“Pretty Damn Good for a Flatlander from Quechee”
That was the message a local with deep family roots in Hartford had for me last night after he heard the election results. I laughed, and immediately felt better about losing 513-433. Especially to Sam Romano, who has yet to cast a vote on the Selectboard I disagree with (when I put in my petition to run, I didn’t think Sam was going to run again).
I will be reconfiguring this blog to be an alternate resource for Hartford citizens to get information about the town and school board operations, documents and the like. We’ll also set it to be more forum-like for easier interaction.
Luke Eastman for School Board
I asked Luke Eastman to write up something I could share with my readers. I’ll be voting for Luke on Tuesday. Here’s what he has to say for himself:
As a third-generation Quechee native, I know first-hand the quality of our schools and am proud to say that the Hartford school system has been essential to my family’s success. I attended the Quechee Elementary School and graduated from Hartford High in 1993 with an academic scholarship to the University of Vermont.
Improving town – citizen info flow
The town’s website just isn’t delivering what Hartford needs. I just went to look for the minutes of the January board meetings, and they are still not posted. The last set of minutes are from the end of December. Similarly, there’s no discussion of how the audit materials were removed from the printed town report and instead posted on the web site. You’d have to realize they were missing and then go looking for them.
If elected next week, I will try to turn this around quickly. Whatever the limitations of our current website, keeping it up to date has to be a top priority. Every person working in town hall needs to know how to post up material, and that task needs to be regarded as a priority, not as something to do if there is time left over at the end of the day.
Town Offices: Rebuild or Replace?
No matter who wins the 2 year Selectboard seat, Hartford will have at least one person on the Selectboard who’s inclination is to build new town offices instead of trying to renovate the 100 year old building we currently use. Both Sam Romano and I agree that it will be a better use of our money to start fresh (per the article in the 1/28/2011 Valley News), so there is no distinction between us on this issue.
A new town hall that took advantage of the latest technology for energy use, that included meeting rooms designed to support interactive, real-time online meetings, that was designed from the start with the expectation that future generations would want to reconfigure it could become a symbol of our town’s commitment to the future.
Fill this out to vote early by mail or in person
Healthcare Reform and Vermont Taxpayers
One of the benefits of living in a small community in the past is that when the neighbor’s barn burned down, friends and foe alike would gather and help get a replacement built, because everyone understood that the lightning bolt which hit the barn could just as easily struck them. And in the collective act of helping, new friendships would form, and old wounds would get a chance to heal as enemies worked shoulder to shoulder on a common task. These community building events are in short supply these days (though COVER Home Repair does a fantastic job in this area.)
In the current unrest over taxes in all forms there is, I think, a sense of throwing in the towel on going to barn raisings, especially as far as healthcare goes, up and down the line. Everyone is gaming the system, and the more firepower you bring to gaming it, the more you extract from it. Medical equipment and supply companies, pharmaceutical firms, big insurers all extract enormous profits. Hospitals under the gun game the system by having different prices for the same services depending on who’s paying (this is called cost shifting). Desperate patients hide assets to qualify for ‘free’ care. People who could make paying for health insurance more of a priority than, say, the annual trip to Vegas, don’t believing that they will be taken care of anyway (and they are right, emergency rooms have to take them in). Because so many are gaming the system, if you are paying for health insurance and you are lucky enough to have a good job and to own property, you are paying a huge amount into the health care system in the form not only of your own premium, but in wages your employer would otherwise be willing to pay you; in taxes at the local level that support town employee health care premiums, and school employee premiums (and all these premiums are higher than they need to be because of all the free riders, the higher costs of medical goods and higher hospital prices); higher state taxes for Medicaid, and state employee plans; federal taxes for Medicare, and federal income taxes for various government operated health programs including the VA. I total it all up and in my case estimate I’m putting something like 20K into the pot each year, but I can’t pin it down, and that bothers me more than anything. Instead of feeling like I’m helping raise a barn, I feel like I’m playing 3-card monte against a street hustler.
The plans Dr. Hsiao unveiled in Montpelier last week offer a way out of this mess, at least for Vermonters. And some quick calculations indicate that there would be some immediate savings for town and school budgets in the form of lower premiums. I will be watching this develop carefully and making sure that the town posts models showing the effect of the changes for taxpayers in our town. Why? Because clarity about where our money goes is essential to feeling good about our tax-paying.
The proposal creates a genuine health-care system that would encompass all Vermonters and standardize the benefits across the board. Instead of constantly changing plans and premiums, we would get some certainty about what it cost us and what we’d be covered for. We’d all be in the same boat (and if you wanted you could go and buy a supplemental policy for even more coverage). This would, for example, remove the anger many have over teachers having better benefits than they. So it could, in the long run, give us a really special, objective, fact of statewide Vermont community that I believe would be very attractive to many small firms that in this day and age don’t need to be anywhere in particular. Hartford, with its proximity to Dartmouth, the interstates, a revitalized regional airport in Lebanon could become even more of a center for these high-tech firms.
I’ve said that regionalization is necessary. The proposal in front of the Vermont state government now is nothing less than regionalism brought to health care — a statewide system that can save tax dollars and build community.
Fill this out to vote early by mail or in person
Wendell Barwood – An Appreciation
Wendell Barwood was a friend of mine and I am grateful for the opportunity to say that. I met Mr. Barwood shortly after moving to Quechee in the spring of 1997. Over the course of the next few years, listening to the stories told by the first generation of Quechee Lakes owners, I came to realize that Wendell had played a key role in helping Quechee Lakes establish itself as a community within a community. Local residents would be welcomed, not ignored; new residents would be encouraged to participate in the wider town; and the true rationale for Quechee, to be a recreational community with many full timers, would never be forgotten. Today the twists and turns of the market have unbalanced Quechee from the vision of its originators, but Wendell’s encouragement to me and to many other Quechee fulltimers — that we make that extra effort to assert our connection with the wider town — will live on.
We will all miss him; we have all benefited from his community spirit.
Regionalization + Technology: Two ways to help Hartford prosper
Hartford is very well run by town manager Hunter Rieseberg and the key issues it faces have to do with the limitations the economy have put on the ability of the town to raise taxes, or worse, hold them constant in the face of increasing costs, particularly for health care, at a time when so many no longer receive benefits from their job and cannot stomach taxes going to pay for benefits they don’t have themselves. This disconnect will make any increase in taxes a difficult sell for a long time to come.
We’re faced with a series of difficult decisions and I’d like to think I could help make sure we make the best of a bad situation. Coming out of the information technology arena, I sense that the town shies away from asking how IT can be put to use to reduce costs and improve services.
I’ve been a Justice of the Peace in Hartford for the past 8 years and have gotten to know most of those involved in local government. Everyone is trying to make sure the town continues to be well run and I expect to maintain that traditional point of view as Selectman.
Hartford, in an era of contraction, is well positioned to become the regional leader in areas of public protection. Already, the Hartford 911 call center serves 14 of the surrounding towns. We are well positioned to help the region reduce their costs of protection while at the same time bringing in monies that reduce the pressure on Hartford taxpayers.
Regionalization is something not discussed often enough in Vermont and I intend to make it the centerpiece of my campaign.
Because I am running against lifelong Hartford resident Sam Romano, an incumbent, it is unlikely I will win this election. However, the opportunity to make the case that regionalization and greater use of technology are two avenues the town needs to be paying more attention to is well worth the effort.
Fill this out to vote early by mail or in person
On the Collapse of Prospect Place
The Prospect Place development is dead for now, but with all the work that has been put into the concept it will be well worth the effort of the town to do what it can to preserve the opportunity. The single most important step the town can take is to get the state to approve a tax-incremental financing (TIF) district in place encompassing the White River Junction core. TIFs are not without their own problems; if structured too generously they can reward developers with public tax monies for investments that would have been made anyway. The temptation Hartford faces is to make the TIF district too large and as a result get locked in a battle with the state over approval. The application, under development now, ought to be made such that the state green light will be given without delay.
Fill this out to vote early by mail or in person
Candidate for Selectboard: F. X. Flinn
Hi, my name is F. X. Flinn and I’m running for the Hartford, Vermont Board of Selectmen on Town Meeting Day in 2011. The election will be held on Tuesday, March 8th. This blog is designed to give the voters in our community an opportunity to connect directly with me in a fashion that allows everyone to join in the conversation.
First off, I want to explain my initials. They are for Francis Xavier. Most guys named Francis Xavier go by Frank, as I did when I was a kid. Toward the end of my time in high school, I was getting tired of looking at my by-line in the high school newspaper and wanted to change it from ‘Frank Flinn’ to something else. By the time I went off to Cornell University in the fall of 1971, I’d decided to just use my initials, F. X., having heard from my grandpa that when he was a kid in Brooklyn there was a bar called “F. X. McRory’s.” As fate would have it, I was given a roommate who was wonderfully charismatic, one of those people who uses a turn of phrase that everyone adopts. He immediately began using ‘F. X.’ as a nickname and, in a new environment where nobody knew me as Frank, it stuck. In the 40 years since, I’ve heard about 72 other “F. X.”‘s, and met three, including F. X. Matt, the beer brewer in Utica NY (Saranac, Matts etc) who encouraged me to stick with it.
The original Francis Xavier was, along with Ignatius Loyola and Aloysius Gonzaga, one of the founders of the Jesuits, the Roman Catholic order devoted to education, missionary work, and the intellectual defense of the faith. They were all Basques, the ethnic group that lives in the Pyrannies Mountains between Spain and France, and the Basques speak a language that is unrelated to any other on the planet. That’s why their names are fairly odd; in fact the “X” in Xavier (which is pronounced ZAVE-yer, not X-zave-yer) and the “J” in Javier (pronounced HA-vee-air) each have half the sound of the consonant in Basque. I once met a Basque and asked him to say Xavier for me. The first consonant was a strange mix of the Z and H sounds the English/German and the Spanish/French hear. Anthropologists and archeologists thing the Basques have been in Europe for nearly 50,000 years, by far the oldest group in Europe; this is why their language is so strange and ancient to our ears.
A good question is why Irish Catholics name their sons for Basque Jesuits. Mostly it has to do with the influence of the Jesuits’ high school and college system, and the respect and gratitude they earned raising the sons and daughters of immigrants from Ireland in New York and Boston during the 19th and 20th centuries. But there is also another thread, a deeper one: the first Catholic colony in the New World, Maryland, was established by the Lord Baltimore, his sons and their friends in the English gentry, and their servants, overwhelmingly Irish, from around Cork. Father Andrew White, a Jesuit, was their priest. When they disembarked at what is now Leonardtown, MD in 1639, they planted a community that would flourish and contribute significantly to the development of religious freedom (in 1649 a law establishing freedom of worship was enacted by the Maryland legislature), to the American Revolution, and the settlement of Kentucky. I am a child of both the NY Irish immigrant thread, on my dad’s side (his grandfather was a Francis) AND the Marylanders on my mom’s side; many of my Marylander grandfathers were also named Francis Xavier. My mom held out on calling me F. X. for about a decade, until the day I got married, by her brother, my uncle Charlie, a Jesuit who taught constitutional law at Fordham. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he said after the wedding ceremony was complete, “I give you Mr & Mrs F. X. Flinn.”
The original Francis Xavier was a man of considerable learning and courage, and not a little bit of an adventurer. He went to Asia, particularly Japan and India, looking to open a dialog between the Church and those ancient civilizations. My life pales in comparison, though my work first in the publishing world and later in the high-tech industry has provided me with a lifetime of continuous learning. I will promise to bring my willingness to study and my certainty that our democratic forms of self government can work for the positive enhancement of our lives to the job of Selectman.
In future posts I will start to address some of the questions facing Hartford and the role of the Selectboard in answering those questions. Please join me in this dialog.
Fill this out to vote early by mail or in person