for the start of the school year. 

Travel Kuz accused the union of unlawful picketing and endangering students in a cease-and-desist letter last week. Local law enforcement did not witness any unlawful activity and the Teamsters disputed the characterization. 

A spokesperson for Travel Kuz — affiliated with Beacon Mobility — wrote in a press release that the company ended the lockout because the union is ready to return to the bargaining table. 

“From the start, our hope has been to reach an agreement that is fair for employees and affordable for the town, while keeping the focus on what matters most: children arriving at school safely and returning home with care,” the spokesperson wrote. “We care deeply about our drivers and want to be sure they feel valued and fairly paid for the vital work they do.”

Curtis Clough, president of the Vermont Teamsters Local 597, said the union has “always been available to negotiate with the bus company,” even during the lockout. 

“We’d love to get back to the table with the company,” Clough said. “We’ve already sent the company multiple letters asking for them to come back to the table and negotiate, so hopefully that bears some fruit.”

Lena Melentijevic, spokesperson for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, wrote in a statement that Travel Kuz notified individual drivers and monitors late Monday afternoon that the lockout ended, but the union has not received direct communication from the company about the situation or future bargaining as of Tuesday.

“The company created a stressful situation for our members and the community,” Melentijevic wrote in a statement. “We call on the company to come back to the table and negotiate a fair contract for our members.”

Travel Kuz previously told VTDigger the union’s proposal would cause an “unrealistic burden” by expanding company costs by over 40%. 

At the Aug. 22 meeting held during the lockout, Clough said, the union adjusted its workers’ pay proposal but maintained its benefits request. He said the Teamsters Local 597 is asking for a contract pay package similar to bus drivers represented by the Teamsters in other states, particularly in New Hampshire. 

Clough said the company has repeatedly delayed workers’ pay, retirement matches and health care premiums, and has asked the union to agree to concessions such as limiting family and medical leave, barring drivers from taking on extra hours and canceling bus monitors’ pay guarantees.

The Vermont Teamsters Local 597’s want a fair contract that ensures members have what they “need to afford to live in the community and afford their health care,” Clough said. 

Windham Southeast Supervisory Union’s Superintendent Mark Speno wrote in a Tuesday statement that he is glad the drivers and monitors are able to return to work while a handful of replacement drivers continue to fill in for some routes. 

The supervisory union is hopeful the contract negotiations settle soon and the bus company makes improvements to the routing and communications systems, according to Speno.

“My expectation is that there is a contract settlement that recognizes support and balance within very few days, so we can all move forward,” Speno wrote.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Company ends lockout of Vermont bus workers, contract talks in the works.

The bus transportation company Travel Kuz sent a cease-and-desist letter Wednesday to the Vermont Teamsters Local 597 alleging the union engaged in “unlawful” picketing practices and put student safety at risk.

The Teamsters Local 597 president denied the allegations, and local law enforcement said they did not witness criminal activity during Wednesday’s demonstration at Brattleboro Union High School. 

The labor dispute began when the company, affiliated with Beacon Mobility, locked out its Vermont union bus drivers and monitors from the Brattleboro headquarters last week after contract negotiations broke down. 

Travel Kuz provides student transportation for Windham Southeast Supervisory Union schools in Brattleboro, Dummerston, Guilford, Putney and Vernon. The union bus drivers and monitors with Teamsters Local 597 typically handle school routes for the 10 schools in the supervisory union, but they have not been allowed to work with their employer Travel Kuz due to the lockout. 

Since the work stoppage by Travel Kuz, the union drivers and monitors have been on the picket line. The company brought in replacement workers to serve Windham Southeast Supervisory Union schools for the start of the school year. 

Travel Kuz claimed that union members picketing Wednesday at Brattleboro Union High School spat on school buses, blocked school bus access, caused traffic disruptions and hazardous conditions and displayed “obscene and aggressive behavior toward students and drivers,” according to a Travel Kuz press release. 

Curtis Clough, president of Teamsters Local 597, denied the allegations of union members spitting, risking public safety or otherwise causing harm to students or drivers. He said the union members did cross the street a few times during the picketing but that is a legally protected activity. 

He said the union is looking into taking legal action against the company and the company’s counsel due to allegations in the letter. He said it is the company’s actions — tapping replacement workers and preventing local bus drivers and monitors who are more familiar with the community and school routes from working — that are detrimental to students, not the union demonstrations. 

“We didn’t put any students in danger yesterday,” Clough said. “They were the ones that put students in danger by locking out the bus drivers.”  

The Travel Kuz company is seeking injunctive relief against the union and claimed to be working with local authorities and legal counsel to “ensure compliance with labor laws and public safety standards,” according to the press release. 

Clough said Brattleboro police were present during picketing and did not issue any citations or tell the union to cease demonstrating. 

Brattleboro Police Capt. Adam Petlock confirmed that officers were present at Brattleboro High School during the picketing because it is customary to have law enforcement stationed at schools during the first week of school. 

Petlock said the role of law enforcement is to respect the right of people to protest and engage in protected First Amendment activities while ensuring the safety of children and the public. 

Officers who were present during picketing demonstrations witnessed “no criminal violations” by union members, Petlock said, and Travel Kuz has not contacted Brattleboro law enforcement to his knowledge.

Brattleboro resident Ian Turner, a parent of two students in the supervisory union, said that the lockout has caused inconvenience and safety concerns for his family as they are forgoing bus transportation for their children during the lockout.

One of Turner’s children enrolled in the 10th grade is nonverbal and needs preparation to use the bus, and was comfortable with the union driver and monitors during the previous year, he said. Turner said he has reached out to Travel Kuz and the company has yet to communicate a transportation plan, and the lockout by the company is disruptive to his child’s education. 

Turner said he talked with the union members picketing outside of Brattleboro Union High School yesterday and did not witness any aggressive behavior. On the contrary, Turner said he has generally seen union picketing garnering positive reactions from parents and he considers the union bus drivers and monitors to be trusted members of the community.

Lena Melentijevic, a spokesperson for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, wrote in a statement many of the drivers are part of the community and have students in the supervisory union. 

“Travel Kuz is failing in its desperate attempts to distract the public from the truth — this company locked out its own workers, preventing them from returning to work since last week,” Melentijevic wrote in a statement. “This lockout could end today if the company chose to end it.”

Clough said the contract negotiations are still active despite the labor dispute, and the Teamsters Local 597 will work to agree on a fair contract.

“We’re gonna be out there on the picket lines until the company gives us a fair contract,” Clough said. “They’ve locked us out. They say they’re not gonna let us back in until we agree to a contract, so it’s gonna have to be a fair one.”

The Windham Southeast Supervisory Union superintendent did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Bus company accuses union drivers of unlawful and unsafe picketing at Brattleboro school.

This story by Brandon Canevari was first published in The Commons on Aug. 19, 2025.

The Windham County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO) is attempting to change the way that local law enforcement resources are provided and how they are funded by working with the legislature to make the system more stable.

According to Sheriff Mark Anderson, the Regional Policing Initiative could look to the Legislature to create one governing body to address the needs of the 19 towns in the county that are without their own policing infrastructure. Only Bellows Falls, Brattleboro, Dover and Wilmington have full-time police departments.

Whenever Vermont has attempted to share policing resources among municipalities in the past the system usually breaks down, Anderson said, describing a problem that he said has been documented for almost 70 years.

He noted that those who attended a series of information sessions about these potential changes were positive and optimistic about the need and curious as to how to accomplish it.

The meetings took place in Jamaica, Marlboro, Newfane and Putney in late July and earlier this month.

“Ultimately what we’re working on is approaching the Windham County legislative delegation to propose a pilot project where we can say, ‘Let’s actually stop studying this and talking about the changes. Let’s do a practice run so that we take the things that we believe, the subject matter experts believe, will actually fix the problems that we’ve been talking about for decades,'” Anderson said.

Financial pressure creates a resource crunch

Some towns throughout Windham County have contracts with the sheriff’s office to provide services, a decision that is made by town selectboards. Those contracts are reviewed regularly and whether a contract remains in place is subject to change.

If one town decides to end a contract and another town wants the service, Anderson said under the current structure he moves the service to the other town.

The problem, he said, comes when a town that terminated a contract reverses course and wants the service back in six or 12 months time. At that point, Anderson said, the WCSO doesn’t have the funding to immediately be able to resume the service, and it takes approximately 12 months to recruit, hire, train and deploy a new officer.

“It just becomes this game of a waitlist, of a cycle, all because the selectboards are under pressure to be diligent stewards of funding,” he said.

“I need about 12 months to plan just about anything we do for any town, and they’re making a decision in May or June on what they want in their next fiscal year which starts in July. I can’t operate in that environment,” Anderson said. “They can’t operate in an environment where they’re depending on services. People get frustrated, and we’re just not doing the things.”

Anderson hopes the Legislature can form one governing body to represent the towns in the county.

“Rather than pursue this through 19 different towns in Windham County all with 19 separate decision making processes, what we’re trying to do is align this through the legislative process to say this is representative of the 19 towns through one deliberative conversation,” Anderson said.

Legislators will discuss the plan’s viability

On Sept. 22, Anderson will have a discussion with Windham County legislators to determine whether the concept is viable and, if so, to explore how to begin the legislative process when the new session begins in January.

Whether the change will come to pass will depend on the legislative process, Anderson said, starting with getting support from lawmakers to introduce a bill.

Even if the idea does not survive a journey through the legislative process, Anderson said he does not believe the public dialogue was in vain.

“I don’t see what we’ve done as wasted time. I see what we’ve done as educating our constituents and the community to say, ‘This is what to expect of the services and the government we have,'” Anderson said. “If we can’t get the change made, that’s not a failure, that’s also a decision of the public process, so both are fine.”

The meeting on Monday, Sept. 22 is scheduled to take place at the Windham County Superior Courthouse in Newfane at 5 p.m.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Sheriff explores a new approach to funding regional policing in Windham County.

Bus drivers and monitors for Windham Southeast Supervisory Union schools picketed in Brattleboro Friday afternoon in front of Academy School and Brattleboro Union High School as tense negotiations continue with their private employer. 

The student transportation workers, represented by the Vermont Teamsters Local 597 union, have been locked out of their place of employment since Wednesday by Travel Kuz, which has offices in Brattleboro and northern Massachusetts. According to its website, the company became affiliated in 2023 with Beacon Mobility, a firm with school bus companies nationwide.

“The employer is not letting anybody go to work until they agree to their terms and conditions, so they’ve locked us out to try to put pressure on the group,” Curtis Clough, president of Teamsters Local 597, said in an interview.  

The school year begins for students in Windham Southeast Supervisory Union, like many others across the state, on Aug. 27. In addition to Brattleboro schools, the supervisory union also includes schools in Dummerston, Guilford, Putney and Vernon. 

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters claimed in a press release that if the bar on bus drivers and monitors working continues into next week, its members are concerned it could mean that students enrolled in Windham Southeast schools will not have bus transportation. 

An email from Travel Kuz said the temporary lockout at the Brattleboro office was implemented earlier this week after no agreement was reached with the union, but that the lockout will not affect student transportation routes. 

The email from the company said that the union’s request would result in over a 40% increase in costs to the company, “an unrealistic burden under fixed school district contracts,” and that the company is prepared to meet with the union to find a “fair, balanced resolution.”

In addition to claims it cannot pay workers what they’re asking for, Travel Kuz has held back retirement matches and health care premiums and frequently failed to pay workers on time, Clough said. 

Teamsters Local 597 asked to open bargaining in February and the union’s contract expired in June, Clough said. Between May and July, there was a period of several weeks when negotiations were at a standstill because the company refused to meet with the union. It has been difficult scheduling a time to meet with companies to continue negotiations after their last bargaining session Aug. 7, he added. 

Teamsters Local 597 filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board due to Travel Kuz withholding a revenue contract document that the union requested and the lockout notice. This along with refusing to negotiate for weeks displays the “bad faith bargaining” of the employer, Clough said. 

Catherine Cleveland, a union member, said she was looking forward to her first day of school as a bus driver after receiving her certification in June. She worked as a bus monitor with the company before that, and said that she was injured on the job a year ago and is “still fighting workmen’s comp claims.” Beyond higher wages, Cleveland said she would like the company to demonstrate more appreciation for the work and responsibilities of bus drivers and monitors safely transporting students.

Cleveland said the children will be negatively impacted if the lockout continues even if the company sends out-of-state drivers and monitors to serve the Windham Southeast schools.

“They don’t know the children. They don’t know the schools,” Cleveland said, “A lot of them probably don’t know a lot of the areas, so even just being out driving a route is going to be a challenge.”

The Windham Southeast Supervisory Union superintendent could not be immediately reached for comment.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Academy School, and misidentified a town within the Windham Southeast Supervisory Union.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Days before the school year begins, Windham Southeast districts’ contracted bus drivers walk the picket line.

BRATTLEBORO — Two months before the close of its fiscal year, Brattleboro Memorial Hospital is still trying to find enough cost reductions and new revenue to balance its current $119 million budget.

“FY25 has been a financially challenging year,” hospital leaders wrote to state health care regulators in a memo shared at a Wednesday review hearing. “BMH currently has a comprehensive financial recovery plan in place; however, we are at risk of failing to fully deliver on some of those initiatives.”

The hospital, one of Brattleboro’s three largest employers, revealed in May it faced a projected $4 million budget shortfall upon the close of its fiscal year Sept. 30. In response, it launched a hiring freeze and let go of six administrators in hopes of lowering its staff count from 543 this fiscal year to 513 in the one that starts Oct. 1.

Hospital leaders still have work to do. On Wednesday, they informed the state that patient volumes and revenues were “generally stagnating or decreasing.” (Regulators didn’t push why, but praised the quality of care.) Brattleboro officials then noted this fiscal year’s losses had totaled as much as $9.5 million and unpaid patient bills had risen as high as $38 million.

“We recognize we are in a bad financial condition,” Laura Bruno, the hospital’s chief financial officer, said during the online hearing. “We have some ways to go.”

Hospital President Christopher Dougherty added in a letter to the state: “BMH must produce a positive margin in the fourth quarter of 2025.”

Brattleboro is one of Vermont’s 14 community hospitals meeting with the state’s Green Mountain Care Board this month as regulators study proposed budgets for the 2026 fiscal year.

Brattleboro’s 2026 spending plan estimates its total operating expenses will rise $2.3 million or 1.9% from the current year’s, while revenues could increase enough to project a surplus of $244,000. 

While hopeful, the hospital foresees several potential problems. It is set to lose $14 million next year with the Dec. 31 end of the OneCare Vermont accountable care organization, although it hopes to replace those funds by joining another system.

It could lose $3.6 million if the federal government doesn’t extend Medicare-dependent hospital and low-volume adjustment support and another $700,000 if dropped from a national 340B drug pricing program that offers financial help. And new U.S. tariffs “threaten to dramatically increase our costs for supplies and drugs,” it said in its memo.

State regulators will continue to review budgets this week and next before ruling on whether to approve, modify or deny proposals by Sept. 15.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Even after cuts, Brattleboro hospital unsure it can balance budget.

DUMMERSTON — The nonprofit Landmark Trust USA makes money to preserve historic properties through short-term rentals of such holdings as the late Victorian-era writer Rudyard Kipling’s former Vermont home.

And soon, his horse barn.

Kipling, born in India and raised in England, was 26 when he visited the United States on his 1892 honeymoon and decided to build a house near his wife’s family in the southeastern town of Dummerston.

The man who’d become the first English-language author to win the Nobel Prize in literature named his 2½-story hideaway Naulakha after a Hindi word meaning “jewel beyond price.” There, he penned “The Jungle Book” and “Captains Courageous” and conceived “Kim” and “Just So Stories,” only to depart after constructing a barn for his horses, Nip and Tuck, in 1896.

The property stayed in local hands, then sat unused for 50 years before Landmark Trust USA — an offshoot of Britain’s Landmark Trust conservation charity — purchased it in 1992.

To generate revenue, the organization rents Kipling’s home and carriage house for short-term stays and small gatherings. This week, it’s announcing plans to convert the horse barn’s loft into a studio apartment.

“The Naulakha stable project furthers our preservation mission, ensuring this remarkable place is accessible for future generations,” Susan McMahon, the trust’s executive director, said in a statement.

The plan is part of a $1.25 million Naulakha capital campaign, which is 85% complete and will also replace several roofs and improve groundwater drainage.

Landmark Trust USA manages six historic properties that include the Naulakha buildings, a nearby Dummerston farmhouse and sugarhouse and the Amos Brown House in Whitingham. It also maintains the 570-acre Scott Farm orchard, which grows 130 varieties of heirloom apples just down the road from Kipling’s home.

“We’re making good progress,” Jeremy Ebersole, the trust’s public outreach manager, said of the improvement campaign. “The goal is to have the stable rental done and ready sometime in the fall.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Seeking a unique vacation rental? Introducing Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont stable..

This story by Joyce Marcel was first published in The Commons on July 8.

BRATTLEBORO — Much of Windham County depends for its health care services on Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, which has been weathering what already was a financial crisis.

And then everything changed on July 3, when Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The bill, which President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, may cause some 45,000 people in Vermont to lose their health insurance over the next several years, according to initial estimates from the Vermont Agency of Human Services.

And one academic health-care policy study predicts that two other hospitals just over the Vermont state border — one in New Hampshire and the other in Massachusetts — are at risk of closing as a result of the new law.

“I don’t know what to say, except this bill is vicious, and it does, I believe, disproportionately affect rural community hospitals,” said Christopher J. Dougherty, president and CEO of Brattleboro Memorial Hospital. “And rural community hospitals don’t need any more help to create challenging financial times. It’s there already.”

Rural hospitals mean a great deal to their communities, and Brattleboro Memorial Hospital is no exception.

“This is not just a hospital,” Dougherty said. “We’re also the largest employer in this community, so we add to the economics of this community.”

And for people looking to move to the Brattleboro region, “they want a hospital close by,” he continued. “They want an emergency room. If they’re of childbearing ages, they want labor and delivery rooms.”

Dougherty believes that rural hospitals “are the bedrocks of rural communities — not just as a hospital, but also really as an economic driver.”

As vital as they may be, America’s rural hospitals are struggling financially. The reasons are complex, but they include everything from the constantly rising costs of health insurance, pharmaceuticals, and staffing to the meager reimbursement the federal government offers for Medicaid and Medicare patient services.

Yet on July 3, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest cost estimates, will reduce federal Medicaid spending by $793 billion and increase the number of uninsured people by 7.8 million, according to an analysis from KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation, which describes itself as an “independent source for health policy research, polling, and news.”

The federal program distributes money to states to administer as benefits for residents who qualify, based on family income or disability status. The funds subsidize some or all medical costs for a variety of needs.

Medicaid dollars don’t go directly into the pockets of individuals. Rather, the program funds initiatives like Dr. Dynasaur, which supports Vermont children from prenatal care for the mother to a child’s teen years. Medicaid covers long-term care, supports people with disabilities, prescription assistance and other programs.

The program has been highly politicized, Dougherty said.

“I don’t think the decisions that are being made are based on facts,” he said. “One of the things that is claimed — and I want to say ‘claimed’ — is that there’s all this fraud in Medicaid, $700 billion worth of fraud. I’m sorry, I don’t believe that’s even possible.”

Proponents of the legislation have “tried to take a narrative that this is all about fraud and waste, but I think it’s all about the most vulnerable among us,” Dougherty said.

Meanwhile, the legislation is not only an attack on them. It’s “also going to destabilize hospitals, especially rural community hospitals,” he observed.

Michael Del Trecco, the president and CEO of the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems , told The Commons that the sharp cuts to Medicaid coverage in Vermont would challenge the entire health care system.

“First, it would be very problematic for individuals and their families,” said Del Trecco, whose private, member-owned organization is devoted to “improving the health status of communities throughout Vermont,” according to its website.

“And then, second, generally speaking, there are funding mechanisms in the state that would jeopardize organizations’ abilities to care for and treat people,” Del Trecco continued. “We need to be paid sufficiently to manage our operations while we engage in all of the operational efficiency opportunities that are in front of us. It’s a very difficult, continuous situation.”

Hospitals face ‘strong financial headwinds’

Like most rural hospitals, Brattleboro Memorial Hospital is already struggling financially; it recently cut six administrative posts as part of an effort to reduce its $119 million annual budget by $4 million without reducing patient services.

Medicaid represents about 20% of Brattleboro Memorial Hospital’s volume and 15% of its revenue, according to Dougherty.

“We are extremely concerned about the impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Brattleboro Memorial Hospital for a number of reasons,” Dougherty said.

First, “all Vermont hospitals are already facing very strong financial headwinds,” he explained. “This bill will make massive cuts to Medicaid. It is estimated that Vermont hospitals will lose $1.7 billion in federal health care funding over the next decade.”

The hospital will face reduced Medicaid reimbursements, loss of coverage for low-income patients, and an increased uncompensated care burden, he said.

Another complication from the bill is that it would reduce the hospital’s provider tax — a $6.6 million burden — by 0.5% each year. While that reduction is welcome, it also means that the state Medicaid program will lose funding from each hospital’s provider tax and the federal matching program for the tax payments.

“This is a substantial amount of funding, and it will have to be made up for somewhere,” he said.

The act does have funds for rural hospitals, clinics, and opioid treatment programs, Dougherty said, but “while these funds will offer the potential for some short-term assistance, the bill does not compensate for the long-term financial damage caused by the Medicaid reductions. This bill exacerbates an already tenuous situation.”

Small hospitals may face staff layoffs, service eliminations and, in the worst cases, complete closure.

Becker’s Hospital Review, a media source for health care decision-makers, estimates that 760 hospitals nationally will be at risk of closure.

It predicts that in Vermont, eight hospitals will be at risk of closing and one is at immediate risk of closing in the next two to three years.

Becker’s reported that across the U.S., 16.1 million people living in rural communities are covered by Medicaid. In nine states, over 50% of the Medicaid population lives in rural communities in Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Mississippi, Vermont, Kentucky, North Dakota, Alaska and Maine. Approximately 47% of rural births in the U.S. are covered by Medicaid.

Since approximately 65% of nursing home residents in rural areas are covered by Medicaid, it also makes no sense to say that a Medicaid recipient should just get a job and pay for private insurance.

Yet Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said on May 25 on CBS’s Face the Nation, “If you are able to work and you refuse to do so, you are defrauding the system.”

According to a letter sent by U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., to Trump, Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., “Addressing the crisis in rural health care access is a national, bipartisan priority, and it should be bipartisan to not worsen it. However, if your party passes these health care cuts into law, Americans in rural communities across the country risk losing health care services and jobs supported by their local hospitals.”

Markey appended a detailed list naming all the hospitals he estimates will have to close their doors if and when they lose Medicaid reimbursement, citing an analysis by Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina.

Among them are two nearby hospitals — Baystate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield, Massachusetts and Cheshire Medical Center in Keene, New Hampshire.

Fighting for survival

According to Owen Foster, the president of the Green Mountain Care Board, which regulates hospital budgets in the state, all Vermont hospitals are fighting for survival in one way or another. He paints a bleak picture.

In most (though not all) of the state’s hospitals, “you have a number of challenges all at the same time, and one is deteriorating hospital finances across the state,” Foster said. “And Brattleboro is one that is facing those challenges right now.”

At the same time, “you also have some of the highest commercial health care costs in the country,” he continued. “And you have no capacity for your patients and your small businesses or your business community to pay more in health care costs. We’ve maxed out our health care costs for our people.”

It’s difficult, he said, for hospital finances to rebound in Vermont with no capacity to increase commercial prices.

“You’ve probably seen the headlines that the commercial insurance costs have been going up [10 to 15%] every single year for the last several years,” Foster said. “Right now, Blue Cross is requesting a 23% rate increase for the individual group insurance market. But people can’t afford to pay 23% more. If people can’t afford to pay 23% more, they can’t afford to pay Brattleboro Memorial Hospital higher prices to solve the financial challenges they have.”

In addition, the coming federal changes to Medicaid will have a large impact.

“If you have uninsured people, it often results in bad debt or free care,” Foster said. “And the subsidies for the qualified health plans change, which could also limit the number of people on commercial insurance.”

Even before the bill, Blue Cross Blue Shield has been threatening bankruptcy.

“The insurer finances are probably more challenged and strained right now than any hospital financials,” Foster said. “Blue Cross Blue Shield has been put under incredible financial stress in the last year. Their reserves have been significantly depleted, so they have no money to pay out, either. And that’s a challenge. There’s really nowhere to get more money.”

All these things combine to put a significant strain on hospital finances, Foster said.

“So the long and short of it is there’s really no horizon that we see where there’s a significant financial injection to solve for the financial challenges people have,” he said.

Cutting costs

Dougherty took on the job of running Brattleboro Memorial Hospital three years ago. According to Foster, he is the right man for the job.

“Brattleboro has had a tough year,” Foster said. “There’s no question about it. But I’m not alarmed, more than I am for any other number of hospitals in Vermont that have challenging financials.

“Part of it is that I’m very supportive of the work that Chris Dougherty is doing. And I think it’s done with the greatest of intention to make sure that Brattleboro Memorial Hospital is there to serve the community in the years ahead. They’re taking a lot of really important steps to try and address their challenges.”

Del Trecco, of the VAHHS, said Dougherty is dedicated to making sure the Brattleboro hospital is “there today and in the future” and believes in budget-cutting and looking for operational efficiencies both in clinical and nonclinical services.

“The work is not easy and often communities can be concerned, as they rightly should be,” he continued. “But we need to make sure we do this work together. For Chris and his team, the goal was to make sure Brattleboro Memorial Hospital is viable and there for years to come, and I think he’s doing a really great job.”

Two terrible things can happen to hospitals, Dougherty said, and one of them has already happened to the hospital: staff cuts.

Dougherty said it was painful to cut the six administrative positions, putting “great people” out of a job.

“It’s not something we’re proud of,” he said. “It’s not something we’re excited about. We’re really sad about any type of layoff.”

The other terrible thing would be closing all or a part of the hospital. Copley Hospital in Morrisville is closing its birthing center because of unsustainable long-term costs and declining birth rates across the region, he said.

“We’re saying we’re not going to do something like that,” Dougherty said. “I’ve got to tell you, we’re fighting to say ‘We can’t go that route.’ We’ve got to do everything up to the point of eliminating a service. It would be devastating to this community to eliminate any of our services. So we’re looking at everything else possible short of that.

“Closure, in our mind, is absolutely not an option, and everything needs to be done to reinvent, because there’s always a fork in the road; it’s either closure or reinvention,” he continued.

As an example, Dougherty cited Blockbuster Video, which had almost 9,100 locations in 2004. After the rise of streaming video and a string of corporate bankruptcies over the years, all that remains is one lone independently owned franchise in Oregon.

“They didn’t change who they were and what they were doing, and they ended up closing,” Dougherty said. “In contrast, if you look at Netflix, they started out by just emailing DVDs. And look at what they’ve done. They’ve revolutionized streaming and things like that, because they reinvented themselves.

“This is what we’re doing. Unfortunately, some of that reinvention is painful. We have to become more cost efficient and more streamlined, and that’s where those layoffs came to be,” he continued.

Everyone deserves treatment

Vermont law states that hospitals have to serve everyone who “walks in the door,” Dougherty said. That means treating people who have insurance as well as people who don’t.

And Brattleboro Memorial Hospital would do that even without the law, according to Dougherty. But add a flood of now-uninsured former Medicaid patients to those already walking in the door of the Emergency Department, and the finances get tricky.

“Somebody has to pay for it,” Dougherty said. “The question is who. […] Well, if it’s the hospitals, we’re struggling already. We don’t need any help to struggle more. We need help in getting out of this. [The One Big Beautiful Bill Act] doesn’t help us get out of this.”

Until July 1, the hospital contracted with Cheshire Medical Center, which “has been staffing our emergency room and doing a tremendous job for quite some time,” Dougherty said. “They have decided that they can no longer extend that coverage to us.” A new provider, BlueWater Health, of Maine, has taken over.

Emergency department staff already live and work in the hospital area, but they now work for BlueWater instead of Cheshire.

Sometimes, the department has more patients than it can safely handle.

“This last week, we’ve been in what is called a surge mode,” Dougherty said, meaning that patients in the emergency department exceeded the number of rooms.

“So it’s not necessarily a staffing problem. Part of the problem is the flow of patients. Last week, for example, we were having days with eight to 10 mental health patients that we couldn’t move out of the emergency room. It wasn’t safe for them to just be discharged home,” he said.

“So then trying to find the right place for them to go to is a problem, not just at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, but in every hospital. We’re not mental health experts. We can’t do a whole lot for them, but there was nowhere else for them to go.

On a recent morning, “we were close to being at surge, but we had some patients who could get to long-term care facilities, or even admitted to our hospital,” Dougherty said.

The future

What the area lacks most is primary care, but a private practice is expensive to open and to operate. Dougherty said that Brattleboro Memorial Hospital is working to expand primary care in the county.

“There’s a federal program that Sen. Bernie Sanders is incredibly supportive of, and it’s called the Federally Qualified Health Center system,” Dougherty said. “There are several around. Actually, every county in Vermont has a federally qualified health center except Windham County.”

Before Dougherty arrived in 2022, Sanders got “some congressionally designated funds to build a federally qualified health center in Windham County. He wants a Federally Qualified Health center in every county in Vermont. So we’re embracing that.”

Hospitals cannot be federally qualified health centers, which provide primary care, dental care and outpatient mental health care.

“So the closest one in Vermont is in Springfield,” Dougherty said. “There’s also a close one in Massachusetts [in Greenfield]. We’re hoping one of them will actually work with us to build a federally qualified health center here and provide those three key things that we need desperately in this community.”

The beauty of the federally qualified health centers is that they focus on taking care of Medicaid patients and uninsured patients first and foremost.

“So everybody has access to primary care, dental care, and outpatient mental health services,” Dougherty said.

“We’re also working with the Brattleboro Retreat to provide the outpatient mental health services,” he continued. “Our hope is that maybe as soon as January, we will actually have a federally qualified health center here at Brattleboro. It may be on campus. It may be in three separate sites.”

No single ‘magic tactic’

In response to the potential of a significant federal cutback in Medicaid, the state has been looking for ways to enhance the Medicaid program, Dougherty said.

“Let’s give a little credit to the state,” Dougherty said. “The state is actually looking at ways of enhancing the Medicaid program, I think because of these concerns of what’s happening with federal dollars.”

The Green Mountain Care Board and the Agency of Human Services are exploring a hospital global budgeting payment for 2026, which will transition hospitals from fee-for-service to a fixed amount to cover a defined set of services. Dougherty said that Brattleboro Memorial Hospital is “evaluating this.”

“It may be this is a good way to approach Medicaid and to prepare us for the future of the way health care is going to be reimbursed,” he said.

“We met with them once to talk about their hospital global budgeting program for Medicaid. We have until October to volunteer to be in that program come Jan. 1. And we may very well want to do that,” said Dougherty, who called it a “win-win.”

“It would be good for the state because it gives them a very specific way of administering the Medicaid program. But it may also be good for us and our community, because it gives us sort of a fixed income for our Medicaid patients,” said Dougherty, adding that the program could become mandatory by 2030.

Dougherty said he also had “about 40 other tactics” he was exploring to cut costs and reduce his budget.

“I wish I could tell you there was one magic tactic that gets us right to where we want to be, but there isn’t,” he said. “So we’re trying everything. And some are small and some are large. Some have no impact on staff, basically, and some have.”

What Brattleboro Memorial Hospital desperately wants to do is avoid cutting any medical services.

“We don’t want that to happen,” Dougherty said.

According to Foster at the Green Mountain Care Board, there is enough money in the health care system to provide a high-caliber, high-quality system.

“The problem is that we have a system that doesn’t work well and doesn’t function well,” he said. “We don’t have many low-cost providers in the state, and we need to make sure that we have those available. Those are often small practices. They are primary care practices, independent practices, generally. Those are the most expensive places to provide care.

“Vermont, as compared to other states, has overwhelmingly concentrated our care at hospitals. And that’s not a recipe for sustainability.”

The state needs more telemedicine, Foster said. It needs to consolidate some services. It needs to reduce discretionary spending. It needs to encourage and support smaller, more affordable practices.

Closing Brattleboro Memorial Hospital ‘not an option’

Could the hospital go under?

“I dearly hope not,” Foster said. “There are some really good people there and some really good providers, and they’re really important to the community.”

Foster said that “a lot of Vermont’s challenges are things that we’ve seen across the country. There have been rural hospital closures by the hundreds across the nation. We’ve had no hospital closures in Vermont.”

“Rural hospital markets have been decimated across the country. In Vermont, we have not yet had that,” he continued. “A big part of it is a lot of people working really hard, but also the commercial market subsidizing prices.”

He added that “there’s always risk to any small rural hospital in America, and Vermont is certainly not immune to that, especially given the potential federal changes and the realities at Blue Cross Blue Shield, and with our people’s inability to pay more in health care costs.”

For Dougherty, closing Brattleboro Memorial Hospital is not an option.

“(The hospital) is fighting,” he said. “We actually do need to be a less expensive hospital than we are. And we are going to do everything necessary to keep this treasured resource in this community.”

Dougherty said that hospital leadership knows “that some of those things are going to be painful, and we’ve started on some of those things that are painful, like reductions in force. But I do believe there are some things that really are very much glimmers of hope.”

One glimmer of hope is new revenue enhancement, and Dougherty points to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital’s new, faster magnetic resonance imaging machine to replace a 17-year-old device that “was way beyond years of obsolescence.”

“We invested in that MRI because it generates a revenue for us,” he said. “This new MRI is a good thing for our community.”

“We are trying to think way out of the box and try and find other revenue streams,” Dougherty said. “There has to be hope.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Brattleboro Memorial Hospital braces for federal cuts to Medicaid.

A state trooper shot and killed a man Monday in Putney after reportedly seeing what he believed was a firearm in the man’s hand and after the man ignored police commands, according to the Vermont State Police. 

A later search of the man’s apartment, police said Tuesday, turned up no firearms. 

Scott Garvey, 55, who lived in the apartment at Putney Landing where the shooting occurred, died from gunshot wounds to his torso and left lower extremity, according to a state police press release Tuesday evening. 

Trooper Peter Romeo, who fired on Garvey, has been placed on paid relief-from-duty status, which is standard state police protocol following a shooting. 

Romeo works out of the state police barracks in Westminster, where he has been assigned since his graduation from the Vermont Police Academy in January 2023, according to the press release.   

Events leading to the shooting began around 11:20 p.m. Sunday, when police received a call from a person at the apartment reporting a “mental health concern,” the release stated. 

A mental health caseworker embedded with the state police “dealt with the concern over the phone, and troopers did not respond to the scene,” according to the release. 

At about 7:15 a.m. Monday, the release stated, police got another call coming from the apartment, followed at 11:15 a.m. by a report from another Putney Landing resident that Garvey was outside “exhibiting concerning behavior and making threatening” comments. 

Troopers went to the apartment along with the mental health caseworker. 

“Mr. Garvey returned to his apartment and barricaded himself inside while continuing to make threatening statements, including of self-harm,” the release stated. 

The caseworker and troopers tried to talk with Garvey to resolve the situation to no avail. The troopers then got a warrant to enter the apartment to charge him with criminal threatening and disorderly conduct, the release stated. 

“Upon entering the apartment at about 4:30 p.m., troopers encountered Mr. Garvey and reported that they saw an object in his hands that they believed to be a firearm,” according to the release. “Mr. Garvey did not respond to commands given by the troopers. Trooper Romeo fired his service weapon.”

State police did not say how many shots were fired. Garvey was pronounced dead at the scene. After the shooting, the release stated, a search of the apartment found no firearms inside. 

The Vermont Attorney General’s Office and Windham County State’s Attorney’s Office will be conducting independent reviews of Romeo’s use of force. 

The Windham & Windsor Housing Trust, owner and operator of the Putney Landing apartment complex, posted a statement Tuesday on Facebook.

“We are deeply saddened by the tragic events that took place yesterday at Putney Landing during an encounter between Vermont State Police and a resident experiencing a severe mental health crisis,” the post stated.

Despite “efforts to de-escalate and bring the situation to a peaceful resolution, the confrontation ended in the loss of a life — a heartbreaking outcome for everyone involved,” the posting added.

The post did not name the resident who died, but he was later identified Tuesday evening by state police as Garvey.

“Our shared responsibility is to care for one another and to build a stronger, more compassionate response to those in crisis — one that upholds the dignity and value of every person,” the post later noted. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont State Police trooper shoots and kills man in Putney reportedly amid threats .

Two weeks after the state confiscated 39 horses from a horse farm in Townshend, all the horses are stable, but some have a longer “road to recovery” than others, according to Jen Straub, executive director of Dorset Equine Rescue. 

The two horses with critical condition when seized from Friseians of Majesty are still in a veterinary hospital as of Wednesday — a gelding with severe dental issues due to lack of routine dental care and a mare with an acute hoof abscess, Straub said. 

The majority of horses are healing from some combination of lice, mites, roundworm infection and a skin fungus called rain rot. 

“That’s all just due to neglect, not getting proper grooming and bathing, not getting regular care,” Straub said.

After the fourth and largest seizure of horses from the Friesians of Majesty horse farm in two years, Windham County State’s Attorney Steven Brown said the ongoing animal cruelty investigation is a “fairly unique case.” 

The horse farm’s owner, Robert Labrie, pleaded not guilty to criminal charges of animal cruelty and violations of conditions of release on June 18. 

The state is exploring options including a permanent or temporary order barring Labrie from possessing horses, Brown said. The state attempted to request that Labrie turn over the horses still on his property to a third party as a condition of his release at an arraignment hearing, but that motion was denied by the judge due to lack of authority to issue the order, he said. 

The first seizure in July 2023 has been adjudicated, and those 13 horses have been forfeited to be rehomed, Brown said. The second forfeiture request by the state, after 20 horses were seized in September 2024, is also still pending. The state also seized two horses from the farm in June of 2024. In the second forfeiture case, the state filed 16 misdemeanor animal cruelty charges under Vermont’s animal cruelty statute related to the condition of the 20 horses.

The state will file another forfeiture order for the most recent seizure to begin the process of finding permanent homes for the 39 horses, according to Brown. He expressed gratitude for the rescue agencies that have assisted the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department and taken in horses.

Since the most recent seizure, 25 of the 39 horses have been relocated from their first stop at Dorset Equine Rescue to the Gentle Giants horse farm in Maryland. They are “visibly looking better in even just a week,” said Lorin Grey, the director of growth at Gentle Giants.

“They’re starting to gain weight,” Grey said. “They’re out on pasture and have access to hay, feed, grain, so they are all doing well and settling in, and we’re starting to address any specific medical issues.”

Grey said the organization was contacted by Vermont’s animal welfare partners for help because some stallions needed “specialized housing and individualized turnout,” a practice of allowing horses to graze in a pasture or paddock.

Gentle Giants horse farm is “one of the only rescues on the Eastern Seaboard that are equipped to house a large number of stallions and a large number of horses in general,” she said. 

The Maryland horse farm also took in seven stallions after the seizure from Friesians of Majesty in September 2024. Those horses have all now recovered, but Grey said they were “several hundred pounds underweight” and many had “ongoing, longtime skin issues that hadn’t been addressed.”

The Maine State Society for the Protection of Animals took in six horses on June 20 after they were originally transferred to Dorset Equine Rescue. Peg Keyser, the society’s advancement director, said the horses’ body condition scores were between 1 and 2 — the low end of the scale. Keyser said the horses’ feet and teeth were neglected and their skin was riddled with ticks and parasites, and in at least one case “raging dermatitis.”

The horses have already seen improvement since arriving and are going through veterinary evaluations and refeeding processes tailored to the horses’ individual challenges, Keyser said. But, the neglect and malnourishment the horses experienced for an unknown amount of time has caused compounded stress and chronic health conditions that will likely have lasting effects, she said. 

A more efficient and effective system

Rep. Chea Waters Evans, D-Charlotte, said the previous seizures at the Townshend horse farm, along with the death of goats within her district in 2023, drew attention to the shortcomings of the state’s animal welfare system.

Those two cases prompted Waters Evans to cosponsor H.626, which was signed into law in June 2024. The law created a Division of Animal Welfare, a new governmental arm tasked with creating a more efficient and effective animal welfare system, she said. 

“There are a lot of people who were trying to solve similar problems in a parallel fashion, instead of collaborating together,” Waters Evans said. “Hopefully if we have a more streamlined system, we’ll be able to stop some of these problems before they start.”

Lisa Milot, the state’s newly appointed division director, said she does not have a formal role in the active animal cruelty investigation, but is tasked with creating a comprehensive plan to improve the state’s animal welfare system in the coming months. 

Milot said Vermont has lacked uniformity and a clear process for law enforcement entities in different parts of the state. There is a need to strengthen and simplify the process of reporting, investigating and seeking recourse through the courts in animal cruelty cases, she said. 

“There’s no real consistency in how the cases are handled,” Milot said. “There’s some large cases that have come up in recent years, and (the state) wants both a better approach to investigating and prosecuting them, but also to, long term, preventing these sorts of cases.”

Milot said animal owners accused of animal cruelty are still allowed to own and breed animals while cases are pending because of the presumption of innocence unless proven guilty.

Along with a general backlog of cases in the Vermont courts since the Covid-19 pandemic, Milot said animal cruelty cases can take years to complete because crimes against humans are prioritized over property related crimes. 

Horses and other animals are considered by the state to be “special property,” so animal cruelty cases are litigated before crimes related to inanimate objects. Milot said the “biggest thing that would help with rescues, with the state expense on these cases is speeding up the rate at which the animal can be rehomed.”

Milot said there is no state-run impound center to house animals during animal cruelty cases in Vermont, and that would be very expensive to create. Partner rescue groups must foot the bill to house, feed, care and treat medical conditions of seized horses before they are forfeited and can be adopted, she said.

Milot said she has been reviewing the animal welfare laws in other states, such as legislation to expedite animal cruelty cases and reduce some of the cost burden on rescue agencies. Her goal is to “come up with a plan and procedures that can help alleviate those sorts of strains, but without causing extra strains on taxpayers,” she said.

Straub, of Dorset Rescue, said there has been productive collaboration between her rescue and the state investigators at the Fish & Wildlife Department and law enforcement. But, she said would like to see more attention and investment in the state’s animal welfare system overall.

“There’s a lack of resources for implementing the laws. There needs to be more people that have time to go do welfare checks and follow through on these neglect cases,” Straub said. “There are a lot of animals suffering across the state, and it’s not being dealt with as timely as it should be.”

The Fish & Wildlife Department, the Agency of Agriculture Food & Markets and the Vermont State Police all declined to comment due to the ongoing animal cruelty investigation. 

Labrie’s attorney also said she could not comment while the case is active, and Labrie did not respond to requests for comment.

Read the story on VTDigger here: 4th seizure of horses from Townshend farm highlights animal welfare system’s ongoing gaps.

A federal lawsuit filed on Sunday alleges that a mistake in a warrant caused the unconstitutional arrest of a pregnant Vermont woman who shared the same name as the suspect in a case involving a death from heroin overdose.

Court documents allege that on July 13, 2022, Alicia Kelley, the plaintiff in the case, was arrested at her home in front of her children and parents by Orleans County Sheriff Jennifer Harlow and a deputy, based on a warrant incorrectly filed by the defendant, Brattleboro Det. Lt. Greg Eaton.

Kelley “became distraught, panicked, and was brought to tears,” according to the lawsuit filed by her attorney, Brian Marsicovetere, in the U.S. District Court of Vermont on June 30. “Her parents and children were home and observed the arrest,” becoming “very upset.” 

Kelley was then held overnight in Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, Vermont on a $25,000 bond. The Orleans County Sheriff’s department then “posted a statement containing the details of the arrest on social media, which was viewed by members of (Kelley’s) community,” according to the lawsuit.

The circumstances leading to Kelley’s arrest began over four years earlier. 

On June 8, 2018, Brianna Radcliffe, 21, overdosed on heroin in the bathroom of a Dunkin’ Donuts in Brattleboro, dying a few days later in the hospital. 

Following Radcliffe’s death, Detective Greg Eaton began investigating the circumstances of her overdose. With the manager of the Dunkin’, Eaton reviewed the surveillance tapes of the heroin deal that would end Radcliffe’s life. According to court filing, the manager recognized the dealer in the footage as a former employee of his: Alicia Kelley.

On May 20, 2019, almost a year after Radcliffe’s death, Eaton applied for a warrant, charging Kelley with selling narcotics that resulted in death. 

But according to the lawsuit, Eaton allegedly identified the wrong Kelley in the warrant.

Court documents reveal that while the women share the same full name — Alicia Kelley — the two were born about half a year apart in 1988. The date of birth of the plaintiff is in the fall while the date of birth of the former Dunkin’ employee who allegedly sold the heroin is in the spring. 

When the Vermont Superior Court issued the warrant, plaintiff Kelley’s birth date was written on it, despite never having met Brianna Radcliffe, according to the complaint. 

In the complaint, her lawyer, Marsicovetere, alleges Eaton had access to information that would have clearly differentiated the women.

“No attempt was made to compare physical attributes based on Vermont DMV or other available state databases. The Defendant did not take any steps to confirm he correctly identified Alicia M. Kelley in the arrest warrant application,” court documents read.

Eaton, who is being represented by McNeil, Leddy & Sheahan, P.C. of Burlington, declined to comment on the allegations in the lawsuit.

At her arraignment, plaintiff Kelley pleaded not guilty. The judge reduced her bail to $10,000, which her parents paid with the help of a bondsman, according to the complaint. 

According to court documents, after the State of Vermont learned that the warrant contained the wrong birth date, the state “filed a motion in the Vermont Superior Court to vacate all of Plaintiff’s bail conditions,” and amended the warrant to contain the birth date for the Kelley who is actually suspected of plying Radcliffe with the fatal heroin dose. 

Plaintiff Kelley’s case against Eaton accuses him of unlawful seizure under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. She is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, as well as attorney’s fees. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Federal lawsuit alleges warrant error led to pregnant Vermont woman’s unconstitutional arrest.

A former employee is suing The Greenwood School in Putney for allegedly permitting sexual harassment and discrimination and breaching an implied contract. 

The trial date has been set for March 1, 2026.

A former administrative assistant for The Greenwood School alleged that the school’s administration failed to adequately address recurrent sexual harassment that she experienced from a student, according to the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court of Vermont by attorney Theodore Kramer in June 2024. 

The employee resigned from her post at The Greenwood School — a specialized boarding and day school, serving neurodivergent students from grades 6 to 12 — in January 2024 due to the “sexually hostile environment.”

The complaint describes a student repeatedly “inappropriately touching” the former employee as well as making comments, facial expressions and engaging in “other acts of a sexual nature” directed at the former employee between May and November 2023. 

When the former employee reported the first incident, in which the student pulled her toward him and touched her buttocks, the dean of students said that the student had “‘mommy issues’ and was looking for a connection,” the complaint states. 

The complaint goes on to describe several times when the student touched her breasts, buttocks and other parts of her body despite the former employee asking the student to stop, and after she reported the instances to the administration. 

The former assistant “specifically recalls the head of school telling her to ‘get over it’ and ‘nothing is ever solved by worrying about what has already happened’” after she wrote a letter to the administration about her concerns in November 2023, according to the complaint. 

The administration and faculty at the Greenwood School were allegedly aware that the student had a pattern of “inappropriately touching faculty members, students and parents of students,” according to the complaint.

The student was barred from the administrative building by the head of the middle school in September 2023 after the student engaged in “continued sexual assaults and harassment,” the complaint states. 

The former employee continued to bring her concerns to administrators after harassment occurred, but the school “took no action to investigate or correct the hostile work environment,” the complaint states. 

The lawsuit argues that the alleged hostile work environment interfered with the former employee’s ability to execute her work duties, negatively impacted her mental and physical wellbeing and led to her resignation. 

The complaint also asserts the school breached an implied contract established in the school handbook by “failing to uphold policies and procedures” and not safeguarding the former administrative assistant from the “many examples of harassment” that occured during her employment. 

The former employee is seeking redress in the form of monetary compensation and attorneys fees as well as any “further relief the Court deems proper” during the trial scheduled for next year. The Greenwood School Head of School did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The attorney for the former employee declined to comment while the case is pending in court.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Lawsuit accuses a Putney therapeutic school of creating hostile work environment.

This story by Robert F. Smith, with additional reporting by Jeff Potter was first published in The Commons on June 24.

WESTMINSTER — After completing its 25th school year of operation, the Compass School recently and abruptly announced that it will be permanently closing.

Though it had planned on operating for at least another year, financial difficulties the school had been facing for some time proved worse than expected.

Those lingering problems, combined with what its board president termed a “domino effect” of circumstances, prompted the school’s board of directors to unanimously vote to close the school immediately.

Debts of $250,000, declining enrollment, and the long-term impact of the Covid-19 pandemic were cited as the combination of reasons for the board’s decision.

Compass was founded in 1999 with the purpose of providing the region with an alternative to traditional education, particularly for middle-school-age children. As the years progressed, it added more grades until it served students in grades 7 to 12.

In an email sent June 9, Board Chair Christine Armiger and Co-heads of School Gabe Allen-Fahlander and Louise Hodson told families that “on Friday, June 6th, we learned that a key piece of our financial plan for next year has fallen through. Without it, there is no way for us to open the school for the 2025-26 school year.”

With “a heavy heart and deepest admiration for everyone at the Compass School,” Armiger, Allen-Fahlander and Hodson informed the community of the board’s decision.

The letter was sent out after the school year had wrapped up, with staff and students expecting the school to be operating for at least another full year ahead.

The building, at 7892 US-5, has been closed up since, and the school’s website has been scrubbed of almost all content and states, “Founded in 1999 by dedicated educators and parents, Compass has closed its doors after 26 years of innovative education.”

A domino effect

In its letter, the directors explained that throughout the last three months the board, staff and community came together and “worked incredibly hard to save the school, raising extensive funds and expanding board membership, as well as bringing in outside expertise as consultants and advisors.”

But the board said that “ultimately, these efforts could not overcome a financial deficit that made it impossible to offer another year of programming.”

Armiger spoke to The Commons on June 23, prefacing her remarks with her intention of being “respectful to parents, teachers, students, and alumni who worked overtime to do what they could to propel us forward” in their attempts to keep the Compass School alive.

She said the school had been struggling with a number of forces, including an overall decline of the population of school-age children of more than 25% between 2000 and today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In its annual 990 form filed with the IRS — analogous to a tax return for the nonprofit world — the school posted healthy yearly surpluses from 2011 to 2015. Starting in 2016, the filings show a number of years of losses even before the pandemic hit in 2020.

Meanwhile, the school “that thrived on its smallness” and not long ago had more than 70 students ended with approximately 50 students in its final year.

The school went public with its financial problems this past winter, sparking a series of fundraising efforts that raised at least $68,000 toward the $250,000 budget deficit, the Brattleboro Reformer reported in April.

Armiger said that between those fundraising successes and the school community envisioning a smaller and more sustainable program, things were looking up. In April, the school announced on an Instagram post that it would open for the next year.

Then came what she called “the domino effect.”

First, a new “wonderful and significant” donor, excited for a long-term relationship with the school, could not commit to a significant donation immediately, Armiger said.

“We still felt confident that a bridge loan we applied for could still get us through [in conjunction with] another outreach campaign to bring in support we’d need until the other money came in,” she said.

But then the bridge loan was denied, which Armiger called “the nail in the coffin.”

Looking back, she said that the overall environment for independent schools is “another tough reality.”

Armiger, a science instructor and director of environmental programs and sustainability at Vermont Academy in Saxtons River, said that “another tough reality is that it’s hard even for schools with significant endowments.” As a young school, Compass never had the opportunity to build wealth and resources, and the community itself is not a place where “you can wrangle up a few hundred thousand in a pinch.”

Instead, she said, the school “absolutely overextended itself with financial aid.”

Two other factors stressed the vulnerable school, Armiger noted. The first was the “declining ability for private-pay families to pay tuition” based on the skyrocketing costs that have hit every family budget hard in the years since the pandemic.

The second was the school’s reliance on tuition funds for students from towns that offer that option. Presuming that Gov. Phil Scott will sign into law the state education reform bill, passed by both the House and the Senate, new reforms and restrictions will curtail which towns can offer that option to its youth.

Heavy hearts

Compass held what has become its last graduation ceremony, for 14 students, on May 31. It ended the year with approximately 50 students and 12 staff.

The school, once described on its website as “the perfect place to get inspired, take risks, learn from mistakes, get invested in your education, and be surprised by what you can do,” prided itself in “developing strong thinkers, problem solvers, communicators, and collaborative workers with the ability to adapt to changing conditions.”

Westminster resident Charmion Handy, parent of a former Compass student, said the announcement was unexpected and came as a shock and that she was “saddened to hear of its closing.”

“Compass School taught our children how to be lifelong learners,” she said. “They provided a learning environment that was rich and diverse, balancing traditional studies with hands-on opportunities to explore topics of interest.”

Rick Gordon, one of the school’s founders, called Compass “a model for what is possible in education.”

Gordon served as the school’s longtime director and retired in 2020 after more than 20 years there.

“We were honored to attract extraordinary educators who had undying belief in every child and unparalleled dedication to supporting every student in their academic and personal growth,” he said. “It was the highlight of my career to be part of this incredible community.”

Molly Bruce Patterson, a board member, alum, and Bellows Falls resident, said, “It is hard to express how much Compass has shaped my life since graduating in 2004.”

Gus Shepard, an executive board member and a member of the first graduating class, said that “students often share how their lives were transformed by their Compass experience, and parents frequently express that Compass saved their child.”

Handy agreed. “Whether it was through Community Service Week, Project Week, or the various class trips throughout New England and abroad, students were exposed to a world beyond,” she said.

She noted that in addition to educating the students, Compass “had a unique way of including parents and families, by encouraging community service at the school, sharing knowledge to students in the classroom or at after-school activities or for the many parent-focused workshops.”

“I am so incredibly grateful that my children experienced this educational opportunity and have grown to be good people as a result of their Compass School experience,” she said.

Shepard said that many students who faced challenges in more traditional educational settings went on to achieve great success in college, careers, and communities. “Unfortunately, demographic shifts in the region led to a significant decline in student enrollment compared to when the school began,” he added.

Hodson, the co-head of school, was also the longest-serving teacher at Compass.

“I am heartbroken to close our doors,” she said. “I am saddened for the future students who will miss the opportunity to participate in our community. Thank you to all the teachers, students, and families who have worked to keep our doors open. We take immense pride in the educational experiences we have provided to so many learners.”

What’s next

Windham Northeast Supervisory Union Superintendent Andy Haas said that the closing of Compass “came as a shock to us.”

“Compass has been part of our community for many years, meeting the needs of students and families,” he said. “WNESU has enjoyed our relationship with Compass.”

He said that the district looks forward “to welcoming students to Bellows Falls Middle School and Bellows Falls Union High School. We have been communicating with families since the announcement and will continue to ensure the transition to our schools is as seamless as possible.”

Haas said that approximately 22 WNESU families are affected by the closing. Two of the students are middle schoolers, the rest are high schoolers.

Haas said he knows of three who have requested to attend Green Mountain Union High School in Chester, or Leland & Gray Union High School in Townshend.

As for BFUHS, Haas said that “we have already registered several students.”

As to what will happen with the school building and its 8.8-acre parcel if the school’s corporate entity dissolves, it must turn over remaining assets to another nonprofit once it has resolved its financial obligations.

The school’s bylaws stipulate that its assets must be directed towards meaningful educational endeavors. According to data from the town listers, the total assessed value of the land and building is $2,181,700.

A June 9 news release from the Compass board noted that, “proceeds from the sale of the building are expected to establish a foundation to support personalized learning and continue the kinds of educational experiences that have defined [the school].”

That degree of finality is tough for those who loved the school and worked to keep it alive.

“I love my work on the board at the Compass School — a school that’s so deeply embedded in the community,” Armiger said. “I love its origin story and think that against our better judgment we kept it going as long as we possibly could for the sheer love of it.”

Faculty, she said, “loved working at that school and couldn’t imagine working at another school because they loved working there so much.”

“I think there are still some of us who hold out hope or dream that a sustainable version of school could emerge,” Armiger said. “But it’s hard to imagine right now in this moment.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Westminster’s Compass School closes its doors after 25 years.

In the latest development in an ongoing animal cruelty investigation, the owner of the Friesians of Majesty horse farm was charged Tuesday with animal cruelty and violating conditions of release. Authorities seized more than three dozen horses from the property. 

Thirty-nine horses were removed from a private Townshend business as part of an investigation by the Fish & Wildlife Department Game Warden Service, Department of Public Safety’s Animal Welfare Division and Vermont State Police, Joshua Morse, a spokesperson for the Fish & Wildlife Department, confirmed to VTDigger in a statement.

“The 39 horses have been moved to a private partner that can provide adequate space and care,” the statement read. 

Friesians owner Robert Labrie faces a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a $2,000 fine under the animal cruelty charge. The charge for violating conditions of release could result in up to six months in prison and a $1,000 fine.

Jen Straub, executive director of Dorset Equine Rescue, said this was the fourth time she has assisted an investigation at Friesians of Majesty. The rescue has taken in 74 horses from the farm since the first seizure in 2023, she said. 

Straub said she has aided in animal welfare investigations numerous times over the years in Vermont and other states, but Tuesday’s operation was by far the most horses the organization has taken in one seizure. 

Approximately 25 horses remain on the farm, she said. 

Straub said the seized horses had various ailments, including emaciation, skin infections or other injuries, some that were left untreated. Two of the 39 horses needed to be hospitalized, she added.

According to a probable cause affidavit, Detective Sgt. David Taddei for the Department of Fish & Wildlife’s Warden Service wrote he visited the Townshend farm Tuesday after obtaining a warrant to investigate potential animal cruelty. 

State Veterinarian Kaitlynn Levine accompanied Taddei and identified horses that were underweight. The duo said they witnessed “unacceptable conditions for horses to be living in,” according to the affidavit. 

“They did not have access to shelter and there was no natural shelter,” the affidavit stated. “Their entire paddock was mud and horse feces, with the exception of a large rock in the upper area of the paddock, which all the horses were competing to stand on.”

Labrie was arrested Tuesday morning on an animal cruelty charge. Labrie was ordered to appear in court in Brattleboro the next day, and then he was released from the Westminster State Police Barracks on the condition that he not return to the farm until after the state had completed its investigation.

However, Labrie returned to the property Tuesday afternoon while the search was ongoing and was arrested a second time, according to a probable cause affidavit by Warden Noelle Kline. 

Labrie refused to sign citation documents as well as the bail and conditions of release orders after both arrests, according to court filings. 

Straub said some of the 39 horses will remain at the Dorset rescue, while others are set to go to rescue farms in Maine and Maryland while the case proceeds. 

“To absorb 39 horses when you already have a full rescue full of horses is really, really challenging,” Straub said. “We are really grateful that a couple of other rescues were able to step up and offer help to take in some of the horses, so once they’re medically sound and stable, we will be transferring some to them.”

Straub said a judge ordered the 13 horses seized in 2023 to be forfeited to Dorset Equine Rescue, and most have since been adopted. But the horses seized in 2024 from the Townshend farm have not been forfeited through the court system and are still under the rescue’s care.

Dorset Equine Rescue is tasked with covering all medical bills, transportation, food and staff to care for the horses because neither the state nor federal government provide funding for animal welfare organizations in Vermont, she said.

Straub said she purchased a 178-acre property in Rupert after a fundraiser last year. She set up temporary fencing and structures on the property for the influx of horses from the Townshend farm. Straub plans to launch a fundraiser to build permanent structures to expand the rescue’s capacity and better meet the high need to care for rescued horses.

“We get asked to take horses every single day, whether it’s from a neglect case or the owner surrenders (because) they can’t afford the horses,” Straub said. “The need is huge.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect which state departments are investigating the Friesians of Majesty horse farm.

Read the story on VTDigger here: 39 horses seized from Townshend farm in latest animal cruelty investigation.

BRATTLEBORO — Brattleboro Memorial Hospital has cut six administrative posts as it seeks $4 million in reductions and new revenue to balance its $119 million annual budget.

“Unfortunately, creating financial stability at times requires a reduction in force,” hospital President Christopher Dougherty said in an interview Thursday.

The day before, the hospital let go of its director of radiology, senior director of revenue cycle, data scientist, outpatient specialty practice manager and two executive assistants.

“They’re all administrative positions,” Dougherty said of the layoffs at one of Brattleboro’s three largest employers. “None of these are patient-facing positions.”

The hospital announced last month it was exploring 40 “strategies” to save or earn money by the end of its fiscal year Sept. 30. At the time, it listed options ranging from capitalizing on services such as its new MRI machine to continuing a hiring freeze that began April 1, to, at last resort, laying off some of its 520 staffers.

“We believe that we have some tremendous opportunities in enhancing our financial standing,” Dougherty said Thursday without elaborating.

But the hospital president couldn’t rule out more staff cuts.

“Our hopes are that we can avoid these reductions in force, but we certainly can’t guarantee that,” he said.

Brattleboro is relatively small among Vermont’s 14 community hospitals — it ranks eighth in the state for net patient revenue. Like the other hospitals, it is reliant on government reimbursement for Medicaid patients with limited incomes and Medicare patients age 65 or older. Both programs offer lower reimbursements than commercial insurance.

Last fall, the hospital asked the state’s Green Mountain Care Board, a key health system regulator, for a 4.7% increase in what it charges patients with commercial insurance. But the board instead capped any rise to no more than 3.4%, noting Brattleboro instead should reduce “system inefficiencies.”

“We did see an opportunity with some administrative positions to get our staffing in alignment with national benchmarks,” Dougherty said Thursday. “Six probably doesn’t sound like a lot, but they are six members of our community.”

Brattleboro so far is the only Vermont hospital to announce staff cuts this year, but it isn’t alone in wrestling with what the Green Mountain Care Board has called “a health care affordability crisis.”

“We’re committed to doing everything possible to create a sustainable future for the hospital,” Dougherty said. “I do think there’s hope that we are making progress in addressing our financial challenges, and we do have some opportunities to continue to accelerate that, short of reductions in force.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Brattleboro hospital cuts 6 administrative posts in effort to balance budget.

This story by Joyce Marcel was first published in The Commons on June 10.

BRATTLEBORO — The MicroMoo bus service is being discontinued by Southeast Vermont Transit, which runs the Holstein-decorated MOOver buses, leaving many people unable to get to and from work during hours when regular buses do not operate.

The MicroMoo bus, launched as a pilot project in April 2024, was running weekdays from 5 to 11 p.m. as an on-demand service as opposed to a fixed route, so that riders could go directly from one point to another within the town.

Its last run is scheduled for June 13. None of the other, more traditional MOOver routes are affected by the decision.

The service did not attract the ridership it anticipated, the service’s Chief Executive Officer Randy Schoonmaker told The Commons in May.

On average, 18 riders used the service each day — 64% less than the projected number of 50, according to a Southeast Vermont Transit presentation at a public hearing about the discontinuation in Brattleboro on May 12.

The total cost of running the service for a year was approximately $180,000, according to state Sen. Wendy Harrison, D-Windham, who has taken the issue under her wing.

Originally supported for its launch by the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation via a grant from the Northern Borders Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act Dislocated Worker National Reserve Demonstration program, and later with funds from the Thompson Trust and the Agency of Transportation, the service cost $54 per rider, exceeding the state’s limit of $50.

Of that cost, $24,000 was contributed by the town’s Human Services Committee, which made it clear at the time that the funding of the local match would be a one-year-only commitment.

But even so, the state Agency of Transportation, which uses federal funding for the buses, has been facing a $1.5 million shortfall and thus required the seven public transit companies that provide bus services to reduce their budgets.

In the end, the Southeast Vermont Transit board voted to cut the Brattleboro MicroMoo in March.

“We’ve gone from an $18 million budget when I was here 15 years ago, to $53 million,” Ross MacDonald, the Agency of Transportation’s public transit program manager, told The Commons in May. “We know that there’s a lot of service gaps out there. Right now we’re working with all the providers to try and find some level of cost savings so that we can make the 2026 budget work.

“We were hoping, when we put the numbers together last year, that the cost curve would be bending downward. But it actually came up a little bit,” MacDonald said. “So we knew we’d have to make some cuts to make budget. We’re hoping not to make any more cuts, but right now, the cuts that we’ve made are based on general performance and not entirely because of budget restraints.”

Harrison was hoping the town might pick up the bill for the next two years, but this was a tight year for budgeting in Brattleboro and funding the MicroMoo was not high on anyone’s list of priorities.

“It didn’t have enough ridership right now,” Harrison said. “But it usually takes two or three years for ridership to develop.”

‘And now it’s going away’

For the riders who did use it, the service will be sorely missed.

At the public hearing, Micah Ranquist told Southeast Vermont Transit leadership, state officials, and regional planners that he had been using “all the different bus system things” since approximately 2010.

“And this is the first glimmer of hope and a big change, and now it’s going away,” said Ranquist, who is blind and spoke of the potential of the MicroMoo to restore a degree of independence and dignity.

“I heard from one woman who works as a nighttime janitor who took the MicroMoo and now will have to walk miles just to get to work,” Harrison said. “I talked to another person who cannot drive because she has epilepsy. She depended on the bus.

“For people who can’t drive, not having public transportation in the evening essentially keeps them from going to a restaurant or a movie. And businesses benefit from their employees having transportation to night-shift jobs. We need to get the Moover board to support it again.”

One rider, Marie-Claire Rose, circulated a petition to keep the MicroMoo van on the road. She garnered 411 signatures.

“I am frustrated that the amount of public interest you were able to show was not enough to make the change at this time,” Harrison wrote to Rose after the final closing was announced. “I’ll keep looking for ways to extend or resume the service.”

Harrison chaired the public hearing on May 12, where Ranquist and other riders spoke about their need for the service.

“There was a good turnout, and the riders explain how important it is in their own words,” Harrison wrote to the Selectboard. “I also understand that the service is also used by kids staying after 5 p.m. at the Boys and Girls Club and by refugees residing at SIT.”

Public transportation is limited in the Brattleboro area, and the loss of the MicroMoo puts many people at a disadvantage. And those who developed and championed the service acknowledge that the service deserved more time to find its user base. Several users also voiced frustrations about hiccups and frustrations with the mobile app that the service required.

“Being in this situation reminds us why we need to avoid potentially starting up services that we cannot sustain,” MacDonald told the participants at the public hearing.

“There is certainly a place for microtransit in Brattleboro,” said Harrison, who sees the service as “beneficial to connect with Amtrak as well as the work rides and social connection that the existing service provides.”

“I have not been able to find an alternative source of funding but will continue my pursuit,” she said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: MicroMoo transit service in Brattleboro is set to end June 13.

BRATTLEBORO — Two months after rejecting a municipal budget for the first time in town history, residents have finally agreed on a 2025-26 spending plan — but not before trying two more times to amend it.

“I don’t think anyone’s thrilled with it,” resident Tom Franks said at a special Town Meeting that approved a $24.9 million budget Tuesday night. But after months of setbacks and surprises, Franks told more than 100 attendees at Brattleboro Union High School, “We need to pass it as is and move on.”

Residents defeated an initial $25 million plan in March, telling the town selectboard its proposed 12.1% tax increase for the fiscal year starting July 1 was too high.

Local leaders went back to the drawing board, only to discover their budget underestimated contracted expenses such as payroll taxes, retirement contributions and overtime. That forced them to raise the bottom line by $426,732 before cutting a half-million dollars, resulting in a revised proposal about $200,000 lower than the original.

Residents wrestled for two hours Tuesday over the latest plan, which will still require a double-digit percentage tax hike of 10.8%.

The meeting began with a call to add $43,045 to restore a municipal sustainability coordinator job to full time instead of part time. Supporters expressed hope that an employee working more hours could generate more grant money, while opponents noted the need to reduce the budget.

“The taxpayers are screaming and they want you to listen,” resident Dick DeGray said against raising the total, even if only by a small sum.

After 45 minutes of debate, residents defeated the request in a 71-53 vote. Residents then considered a call to cut the plan by almost $1 million, which would limit spending to 4% over the current budget.

“There needs to be some brakes on the system,” resident Robert Oeser said.

But townspeople overwhelmingly defeated a 4% limit in a voice vote before finally approving the selectboard’s latest plan by a 110-4 margin.

Tuesday’s endorsement came six months after local leaders learned that continuing to fund all current services amid rising staff counts and trash disposal costs would trigger a 22% tax increase as of July 1. The selectboard voted this winter to retain all personnel and instead decrease or defer other spending, only for residents to reject the plan in March and call for revisions.

Local leaders found savings by keeping several empty posts vacant, including assistant town manager and information technology coordinator.

The selectboard — anticipating fire department overtime could rise to up to $700,000 or more annually because of recurring vacancies and contract requirements — added three more firefighters in hopes their regular salaries would cost less than paying existing personnel to work higher-priced extra hours.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Brattleboro approves $24.9M town budget after months of setbacks.

BRATTLEBORO — Brattleboro Memorial Hospital is seeking $4 million in expense reductions and new revenue in the next four months to balance its $119 million annual budget.

“Like rural hospitals here in Vermont and across the nation, BMH faces significant financial challenges that have been imposed on us in large measure by both the state and federal governments,” President Christopher Dougherty wrote to the hospital’s 150 community corporators in an email over the Memorial Day weekend.

The hospital is exploring 40 “strategies” to save or earn money between now and the end of its fiscal year on Sept. 30, Dougherty said Tuesday. The list ranges from drawing more revenue through services such as a new MRI machine to reducing expenses through a hiring freeze that began April 1.

Laying off some of the hospital’s 520 staffers would be a last resort, Dougherty said.

“It is absolutely a possibility, but it is at the end of the line of things that we would pursue,” he said of personnel cuts at one of Brattleboro’s three largest employers.

The hospital received budget approval from the state’s Green Mountain Care Board last fall, only to now see diminishing results from the $600,000 a month it pays in Vermont health care provider taxes to help finance Medicaid expenditures for people with limited incomes. 

“While part of that money comes back to us to help offset uncompensated care, the state recently reduced the percentage of annual return to less than 10 percent,” Dougherty wrote in his email.

The hospital president said reimbursements for professional services from the 65-and-up Medicare insurance program have declined by almost 3% annually. He also noted the state rejected a request for a 4.7% increase in its commercial insurance rate.

Last fall, the Green Mountain Care Board, a key statewide health care regulator, required 10 out of Vermont’s 14 hospitals to reduce their requested increases in commercial rates to 3.4% or less.

In its decision on the Brattleboro request, the board wrote that “the commercial market in Vermont cannot afford the current cost of care,” saying “for commercial rate increases to slow, our statewide health system needs to curb spending.” 

The board repeated a similar argument in decisions for other hospitals. In particular, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont, which covers roughly one-third of all Vermonters, is facing financial difficulties due to the increasing cost of care.

The board added that Brattleboro’s low Medicare payment-to-cost ratio, clinical productivity data and higher-than-average wait times “indicate system inefficiencies.”

“It is appropriate for the hospital to focus on managing expenses and reducing inefficiencies to obtain a positive margin,” the board’s decision read. 

The hospital is now working on a “robust combination of expense reductions and revenue generating tactics,” Dougherty wrote before ending his email with a link to “donate now.”

Brattleboro is just one of many hospitals in Vermont wrestling with what the Green Mountain Care Board has called “a health care affordability crisis.”

“It’s estimated that as many as 753 small rural hospitals like us are at risk of closing across the United States,” Dougherty said Tuesday. “I hate to say we’re one of those 753, but we’re not going to let that happen.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Brattleboro hospital eyes $4M in cuts, new revenue to balance budget.

MARLBORO — As a longtime volunteer and chair of the town’s new cemetery commission, Marcia Hamilton annually prepares for Memorial Day by helping place American flags at the graves of local soldiers. This year, that tradition hit especially close to home with the latest addition to the list: The 102-year-old World War II hero she knew as Dad.

Richard Henry Hamilton was born to nearby Brattleboro farmers on Sept. 28, 1922. The family didn’t plug into electricity until after he graduated from high school in 1940, which is why all were huddled around a battery-powered radio when President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for war after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

“Listening to that, we didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was,” Richard recalled in a 2015 National WWII Museum interview, 

Drafted in 1942, the young Vermonter joined the Army Air Corps. He was serving as a radio operator and gunner on a B-17 bomber named “Destiny’s Child” when it flew over Germany on July 20, 1944.

“When dots were spotted way back, we assumed that was our escort,” Richard said.

Instead, the speeding specks were 60 enemy fighters that shot a wing off his plane. Richard saw bullets and a resulting blaze kill four crewmen before he and four others parachuted down 18,000 feet. Separated from his fellow soldiers, he soon found himself in a wheat field.

“The whole village seemed to turn out — with their clubs and pitchforks,” he recalled in a 2008 Library of Congress interview. “I don’t speak German, but I was introduced to it very suddenly.” 

Richard landed in the Stalag Luft IV prisoner-of-war camp. Jailed for 10 months, he was forced out on Feb. 6, 1945, for a multiweek death march.

“Day after day we were just on the road,” he said. “There was no destination.”

It instead led to dysentery, frostbite, blisters, body lice and jaundice. 

“My feet were black and blue and infected,” he said of his 76th day. “I came to a decision that I wasn’t going to go anymore.”

Miraculously, that’s when two Allied soldiers liberated him on April 24, 1945.

“When we saw the Statue of Liberty, I could just sense how those immigrants placed all their hopes and dreams in that,” he said of his return home.

Back in Vermont, Richard married his sweetheart Joyce White and moved to Marlboro, a southeastern Vermont town known for its former namesake college and longtime music festival. There, they acquired the Skyline restaurant, which the couple ran atop Hogback Mountain until retiring almost 50 years later in 1994.

Ever busy, Richard also served on the town select and school boards and as a constable, tax collector and justice of the peace. He wound the clock in the Meeting House steeple until his hip was replaced at age 90. He commanded the Vermont chapter of American Ex-Prisoners of War, and after drawing faith by memorizing Psalm 91 during his capture (its line “He is my refuge and my fortress” appears on his gravestone), he helped Gideons International distribute Bibles to hotels, schools and prisons.

Richard died at home on Feb. 19 at age 102, leaving four daughters, seven grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

“He was still active” attending men’s breakfasts, senior lunches and veterans’ dinners, his obituary said.

Marlboro residents were still thinking about him two weeks later when they voted to create a local cemetery commission.

According to state law, municipal gravesites are the responsibility of a town selectboard or city council unless a community “votes to place its public burial grounds under the charge of cemetery commissioners.”

Marlboro approved Vermont’s newest such commission in a 308-22 vote March 4, electing Marcia Hamilton and fellow volunteers Hollis Burbank-Hammarlund and Sally White to its three seats. They’re now working on spring cleanup, summer mowing, year-round green options and “a user-friendly flowchart to help the public navigate the burial process,” according to meeting minutes.

“One thing we plan to do is create a policy to standardize the care each cemetery gets,” Marcia said of the group, which has a $16,200 annual budget. “We’re trying to show that a commission is a good idea by not having a spurt of expenditures. It’s not going to cost any more money than it ever has.”

Marcia and her family received help at her father’s graveside service May 14 at King Cemetery. More than 200 friends, neighbors, veterans and first responders assisted with a 21-gun salute, the playing of taps and a U.S. Air Force flyover.

Shortly after, Marcia followed in the footsteps of her late mother by gathering three generations of her family to place American flags at the burial plots of local soldiers. She started with her father and went as far back as Revolutionary War militiaman Elijah Bruce, who is believed to have fought at the Battle of Bennington in 1777 before dying from smallpox in 1835.

Each stone, she knows, has its own story.

Read the story on VTDigger here: A Vermont WWII veteran survived a death march. 80 years later, his hometown is saying goodbye..

The federal government has ended a settlement — which was intended to address and prevent future cases of racial harassment at Twin Valley School District — just over a year early, according to a letter the U.S. Department of Justice sent to the supervisory union last week. 

The department pointed to the school district’s compliance with the settlement terms by improving policies and practices. But a leader of the Vermont Human Rights Commission expressed concerns about the decision’s potential connection to the dismantling of civil rights enforcement under the Trump administration.

The settlement in 2023 between the Twin Valley School District and the U.S. Department of Justice stems from a 2021 complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont to the Vermont Human Right Commission on behalf of a student who formerly attended Twin Valley Middle High School, referred to as a C.B. 

Under the settlement, the department required the district to assess all relevant policies and procedures, conduct annual school culture assessments, implement training and professional development for school staff, and continue to report relevant information to the department. The agreement started in March 2023, and monitoring was set to continue for three years until July 2026, with an additional 90 days to raise remaining concerns, under the terms. 

According to the complaint, C.B., the only Black student in the school at the time, faced severe and consistent racially motivated bullying and harassment from fellow students, which school administrators failed to properly respond to. The student developed depression and anxiety, her grades dropped, she withdrew from school sport activities and eventually transferred schools weeks before the school year ended. 

The federal Department of Justice found in its investigations that the district was aware of and did not adequately respond to individual instances of harassment and to the “hostile educational environment” at Twin Valley Middle-High School, located in the town of Whitingham in Windham County.

In the letter to Superintendent Bill Bazyk on May 6, Jonathan Newton, a deputy chief with the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and Natacha Lam, an attorney with the division, wrote to notify the district that the three-year agreement would be concluded early. 

The department’s decision to close the agreement was due to the district “improving its response to and investigation of complaints of discrimination, conducting thorough assessments of the school’s educational environment, and taking responsive action reasonably designed to remedy the harm caused and prevent reoccurrence.”

“The District’s proactive and substantial commitment to this endeavor has led to significant improvement in the District’s processes and practices,” according to the letter. “The United States is therefore concluding its formal monitoring of the Agreement and considers this matter fully resolved.”

In a statement provided to VTDigger, Lia Ernst, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, wrote that the 2023 settlement between the school district and the department was “aimed at systemic, forward-looking change.” 

The Vermont Human Rights Commission facilitated a subsequent settlement between the former student and district in 2024, in which the district was required to release a public statement to address the harm experienced by the student and the insufficient response of administrators. The student and district also exchanged letters on the harm of the incidents and the district paid the student an undisclosed sum, under the terms of the agreement. 

The 2024 settlement by the Vermont Human Rights Commision, initiated by the complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2021, was intended to “acknowledge and redress the harms our client experienced because of that harassment and hostile educational environment,” Ernst wrote.

“We hope that, as a result of these two settlements, current Twin Valley students do not have to go through what our client endured,” Ernst wrote in the statement. 

‘A dark cloud’

Bazyk, superintendent of the Windham Southwest Supervisory Union which oversees Twin Valley School District, started his role in July 2024 and said he could not comment on the 2021 complaint directly.

But Bazyk said the school district worked with the U.S. Department of Justice to train teachers and administrators and establish processes to ensure the state’s hazing, harassment, and bullying policies and procedures, as well as federal Title IV reporting processes, would be followed. 

The school district also worked to build more robust reporting options for students experiencing harassment and developed a diversity, equity and inclusion-based curriculum for students throughout the entire district, Bazyk said.

The district also brought in diversity, equity and inclusion consultants and hired a director of diversity, equity and inclusion, but the staff member left the district in summer 2024, and the role has not been refilled, Bazyk said. 

He said the open case was “obviously a dark cloud” over the Twin Valley Middle High School. The district is more equipped to properly respond to cases in the future and plans to continue to incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion practices in the district, Bazyk said. 

Bazyk said he thought the district had earned the Department of Justice’s trust that the district would continue these efforts, and “that’s probably why they ended it early,” he said.

‘Premature conclusion’

Big Hartman, executive director and general counsel for the Vermont Human Rights Commission, said they were disappointed by the early conclusion of the U.S. Department of Justice settlement because “there’s always more you can do to create a more welcoming environment for all students.” 

The commission did not impose additional measures in the 2024 settlement because the U.S. Department of Justice settlement met the commission’s standards for long-term monitoring to avert future harassment cases, they said.

Hartman said the settlement’s early end could be related to the dismantling of civil rights enforcement under the Trump administration. Hartman said the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights satellite locations have been shuttered, and a swath of staff have been fired under the current administration, weakening the federal office’s ability to investigate discrimination in schools, according to reporting from ProPublica. 

“The premature conclusion of this settlement is very reflective of a national shift in civil rights enforcement priorities that we’re seeing across the country,” they said. “This shift is a signal to us that we can no longer rely on the federal government to enforce our civil rights protections, especially as they apply for people of color, trans people and individuals with disabilities.”

Amid these national changes, Hartman said state level civil rights enforcement is now the “only line of defense.” But, Hartman said Vermont’s civil rights enforcement entity — the commission — is severely understaffed and there is a reported backlog of complaints to the commission from recent years, including a rise in racial harassment cases in schools around the state.

“We are seeing a worsening trend of harassment in schools based on race, especially in the past year or two,” Hartman said. “That is very concerning to us, and we know that enforcement, through agencies like ours, is really crucial to trying to remedy the harm and trying to prevent future incidents of discrimination.”

Wichie Artu, president of the Windham County NAACP said students who are Black, Indigenous or people of color and their parents consistently report bullying and harassment at schools around the region. He said many students and parents do not understand how to file a complaint, resulting in many being dropped. 

The Windham County NAACP works with families to guide them through the reporting process and has encouraged the development of coalitions and support networks of peers, staff and family because “this is a ‘it takes a village’ kind of problem,” Artu said. 

Artu said he could not comment on the changes at the Twin Valley School District. However, he said he has observed generally in his work that school leaders often enact well-intentioned reforms of school policies and curriculum but fail to make a meaningful impact on school culture if they do not center BIPOC student voices in those changes.

Artu said the Windham County branch of the NAACP is planning to reach out to the district to learn about the initiatives implemented to improve school culture, and said he hopes the group can work in “solidarity with these efforts.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: US Department of Justice ends 3-year racial discrimination settlement early at Twin Valley Middle-High School.

Most matriarchs observe Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May. But Guilford great-great-grandmother Shirley Squires has reason to wait until the AIDS Project of Southern Vermont’s annual Walk for Life fundraiser later this month.

The 94-year-old didn’t know much about the human immunodeficiency virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome when it struck her son, former state Rep. Ronald Squires, D-Guilford, some four decades ago.

The lawmaker was the first in the Vermont Legislature to announce his homosexuality, doing so in the spring of 1992 to help pass a statute prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation.

“This bill is not about special privileges,” the representative told colleagues on the House floor, noting the legislation instead would give him and his peers “the same rights that you all have.”

Nine months later on Jan. 8, 1993, the 41-year-old was hospitalized for AIDS-related viral meningitis when switchboard operators patched through a call from then President-elect Bill Clinton.

“They thought it was a hoax,” his mother recently remembered. “I was dumbfounded.”

Within the next hour, the legislator, taking his last breath, became the first Vermont public figure to lose his life to AIDS, the Associated Press reported nationwide.

“Just before he died,” his mother recalled, “he said he didn’t know what he would do without the AIDS Project.”

Shirley Squires knew little about the Brattleboro-based nonprofit, one of the state’s three AIDS service organizations — along with Vermont CARES and the Upper Valley’s HIV/HCV Resource Center — that provide support to people with HIV as well as community prevention and education programs.

Squires nonetheless collected $1,000 from family members and friends for the organization’s 1993 Walk for Life, not knowing how far that first step would take her.

When AIDS was initially identified in the 1980s, a diagnosis was a certain death sentence. The advent of testing and treatment in subsequent decades is now helping some 750 Vermonters live with the virus, according to the state Department of Health. But such advances have left succeeding generations less concerned and, as a result, less conscientious of a disease that still must be managed by ever-continuing and costly medications.

And so the great-great-grandmother (yes, she has children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, although she admits to losing count of how many) hasn’t stopped generating money and awareness.

Squires, yet to miss a year of fundraising, reported a cumulative total of $52,000 upon her 10th anniversary walk in 2003, $235,000 upon her 20th in 2013 and $456,118 upon her 30th in 2023. By the start of 2025, her lifetime haul was up to $478,007 — just $21,993 shy of a half-million dollars. 

Anticipating her annual handwriting of solicitation letters to 500 regular contributors, Squires had a sure-fire pitch: If she can raise just $104 more than the $21,889 she reaped last year, she’ll hit the $500,000 milestone. 

But that isn’t what the matriarch penned to her mailing list that ranges from past and present state leaders to locals who visit her home at Christmastime to view her collection of more than 1,000 Nativity sets.

“I am writing on behalf of Shirley, who recently broke her shoulder and is unable to write her usual personalized note,” someone else printed.

Even so, Squires and the staff of the AIDS Project are forging forward.

“Every single dollar Shirley brings in could potentially be replacing a chunk of funding that we might be losing,” said Samba Diallo, the service organization’s executive director.

The AIDS Project, whose nine staffers serve 77 clients in Bennington and Windham counties, operates on an annual budget of about $600,000. Nearly 85% of that comes from federal and state funding, with the remaining 15% covered by local and private sources.

Talk of government cuts is scaring the nonprofit, which already has seen financial aid shift from rural areas with fewer people and lower perceived risk to urban centers with larger populations.

“There are so many challenges, but money is the biggest,” Diallo said. “How do we make sure we have stable funding?”

The AIDS Project will start by holding its 38th annual Walk for Life on May 31 at 10 a.m. at Brattleboro’s Centre Congregational Church.

Squires hopes people will contribute whatever they can.

“I want to try to write everyone to thank them,” said the matriarch, who notes she no longer has to confine her shoulder to a sling.

Diallo, for his part, is drafting his own wish list. Top on it: “We just need more Shirleys.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: This 94-year-old Vermonter is the great-great-grandmother of all fundraisers.

BRATTLEBORO — Six weeks after residents defeated a forthcoming municipal budget for the first time in town history, local leaders are set to present a new proposal to a special Town Meeting this month.

“When I run into anybody, they will say three things every time,” selectboard member Oscar Heller said Thursday at the last of eight budget-revision sessions. “They will say, ‘I don’t envy your job.’ Then they will say, ‘You’ve got to bring the tax rate down.’ And then they will say, ‘Here are the two, three, four things that I’m telling you that you can’t change.’ And that list of things is different for every person.”

Supporters note the plan set for consideration May 27 is down some $200,000 from the original $25 million figure. Opponents counter the resulting taxes remain up by double digits, from a rejected 12.1% to a revised 10.8%. And everyone else is questioning whether any budget will be approved before the start of the fiscal year July 1.

“A lot of the people who I’ve talked to would like to have seen a broader reduction in personnel across departments,” selectboard member Isaac Evans-Frantz said at Thursday’s session.

Instead, local leaders have retained all currently staffed positions and found savings by not filling several empty posts, including those of assistant town manager and information technology coordinator.

In the most unusual action, the selectboard — anticipating fire department overtime could rise to up to $700,000 or more annually because of recurring vacancies and contract requirements — voted to hire three more firefighters in hopes their regular salaries would cost less than paying existing personnel to work extra hours at a higher rate.

When local leaders began drafting a 2025-26 budget last fall, they learned that continuing to fund all current services amid rising staff counts and trash disposal costs would spark a 22% tax increase.

The selectboard went on to vote this winter to retain all personnel and instead decrease or defer other spending, only to see Town Meeting attendees in March defeat the proposal and its 12.1% tax hike.

Revising the budget this spring, officials discovered the rejected plan underestimated such contracted expenses as payroll taxes, retirement contributions and overtime, forcing them to raise the bottom line by $426,732 even before they started cutting.

A half-million dollars in reductions later, the selectboard’s new proposal already has sparked public friction.

Board chair Elizabeth McLoughlin opened the last budget-revision session by apologizing for earlier cutting off a local teenager voicing opposition to any loss of library hours. But two hours later, McLoughlin shouted and sounded her gavel at resident William Kraham when he wanted to speak about the cost of emergency medical services.

Kraham has long advocated for the town’s previous provider, Rescue Inc., which he credits with saving his life after sudden cardiac arrest. But McLoughlin, who voted for a recent fire department takeover of ambulance services, said his comments weren’t germane and threatened to stop the session if he didn’t stop talking.

“I will not have this discussion,” McLoughlin told Kraham before noting she had the right as chair to “request law enforcement assistance in removing a disorderly person.”

Local leaders will explain the revised budget at an informational session on May 21 and seek approval of it at a special Town Meeting on May 27.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Brattleboro officials reduce defeated town budget, yet proposed taxes remain up by double digits.

Jim Dlugos has been appointed the fifth president of the Putney-based Landmark College, the first college in the nation specifically designed to serve neurodiverse students, the college announced on Monday. 

Dlugos was named interim president of Landmark College in July, after a decades-long career in postsecondary education, including an 11-year role as president of St. Joseph’s College in Maine. 

Dlugos said he welcomed the opportunity to help Landmark College during a transition period and now in a permanent capacity because the mission of the college aligned with his individualized, learner-centered approach to education.

Barbara Epifanio, the chair of Landmark College’s board of trustees, said in a written statement that the board realized during the search process that Dlugos had the “right vision and demeanor” for the position. 

“As we’ve gotten to know Jim as Interim President, and he’s gotten to know us, we came to realize there was an ideal fit for his experiences and the opportunities our institution presents,” Epifanio wrote. 

Landmark College, founded in 1985, offers six bachelor degree programs and five associate degree programs and serves approximately 500 students with dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism or executive function challenges.

With Dlugos at the helm for most of the past year, the college moved forward on several initiatives, such as adding three majors in history, health sciences and media arts production next fall, he said. 

“At a time when most news from colleges and universities is about closing programs or shutting programs down, the fact that Landmark is adding programs is a really positive sign about our future,” Dlugos said. 

In January, Landmark College was named the primary recipient of a federal National Science Foundation grant geared toward bolstering educational and professional opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math in the southern Vermont region. Dlugos said the grant is moving forward, and the college is in the hiring and strategic planning phase of implementing projects made possible by the grant. 

“It’ll allow us to develop infrastructure for research, and research is the backbone of emerging businesses,” Dlugos said. “It’s really about economic development and strengthening the economy in southern Vermont, and so it’s going to end up with tremendous benefits for everyone who lives in southern Vermont.”

Josh Moyse, associate professor of theater arts and the faculty senate chair, called Dlugos a “visionary and creative thinker” who engages in a holistic way with faculty to help steward the institution. The college was originally established as a certificate and tutoring program and began offering four-year degrees more than a decade ago, he said. 

“Our student profile has continued to evolve over these decades, and what that means is that we are often transitioning to new territory from within,” Moyse said. “Jim brings a wealth of experience in higher ed that is beyond Landmark and is able to see certain areas that we can simplify that may have become a little bit more cumbersome, which allows us to be more nimble as we move forward.”

Grace Nelson, the president of the Student Government Association, said Dlugos has maintained an open dialogue with students and considered student perspectives during his stint as interim president and that she is grateful that Dlugos will remain the leader of Landmark College.

“He’s done a lot of things that have improved some of my experiences with the school,” Nelson said. “With certain meetings, he’s changed some of the formats to make it more of an open conversation.”

Nelson also pointed to weekly emails Dlugos sends out about national affairs and the potential impacts for Landmark to engage students, faculty and staff. “It’s more easily accessible for us and puts it in context,” she said.

Last fall, the college acquired the defunct Windham College’s former gymnasium and field house building and is beginning renovations to transform the space into a “college community hub,” according to Dlugos.

“Part of my hope for Landmark over the next number of years is that we become clear in our advocacy, developing neuro-inclusive communities, and part of that is having neuro-inclusive spaces,” Dlugos said. “The renovations really are going to be aimed at creating spaces that are going to be the best possible for people to learn differently, and the reality is we all learn differently.” 

Along with creating inclusive learning and gathering areas, Dlugos said one of his goals as president is to develop a strategic plan in the coming year to foster ongoing engagement with the school’s neighbors and the broader community.

“We’re looking to really develop and strengthen our relationships with Putney and with the rest of Windham County,” Dlugos said. “I really want Landmark College to be seen as an anchor institution in Windham County, and so it’s important that we plan for the future, that we know what is important and on the mind of everyone in the area.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Landmark College selects interim leader as new president.

BRATTLEBORO — When March Town Meeting attendees rejected a $25 million municipal budget for the coming fiscal year, they returned it to local leaders for revision in hopes of lowering a 12% projected tax increase.

No one anticipated costs might instead climb higher.

Officials have discovered their original spending plan underestimated contracted expenses like payroll taxes, retirement contributions and overtime. With the addition of the omissions and other accounting adjustments, the base budget’s corrected total is $426,732 more than initially calculated, according to administrators and their updated spreadsheet.

As a result, the town selectboard will have to cut nearly a half-million dollars from the new number just to level down to the 12% tax hike defeated last month, leaders have determined.

“The budget news is really disappointing,” selectboard Chair Elizabeth McLoughlin said at the start of a special Thursday session on the topic.

Five and a half hours later, the board asked Town Manager John Potter to return this week with a plan to cut $500,000 in expenses for the fiscal year that starts July 1. That would allow leaders to present a revised proposal at a special Town Meeting on May 27 that’s lower than the original, if only by about $75,000.

“The numbers have been corrected and our task has gotten way more difficult,” selectboard Vice-Chair Oscar Heller said.

Heller, newly elected to the board, headed the town’s advisory Finance Committee this winter when it issued a rare public resolution questioning why local leaders, facing double-digit-percentage increases in staffing, health insurance and trash disposal costs, weren’t studying decreases in the biggest single source of spending: personnel.

“We recognize that the concept of staff cuts is painful,” the committee said in its statement, “but we believe that considering it is an essential part of the responsible management of the town.” 

The selectboard at the time — which lost three of its five members in March when the former chair didn’t run for reelection and two incumbents were defeated — chose not to reduce employees. On Thursday, continuing board member Peter Case, who has opposed layoffs, asked how the town would achieve $500,000 in savings.

Replied Potter: “It’s going to come from positions.”

And McLoughlin: “Nothing is off the table.”

The selectboard is scheduled to receive and review proposed reductions at a special session this Thursday. Leaders so far have chosen not to fill two open administrative jobs: assistant town manager and finance director. But they are considering the addition of three firefighters after determining that station overtime is so high — currently upward of $700,000 or more annually — that hiring help would be less expensive.

“I don’t see any way to reduce that number,” new Fire Chief Jay Symonds said of the overtime spurred by vacancies and contract requirements, “other than adding staff.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Brattleboro rejected a $25M municipal budget as too high. Now comes a $426,732 aftershock..

BRATTLEBORO — As local leaders race to revise a forthcoming municipal budget after a March Town Meeting defeat of a $25 million plan, they are split over how to decrease spending by July 1 to avoid a projected tax increase of 12%.

“I’m very optimistic that we can make cuts of a sufficient nature and add revenues of a sufficient nature so that we have a budget that is more structurally sound than the one that was rejected and everything’s hunky-dory,” Selectboard Chair Elizabeth McLoughlin said Thursday at the first of a month of special follow-up sessions.

But when three newly elected members to the five-person board introduced the idea of a municipal hiring freeze, they faced pushback from McLoughlin and Town Manager John Potter, the latter who said that only he should be making decisions about specific people and positions.

“I manage the staff,” Potter said.

The 2 1/2-hour session — part of a series to continue Tuesdays and Thursdays in April before a May or June revote — ended without a decision. Instead, a divide emerged between local leaders who drafted the defeated budget and fledgling board members who campaigned on the promise of fiscal change.

“The thing I want to do is economize and find ways to reduce the budget,” said Oscar Heller, a newcomer and board vice chair. “I’ve been told over and over again that doing it by attrition and by hiring freeze is the much-preferred way rather than considering actual reductions, so we have to be able to talk about that.”

Heller served this winter as chair of an advisory Town Meeting Finance Committee that issued a rare public resolution questioning why local leaders, facing double-digit increases in staffing, health insurance and trash disposal costs, weren’t studying decreases in the biggest single source of spending, personnel.

“We recognize that the concept of staff cuts is painful,” the resolution said, “but we believe that considering it is an essential part of the responsible management of the town.”

Now seeking to review employee numbers over the next several months, Heller proposed the hiring freeze.

“Unfilled positions are a rare opportunity to possibly decrease ongoing costs without firing somebody,” he said. “That doesn’t mean no position can be filled, it just means that filling an empty position becomes an intentional decision of the board.”

Heller noted that although the former selectboard voted for up to nine new police positions last fall — declaring a rise in crime an “emergency” and using $675,669 in unassigned general funds — the town still had at least one of those ancillary positions open and available for savings.

“I’m looking for ways to find small budget compromises in the face of what was already a really big quick increase for the department,” he said. 

But the town manager objected, saying that administrators were screening applicants for the support post.

“It’s very disruptive to the management of the town to be having conversations about individual staff positions,” Potter said.

Heller disagreed, noting it felt like “a bridge too far” to be told the board couldn’t discuss whether to fill open positions.

“I am out of fighting energy on this topic for tonight,” Heller went on to conclude, “but the energy will return tomorrow.”

Potter has opposed staff cuts for months, most recently in a memorandum in which he offered scenarios about what could happen as a result.

In one case, Potter said a cut of a finance department worker could mean “overworked staff miss a critical deadline for a scheduled debt payment, triggering penalties and damaging the town’s credit rating,” according to the memo. “Residents are left paying more in taxes to cover the financial mismanagement.”

In a second example, a cut of a human resources employee could mean “job postings for critical roles were delayed for months.” the memo said. “Instead of saving money, the cuts created a staffing crisis, leaving emergency services stretched thin, road maintenance delayed, and essential town resources overwhelmed.”

In a third, a cut of a clerical worker to support town boards and committees could mean “meetings become disorganized, with missing agendas, delayed minutes, warning and procedural errors,” the memo said. “Instead of a smoothly run government, Brattleboro becomes bogged down in inefficiency and confusion.”

Many locals have complained about the memo, with resident Eric Caron noting at one meeting that such “doomsday things” are “not professional, those are threats.” The local website ibrattleboro.com, for its part, commented through a column headlined, “Town of Brattleboro Budget-Cutting Scenarios Win Award for Short Fiction.”

“A drop in the tax rate increase,” ibrattleboro.com co-founder Christopher Grotke countered in his own scenario, “made the taxpayers of Brattleboro very happy and reinvigorated their trust in a lean, highly-effective municipal government.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Brattleboro sees more division than subtraction in efforts to cut defeated budget.

BRATTLEBORO — U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes slept in one of its bedrooms in 1877. Writer Rudyard Kipling drank lager in its basement bar and played poker in its penthouse suite from 1892 to 1896. Broadcaster Lowell Thomas presented the NBC national radio news live from its ballroom in 1946. And if current owners have their way, someone new will buy this town’s cornerstone Brooks House and soon make their own history.

The five-story Main Street landmark — built in 1871, ravaged by fire in 2011 and restored in 2014 — has been placed on the market “on an ‘as-is’ basis and is being offered without a formal asking price,” according to an online listing that notes potential purchasers must sign a confidentiality agreement to receive more specifics.

“Although we have listed the property for sale with a broker, the Brooks House team members, all of whom continue to work at our businesses downtown, remain committed to Brattleboro,” its five local owners — engineer Bob Stevens, lawyer Craig Miskovich, financial-planner brothers Pete and Drew Richards and their colleague cousin, Ben Taggard — said in a written statement to VTDigger.

When the late businessman George Brooks fashioned his namesake block in 1871, he spent $150,000 on 1 million bricks and 500,000 feet of lumber. A century and a half later, the local quintet scraped up $23 million more to rebuild the structure after a gutting blaze April 17, 2011.

Stevens had known the Brooks House as the view from his engineering office when he was hired to assess the fire damage and draw up restoration plans, not knowing he’d soon join four friends in buying the 88,000 square-foot building with six retail spaces, three office units and 23 apartments.

The team, reopening the block in 2014, won the Brattleboro Area Chamber of Commerce’s Corporate Citizens of Year award. Vermont Life magazine, for its part, chronicled the restoration in a 2015 cover story headlined “Miracle on Main Street.”

“Boarding up a wet, moldy, vacant building that inhabits a quarter of the downtown was not an option if we wanted Brattleboro to thrive,” Stevens said in the Vermont Life piece.

With the block finished and fully occupied, the five now want to relinquish their duties as landlords and return to their day jobs.

“We formed the development team with a few goals in mind: renovate the building, recruit great new commercial and residential tenants, and restore the Brooks House to its rightful place as the cornerstone of downtown Brattleboro,” they wrote in their statement. “Now that the building is full of life and every space has been filled, it is time for us to hand the building over to its next generation of owners.”

Asked to elaborate, the owners said they would limit their comments to the statement. But they stress they’re not leaving the community or, in one case, the construction field. In addition to his engineering office, Stevens will continue to operate M&S Development, a firm he founded with Miskovich (whose law office is a Brooks House tenant) to support other New England projects, including the $56 million renovation of Bennington’s Putnam Block.

The potential sale comes as downtown Brattleboro is stabilizing after the Covid-19 pandemic, several longtime business closures and public complaints about a rise in police calls.

“Bigger changes are coming to downtown Brattleboro as we look ahead,” Kate Trzaskos, executive director of the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, wrote in a recent newsletter that noted several new businesses and the current construction of a $7.4 million Amtrak train station.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Brattleboro’s cornerstone Brooks House block up for sale.

BRATTLEBORO — For the first time since establishing the state’s only Town Meeting of elected resident representatives six decades ago, this southeastern Vermont hub rejected a proposed municipal budget over the weekend after complaints the $25 million plan for the coming fiscal year would increase taxes by 12%.

The community’s Town Meeting has a history of reducing local government spending as early as 1970, when it cut $24,550, and raising it as late as last year, when it added $70,000, records show. But the annual assembly had never returned a municipal budget to local leaders for revision until Saturday’s session at Brattleboro Union High School.

“I’ve made motions, voted for things, voted against things, but I’ve never taken the position I’m going to take right now,” George Carvill, a Town Meeting attendee for 54 years, said in proposing the rejection. “What we need to do is go back to the drawing board. Start over.”

The assembly of up to 150 representatives went on to debate the budget for more than three hours before defeating it by a 57-76 vote. The rejected plan now returns to the local selectboard, which will have to revise it and then schedule another Town Meeting in hopes of receiving approval before the start of the fiscal year July 1.

“We can’t do all the things we’re proposing to do in this budget,” Peter Elwell, who served as municipal manager from 2015 until 2021, told his fellow Town Meeting representatives Saturday. “We’re driving ourselves to bankruptcy, and so the hard choices need to be made.”

Earlier in the meeting, Elwell questioned why the selectboard voted last fall to add up to nine new police positions during what it declared an “emergency” by using $675,669 in unassigned general funds, only to wait until this month to seek Town Meeting approval for the past spending and continuing cost.

“The use of the fund balance in the middle of the year to fund emergency measures should be done only under the most extraordinary circumstances,” Elwell said of a reserve that’s now below the town’s guideline sum of 10% of annual spending. “But in this particular instance, what was funded under the emergency appropriation are ongoing operating expenses, and so we’re getting hit both ways.”

In response, selectboard members said they had deemed the hiring of more law enforcement as an emergency after hearing public complaints that police calls had jumped 16%. But local leaders unintentionally undercut their contention that they faced a sudden need when they went on to ask Police Chief Norma Hardy to recount her remembrance of events.

“I actually presented to the selectboard two years ago the trends that we saw as rising crime,” Hardy told the Town Meeting audience. “It was not accepted well by the town, but it was a reality.”

Instead, local leaders in 2023 were focused on pushing a plan for the town fire department to take over emergency medical services — a change the selectboard went on to approve despite opposition by more than 400 residents who signed a petition and nearly 90 more who wrote letters to the town’s public feedback page.

The selectboard finally took action on calls for more policing last September in a 3-2 vote. Only afterward did local leaders calculate that the new hires and increases in health insurance and trash disposal costs would result in a double-digit tax hike, sparking a wave of warnings from residents and a call by a citizen advisory finance committee for a study of potential staff cuts.

“I think you’re definitely heading towards a rejection of the budget,” former selectboard member Tim Wessel told his onetime colleagues at their Nov. 19 meeting.

The selectboard nonetheless unanimously approved the $25 million proposal in January.

“People did tell the selectboard what their priorities are, where they wanted cuts,” resident Marta Gossage recalled during Saturday’s debate. “It was like talking to a brick wall.”

Gossage was one of several representatives who voiced discontent that local leaders were claiming essential services might stop if the assembly rejected the budget and returned it for revisions.

“We pretty much feel hijacked,” Gossage said. “You made the mistakes, and you’re telling us that if we vote against your mistakes, that is our fault?”

Added fellow representative Abigail Mnookin: “I really resent how much the selectboard and town staff are leading with fear. Why have a Town Meeting if we’re not here to deliberate and have the right to vote yes or no?”

Resident Paula Melton questioned why local leaders were tapping not only unassigned reserves but also a revolving loan fund and other specialized accounts for one-time spending without replenishing the original sources.

“I would like to strip out some of the emotion from this conversation and bring it back to long-term financial planning, which we know has not happened,” Melton said.

“We cannot get a perfect budget out of a compressed process,” Melton continued of any revision period sparked by a rejection. “However, we can certainly get a better budget, and we can hope that the new selectboard members will be better listeners than the ones sitting on the board right now.”

The assembly debated and defeated three attempts to cut the proposed budget to amounts equaling current-year spending plus an increase of 2%, 3% or 4%.

The five-person selectboard — with three newly elected members — was scheduled to start picking up the pieces as early as a reorganizational session Monday night.

“We all want Brattleboro to be a viable place to live, make a living, start a business, raise a family,” resident Steve Heim told local leaders Saturday. “You really have to look after the rank-and-file taxpayer, because there isn’t a town without them.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: In a first, Brattleboro Town Meeting rejects proposed municipal budget.

BRATTLEBORO — Back in 1960, when this southern Vermont hub of 12,000 people decided to manage capacity Town Meeting crowds by becoming the only community in the state to elect a set number of citizen participants, residents never imagined that subsequent decades would bring more open seats than candidates willing to fill them.

Then social media sparked a recent firestorm of questions about policing and a proposed 12% municipal tax hike.

Some 150 Town Meeting representatives, about half chosen earlier this month in races that drew twice as many aspirants as available positions, are set to debate a proposed $25 million local government budget March 22.

“It all shows community engagement,” said Amanda Ellis-Thurber, who won election to Town Meeting and, defeating two incumbents, the five-member local selectboard.

It also presents a collective challenge, as a citizen advisory finance committee notes that residents don’t have to ratify the budget, but instead can reduce the bottom line or reject the spending plan and send officials back to the drawing board.

“Chatter around voting down the budget is louder than I’ve ever heard,” said Oscar Heller, the finance committee chair and another newly approved member of both Town Meeting and the selectboard. “This is the highest tax increase in quite a while, and people are quite upset.”

The surge in public interest and ire began last spring and summer when local leaders — facing a crescendo of complaints about drug dealing, burglaries and assaults in a community with the first three Vermont exits off Interstate 91 — learned police calls had jumped 16%.

Downtown storekeepers and shoppers pushed for more law enforcement. Social workers countered with a call for more resources to fight poverty and substance use disorders. And an online content creator named Hank Poitras began filming and posting videos of police responses, sparking a war of words between viewers who see him as exposing the depth of the problem and others who charge he’s exploiting people when they’re most vulnerable.

By fall, the selectboard voted 3-2 to boost its budgeted count of police officers from 27 to 30 and to seek up to six support staffers for a new Brattleboro Resource Assistance Team (or BRAT). Only later did leaders calculate that those and other budget additions would result in a double-digit tax hike for the coming fiscal year.

Enter social media and public records

At subsequent meetings, self-declared progressives opposed to more officers began speaking out alongside centrist and conservative residents seeking fiscal restraint. That spurred Poitras to start a political action committee, Real Progress, to campaign for police-supporting local candidates.

The content creator held a January rally that drew 200 people, with some 50 moving on to run for Town Meeting seats. Critics, in turn, searched out and shared Poitras’ past social media posts in which he called Black Lives Matter “scumbag filthy animals,” said of Donald Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll, “Why would anyone rape this ugly woman?” and commented on a nonbinary person being pepper-sprayed, “This is the new way, 100%.”

In response, Poitras said the posts were “old screenshots taken out of context” when he was an aspiring comedian and “don’t reflect who I am now.” (Days later, he used his weekly live stream to offer a “trigger warning” to “all the snowflakes and all the delicate people in the world” who are “very offended.”)

At the same time, Poitras’ critics used the state’s public records act to request his emails with Brattleboro Police, which the citizen journalist asks for comment after filming their patrols.

Jonathan Elwell, a local justice reform organizer, went on to post a story on the website The Rake Vermont headlined “Are Brattleboro Police Hiding Their Relationship with a Right-wing Video Blogger?”

In it, Elwell said the emails showed “communication and coordination” between police and Poitras. He added that Police Chief Norma Hardy “may have altered records” because documents provided included a set of duplicate emails from Poitras in which one was missing the content creator’s ending proposition that “we can ‘shop talk’ about how to respond about those topics.” 

In a statement, the police department said it “does not collaborate” with Poitras and instead provided information “at the request of any reporter or journalist that makes such a request.”

“The statements we give Mr. Poitras are the same statements in our public media releases,” police said. “While Brattleboro PD has no say in how content is used, that in no way should give the illusion or impression that we condone white supremacy or unfair policing practices.”

‘Some difficult decisions to face’

Police haven’t commented further since Town Manager John Potter called for an internal review of how the public records were collected and shared. But the administrator told VTDigger that his office determined the missing line in question was “accidentally left out” and “we found no proof that anyone was trying to hide information.”

“Since the chief herself shared the full email elsewhere in the same set of documents, the claim that this was done on purpose is not supported by the facts,” Potter said. “At the same time, we know there has been a lot of tension in town lately. People are frustrated, pointing fingers and trying to ‘catch’ others making mistakes.”

Amid the online clamor, both police supporters and people with budget concerns recruited their own slates of Town Meeting candidates. Both groups won a portion of the nearly 70 seats up for election this month, with the top winners either not aligned to any side or not endorsed by Poitras, who himself received the lowest number of votes in the race he lost.

Residents also defeated two incumbent selectboard members, Richard Davis and Franz Reichsman, who supported the proposed 12% tax hike.

“The fact that the two incumbents in the race finished dead last shows the degree of general unhappiness with the selectboard and our recent actions,” Reichsman told the weekly newspaper The Commons.

Representatives now are preparing for Town Meeting, set for live broadcast March 22 on Brattleboro Community Television. Although local leaders can’t predict the outcome, newcomers who won selectboard seats understand they might be asked to rewrite any rejected budget before the July 1 start of the fiscal year.

“It would be a difficult job to do in a compressed timeline,” Heller said, “but I’m confident this board, if asked, is ready to take up that challenge.”

Isaac Evans-Frantz, who also won election to the selectboard and Town Meeting, said residents have shared concerns about local taxes, the overall cost of living and potential changes to federal programs.

“No matter what,” Evans-Frantz said, “there will be some difficult decisions to face in the weeks and months to come.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Questions of policing and a proposed 12% tax hike entangle Brattleboro.

This story by Robert F. Smith was first published in The Commons on March 5.

WESTMINSTER — It’s not a generally known fact of history unless you happen to be from southeastern Vermont, but a strong case can be made that the first armed conflict of the Revolutionary War did not take place at Lexington or Concord in Massachusetts on April 19, 1775.

That first armed conflict was the Westminster Massacre, a historic milestone whose 250th anniversary will be marked by multiple events in town from Thursday, March 13, to Saturday, March 15.

Just three months after the nonviolent protest of the Boston Tea Party on Dec. 16, 1774, the last nonviolent protest of British rule over the American Colonies was held on March 13, 1775, at the courthouse in Westminster, the oldest town in Vermont.

A few hours later, the protestors were back at the courthouse — this time, armed and fueled by alcohol and anti-British rhetoric.

That night of March 13–14 would end up turning violent, with the first shots fired in anger and the first deaths of what would become the American Revolution.

A little over a month later, on April 19, the British would attempt to seize gunpowder from the Colonists, triggering the battles at Lexington and Concord and clearly marking the start of the Revolutionary War.

While there were two deaths at the Westminster Massacre, these battles around Boston led to 122 deaths, with many casualties on both sides and well over 200 wounded. There would be no turning back from war after that.

‘History matters’

Lifelong resident and local historian Jessie Haas is one of the driving forces behind the events commemorating the massacre.

Haas authored the 2012 town history Westminster, Vermont, 1735–2000: Township Number One, for which the Westminster Historical Society won a League of Local Historical Societies and Museums Achievement Award for publications/oral history that year.

Haas is well aware of how the event is mostly ignored in history books, but also defends its ultimate importance in the events that led up to the Revolution.

“Why does the Massacre matter?” Haas writes. “History matters. It tells us who we are and where we came from, so it’s crucial that the stories we tell about our past are accurate.”

Did the Westminster Massacre ignite the American Revolution, Haas asks? “No. It could have, but Lexington and Concord intervened, changing everything. But Westminster was the first place where the people’s struggle for their rights as British citizens met with lethal force from their own government. William French became the first martyr, Daniel Houghton the second. They deserve to be remembered.”

A volatile situation over disputed lands

The events of that March day were written about by a number of people involved in the incident. Vermont, at that time known as the New Hampshire Grants, was territory claimed by both the colonies of New York and New Hampshire. Ownership of much of the land that would become Vermont had been disputed since the 1760s, notwithstanding its original theft from Abenaki and other Native peoples.

The residents of Vermont were mainly working-class farmers, living on land claimed by wealthy landowners in New York, called Yorkers. The Yorkers were moving to the disputed territory in Vermont to keep better track of their land holdings, often forcing the local farmers off their properties.

The action of the Yorkers led Ethan Allen and Remember Baker to form the Green Mountain Boys, an anti-Yorker militia, which focused on attacking and burning the homes of Yorkers in the New Hampshire Grants area.

That volatile situation — wealthy New York Loyalists arresting and evicting Vermont farmers from disputed lands, and in turn the Green Mountain Boys militia attacking the Yorker Loyalists, forcing them back to New York and burning their homes and farms — was happening in the Northeast for the decade prior to the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

The action of the Green Mountain Boys escalated the situation, and anti-British protests would not remain peaceful for long. New York officials retaliated by arresting and evicting the settlers in the Grants.

That is the background for the events at the Westminster Courthouse in 1775.

Tory loyalists and Whig patriots

Haas has probably done as much research on the events of the Massacre as anyone, studying the primary-source materials as much as possible.

“What did the people who were witnesses at the time think happened, and why? That’s where I like to start,” she said.

According to available original documents, the March 13 events at the Westminster Courthouse started with a “riotous and disorderly” — but nonetheless nonviolent — crowd of about 80 to 90 people protesting outside the courthouse against the actions of the Yorkers.

Locals presumed that a New York judge and several settlers from New York’s arrival in the village would lead to legal action and the eviction of local settlers. The protest was an attempt to prevent the court from meeting with the New Yorkers.

Did both sides have weapons? “There’s no trustworthy evidence either way,” Haas said. “The Whigs said they did not have guns,” at first, she said, noting that they would likely have left their guns at their nearby homes.

The protest itself was illegal, and “guns would have complicated” the situation, Haas said — a fact acknowledged in the records about other protests around New England at that time.

Many in the crowd identified as Whigs, protesting against the Tories, who tended to be Loyalists toward the British monarchy. The Whigs, on the other hand, tended to be more supportive of a parliamentary government, or even a constitutional monarchy.

Neither term — Whig nor Tory — was a clearly defined, organized political party at the time of the Revolution. While we often think of times in history in black-and-white terms, that is hardly the case. In much the same way that the nation is torn into various political factions currently, it was similar in Colonial times.

The Whigs tended to be upper-middle class, were in general skeptical of royal prerogatives, and would become the leaders in the upcoming Revolution against British rule. The Tories were often landed gentry, families who had benefited from land grants from the British monarchy, and their loyalty was toward the royal family.

Westminster was a town fairly evenly divided between Whigs favoring a revolt against Britain and Loyalist Tories. Brattleboro, on the other hand, was a Loyalists’ stronghold and, in fact, both Brattleboro and Guilford wanted the New Hampshire Grants to be part of New York state. After the Revolution, many former Loyalists from the Brattleboro area would find it necessary to move to Canada, no longer feeling welcome in Vermont.

Haas said that that did not appear to happen in Westminster, where many families had members who were fierce Loyalists and others who were ardent revolutionaries. She said it seems that somehow, after the war, most Westminster families were able to put their previous differences behind them and live together amicably.

A massacre unfolds

Using all available original sources, Haas has developed what she feels is a fairly accurate timeline of those events in Westminster 250 years ago.

A New York judge and New York settlers arrived in the village, looking to make legal claims on disputed property in the area.

On March 13, a crowd of up to 90 area residents showed up at the courthouse to peacefully protest the arrival of the Yorkers and their attempts to remove the local settlers. It seems that most of these were Whigs opposed to British rule.

The crowd got larger and rowdier and forced its way into the courthouse. The local sheriff, William Paterson, ordered the crowd to leave the building. They refused. Paterson, feeling the need for more help, rode south to Brattleboro to recruit a posse from the large number of Loyalists there.

With an armed posse of up to 70 men, Paterson arrived back in Westminster about 9 p.m. They found that the crowd occupied both the court and the jail.

At some point in the evening, the Brattleboro posse went to a Tory tavern on the nearby Westminster Flats and consumed copious amounts of alcohol. For their part, the Whigs occupying the courthouse, where there was also a bar, drank all the alcohol available there.

After visiting the tavern, the posse returned to the courthouse and demanded that the occupiers leave. They refused, and Paterson told the posse members to fire into the building. The Whigs returned fire, wounding some in the posse.

The posse broke open the doors to the courthouse and fired into the crowd. William French was shot five times and died instantly. Accounts state that the Loyalist posse members also mistreated French’s body.

Hand-to-hand combat ensued, injuring many people on both sides, including Daniel Houghton, who died nine days later from his wounds and mistreatment. Once the firing began, the occupiers quickly started leaving the courthouse for their homes.

The posse reclaimed control of the jail and courthouse for the rest of the night, arresting and jailing seven of the fleeing occupiers.

That this had morphed from a small, local event into a conflict of regional concern was proven when, the next day, a crowd of more than 500 armed patriots from militias in nearby towns and counties showed up in Westminster.

“There were three conventions held in the local region in the month prior” to the March 13 rebellion, Haas said. “The Whigs believed the courts were in the hands of the Tories. They felt that the courts were against them and were taking their lands. Revolution was on their minds.”

The patriots surrounded the courthouse the next day and proceeded to arrest the judges, the sheriff, the clerk, and any other officials or Yorkers they can find. They freed the seven jailed locals, then several hundred of the men proceeded south to continue looking for and arresting Yorkers and Loyalists.

Several Yorkers would be jailed in Northampton, Massachusetts, and five would be charged with the murder of William French.

Captain Benjamin Bellows, from just across the river in Walpole, New Hampshire, commanded the militia from that state who showed up in Westminster. To prevent further violence, he had his men surround the courthouse. In short order, two patriots talked the Loyalists in the courthouse into surrendering, and they were taken into custody without incident.

A few weeks later, members of these same militias, including several men from Westminster, would fight against the British at Concord and Lexington.

The court case that sparked the original March 13 protest was never heard. The court was closed, and it was the last time a Yorker court convened in what would become the state of Vermont.

Read the story on VTDigger here: A spark that ignited a revolution.

BRATTLEBORO— Upon the advent of the airplane at the turn of the 20th century, locals with an eye on the sky didn’t need a 1919 front-page headline to see that Evelyn Harris was the “First Woman to Fly Over Brattleboro.”

But unbeknownst to many, the late pioneer also made history by repeating the feat on skis.

Harris had just turned 25 in the winter of 1922 when her brother, Fred, turned a hometown hill into what’s now the sole Olympic-size ski jump in New England and just one of six of its stature in the nation. 

Fred was the first to test it. His sister, records show, was the second.

But while Fred went on to annually present a Winged Ski Trophy to fellow man after man, the occasional female jumper was left to leap without equal reward.

Until now. A century after its start, Harris Hill introduced a new women’s trophy over the weekend — only to see Mother Nature crash the annual two-day event and condense it into a dizzying four-hour flurry of competition.

“It turned out fine,” said 22-year-old Slovenian Nejka Zupancic, who won the first annual award ahead of fellow Slovenian Lara Logar in second and Norwegian Nora Midtsundstad in third. “The hill is awesome, and the crowd is amazing.”

Organizers who’ve struggled with freak thaws since the Covid-19 pandemic found themselves at Saturday’s start with a storm forecast for that evening through Sunday. And so they decided to run all the scheduled weekend rounds back-to-back, with the first at noon and the fourth and final as the sun and snow began to descend.

“The overall safety of the event and its athletes is paramount,” Todd Einig, director of competition, told the press.

“Based on what’s predicted,” added organizing committee leader Kate McGinn, “we didn’t think we could keep up with the weather.” 

Although Harris Hill has canceled Sunday jumping in the past for lack of snow, no one could recall ever doing so because of too much, said the venue’s historian, Dana Sprague, who has attended the event since 1966.

As a result, 38 athletes from seven states and three European countries sped off the 30-story-high launch at a rapid-fire pace as an estimated 4,000 spectators reacted with cheers, mitten-muffled clapping and clanging cowbells.

“It’s a little bit tough on the legs, but we’ll get some rest and it will be OK,” said 21-year-old Slovenian Urh Rosar, who won the men’s trophy ahead of Norwegians Ole Gravermoen in second and Sander Bakken in third.

Although Evelyn Harris was the first woman to jump at the hill, she never was an official competitor. Female flyers at the time were considered more of a novelty than the norm.

Massachusetts sisters Dorothy and Maxine Graves, for example, jumped in Brattleboro in 1938, only to be disqualified after judges learned they weren’t registered with the U.S. Eastern Amateur Ski Association, newspapers would report. Undeterred, Dorothy competed again after the event’s World War II hiatus.

“The crowd’s favorite,” the Brattleboro Reformer declared in 1946 when she finished fifth in a field of 22.

Harris Hill has hosted many women in subsequent decades, even as the Winter Olympics prohibited them from taking to the air until 2014. But during that time, the local venue never offered them an award like the men.

“Women’s ski jumping has faced inequality and discrimination for its entire existence,” said 32-year-old hill veteran Spencer Knickerbocker, one of two area competitors alongside Spencer Jones, the 14-year-old Putney great-grandson of the late U.S. Sen. George Aiken. “It’s our responsibility to help.”

Knickerbocker joined with Fred Harris’ daughter, Sandy, to lobby for the women’s trophy.

“It’s time,” Sandy Harris said. “It’s past time.”

The Presidents Day weekend event featured 200 volunteers who did everything from clearing the 90-meter slope with leaf blowers to carting out a winner’s pedestal that the three top female finishers chose to stand on together.

Said Slovenian Lara Logar, who traveled 4,000 miles for the tournament: “It’s nice to feel equality.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s sole Olympic-size ski jump set out to honor female flyers. Enter Mother Nature..

This story by Robert F. Smith was first published in The Commons on Jan. 28

BELLOWS FALLS — A complex ownership situation involving two state agencies could derail Rockingham’s plans to purchase and restore the Bellows Falls train depot, but Development Director Gary Fox said these issues can be resolved in time for the town to meet the April 1 deadline for buying the building.

To that end, the town has sent a letter to Gov. Phil Scott seeking cooperation from two state agencies to move the project forward, and the state has affirmed its willingness to find solutions.

The 8-acre rail yard at the north end of the Island, part of the village’s designated downtown historic area, is owned by the Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTtrans), while Green Mountain Railroad (GMRR) owns the 1923 depot building in the middle of that land.

Also at issue is who is responsible for cleanup of industrial pollution — and how it will be paid for.

The town wants the restoration of the historic depot to be the focus for development on the Island in the decades to come. GMRR is willing to sell the building to the town for $285,000. Town officials report that while VTrans won’t sell the land the building sits on, the state agency is willing to lease the land to the town.

Some town officials, like Selectboard Chair Rick Cowan, have expressed concern that if the town buys the building and leases the land before resolving environmental mediation issues, the town might get stuck with the environmental cleanup bills, as the proposed VTrans lease assigns responsibility for environmental cleanup to the tenant.

The renovated depot building might include a restaurant — a scenario envisioned in the design work for the $4.3 million project — but Cowan said the lease would prohibit the sale of alcohol on VTrans property, which could drastically impact any future restaurant plans.

Lawyers are involved in discussions to put these issues to rest prior to the purchase.

“There is a lot of ambiguity in the lease language,” Fox said. “But changing one or two sentences in the lease could clear up all of that.”

That is the purpose of current talks with various state departments, and a letter from the town asking the governor to intervene.

“Why not just get these problems ironed out?” Fox asked. “Who wants to go to court over this down the road? Let’s get this all squared away now.”

Town urges state to help resolve issues

The Rockingham Selectboard sent the letter to Vermont Gov. Phil Scott earlier this month asking him to intervene with the agencies and help resolve the issues before April 1.

“We need your help!” the Jan. 7 letter begins.

The letter asks Scott to work with the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and VTrans “to achieve a positive outcome for the Island District.”

As a major transportation and industrial hub for two centuries, the soils of the Island suffer from extensive pollution, which either has to be removed or contained.

Rockingham is nearing the end of Stage I of a three-part development plan for the historic train station. Stage II is scheduled to start around April 1.

The stage I predevelopment work involved a survey of the site for structural and environmental issues. The cost of that work was $127,542 from taxes and over $64,000 in grants. An action plan has been developed that will be enacted in Stage II.

At that point, Fox said, “we’ll have a train station that we can work with. It will have been restored to preservation standards.” Importantly for the project, he said, the town already has “100% committed funding for Stage II.”

That funding includes $269,000 raised from taxes, and, Fox said, “You’ve got just under $1 million in non-taxpayer money going into it,” referring to money already raised from grants.

Environmental issues like lead paint, soil gases such as trichloroethylene and contaminated soil will all be addressed by the end of Stage II.

Last June, consulting engineers Sanborn, Head & Associates discovered tetrachloroethylene vapors in the air within the soil beneath the foundation of the depot building and above the water table.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the chemical was widely used in dry-cleaning fabrics and metal degreasing.

The agency describes primary long-term effects of the chemical as neurological, “including impaired cognitive and motor neurobehavioral performance. Tetrachloroethylene exposure may also cause adverse effects in the kidney, liver, immune system and hematologic system, and on development and reproduction.”

Fox said that at the end of Stage II of the project, “we’ll have an Amtrak station that is safe, health-wise, with the environmental issues mitigated through either removal or sealing.”

“The building will have been restored, and it will have all new windows and doors,” he said.

But Cowan said there are still unclear details that have him concerned, and that Fox is trying to resolve. Resolution of those issues, Cowan said, would be necessary to get his approval of the project.

The Selectboard members told Scott that the town must get “a commitment from Vermont DEC and VTrans to address the contaminated railyard in a feasible manner, and minimal VTrans lease modifications, purchase and renovation of the station is not possible due to liability of leasing the land, putting the town at risk of 170 years of rail operations.”

Project planners projections indicate that rail use of the yard will double over the next decade.

Pollution and housing concerns

The rail yard, a local fixture for well over 170 years, takes up the north end of the Island, the 20-acre rail/industrial section of Bellows Falls, formed by the Connecticut River on the north, east, and south sides, and the canal powering the town’s hydroelectric station on the west side.

The railroad has also played a critical role in the history of the region. Rail lines have provided transportation for paper, textiles and other goods produced in the area, as well as milk and other agricultural products shipped to Keene and Concord, New Hampshire, to Boston and beyond. Rail service has transitioned over the years to primarily long-haul freight and one Amtrak passenger train, the Vermonter.

The canal was built in 1801 and helped Bellows Falls become a major transportation hub. In the later 1800s, the canal would be converted from transportation to providing water power for mills. In the 1920s, the canal was rebuilt to power the hydroelectric plant in Bellows Falls.

The Island was home to several factories over the past 200 years, which created extensive ground pollution there.

The advent of rail in the 1840s increased the village’s importance as a transportation center. The rail yard in Bellows Falls was a major Northeast rail hub.

Because the Island is immediately adjacent to Bellows Falls’ downtown, in recent years it has also been designated as part of the downtown historic district. Fox said that redevelopment of the Island for a variety of commercial and housing purposes is a vital part of the village’s future plans.

The town has developed an Area Wide Plan with input from the Windham Regional Commission. The plan proposes several town and private industry projects over the next several years.

These include adding over 100 housing units on the Island in upper stories there, and 45,000 square feet of street-level commercial development.

When asked about the assertion of a few in the community that adding low-income housing increases crime, Fox scoffed at the idea as nonsense.

The village’s history supports him. Over the past several decades, five major housing projects, including numerous apartments for low-income tenants, have been completed in the half-mile stretch of downtown Bellows Falls from the former Armory building on Westminster Street to the recently opened Bellows Falls Garage building on Rockingham Street.

Town officials said all of these projects combined have had zero impact on crime statistics, and that the buildings have a reputation for being well-managed and safe.

On the contrary, Fox said, “The way to fix tax issues in the town is to add buildings back to the Grand List.”

The Island, he explained, is the area where the town has lost considerable buildings off the tax list. Adding to the Island’s appeal for development is that “it already has water, sewer and three-phase power, and it has the most room for growth.”

Cleaning up the pollution on the Island is not only “the right thing to do for the future,” Fox said, but “the most valuable place to add property value back” to the town.

In response to the town’s plea, Scott’s office pledged to “work directly” with the Agency of Transportation and the Agency of Natural Resources and assured the town that the governor’s office is “actively working towards a solution.”

“Who wants to invest in a community that won’t invest in itself?” Fox asked. “There are a lot of places for the federal and the private money to go. If the town runs away scared, private money will go elsewhere.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Concern in the air on Bellows Falls depot project.