An Emergency Waiting to Happen.
There’s been plenty of press coverage about the Burlington School Board’s Emergency Meeting that was held at 9:00 PM this past Sunday. Sunday also happened to be both Easter and April Fools’ Day. Vermont Digger’s headline characterized the meeting as delaying the release of an ongoing racial bias investigation, while the Burlington Free Press, alluded to whether the meeting itself, as warned and conducted, constituted a violation of Vermont’s Open Meeting Law. The…
Windham County Courthouse - Newfane, VT
If any of you have ever baked bread, you know that you are only supposed to knead the dough for so long before it starts to impact the quality of the final product. Some things aren’t meant to be touched, if at all. Related to this is the old Vermont proverb, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Sometimes a client will come into the office and we’ll decide the best thing to do in…
Red Line In Morning - BTV
There was old Odd Couple Show courtroom scene where Felix Unger expounded upon the dangers of “assuming.” I’d encourage you to watch it because it provides an important context for the premise of this post.
Most people may have some experience with the term “off the record” as it applies to the media. Presumably that experience is not personal because most people do not speak with the media on a regular basis and on the…
A few months ago I attended the first meeting of of the Vermont Ethics Commission and blogged about it here (incidentally if you know how to locate the Commission’s website, please drop me a line, I haven’t been able to find it). During the course of that meeting I engaged in an exchange with the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office about executive officers and state employees getting guidance of a confidential nature from the Commission.…
Burlington Sunset
We are once again heading into an election year. And as with any election cycle, there are perils and pitfalls that candidates and government employees need to be aware of. One of the least known, but at the same time most consequential laws impacting elections and candidates is the Hatch Act of 1939. The Hatch Act was initially implemented as the U.S. pulled itself out of the Depression and lunged headfirst into WW II…
Councilor Dave Hartnett Discussing the Proceedings of the Evening with Assorted Media
The purpose of this blog is not supposed to be political, its a forum to discuss ethics and government in Vermont. If you want politics, you can check out my political blog over at Sugaring Off. With that said, it’s important to discuss the ethical dilemmas (and the associated procedural and policy hurdles) faced by the Burlington City Council last night as it decided who would be the new purchaser for Burlington Telecom.…
The Caladonian Record ran an interesting piece this past weekend entitled “Public Records Request: Blittersdorf Says Standard Will Cost Him $1 Million.” Although the Record is behind a paywall, the gist of the article was relatively straight forward in that it called into question the ways in which lobbyists seek to influence lawmakers. The article was in part premised on a public records request made by Annette Smith, the Executive Director of the…
State of the State
The last post had to do with conflicts of interest. This is a follow-up to that but a little but more subtle. There are really three different types of conflicts of interest. Legal conflicts that are clearly defined by ordinance, policy, rule, statute or otherwise. Ethical conflicts, for which there may be no law against, but ethics dictates against. And political conflicts, which are governed by political will and politics. Within each of these categories…
Why Choose Between Maple and Bacon, When You Can Have Both?
Right now the Burlington City Council is deciding whether it should sell Burlington’s homegrown telecom to either an experienced and highly-regarded Canadian corporation (which has offered $30.5 million) or a well-intentioned, but inexperienced and underfunded local group (which has offered $12 million). My VPR Commentary on the merits of the proceedings, can be found here, but the purpose of this post is of course to look at an ethical issue that just popped up…
Last week VT Digger had an interesting story about former Attorney General William Sorrell’s “420” license plate. The story was more or less a puff piece based on the double entendre of the plate number itself. (If you don’t know what 420 means in popular culture you can read up on it here). More or less untouched by the piece was that Sorrell had license plates reserved, for himself and his three sisters. In…
