Which Vermont will survive?

by Don Keelan

Michael Albans, Babette Stolk, Jimmy Nesbitt, and Benjamin Lerner are young reporters for Vermont media outlets: the Bennington Banner, VTDigger, and Vermont Magazine. 

The four have in common that they wrote stories about happenings in Vermont and published in their respective publications in early February. 

Stolk and Nesbitt’s story was about an incident that took place in northern Vermont and was headlined in the VTDigger:  “Body found in container on the Missisquoi River belonged to a missing Derby woman.”

Albans wrote about a criminal incident that occurred 100 miles to the south at Vermont’s southern border in Pownal. It was headlined in the Bennington Banner: “Bennington man identified as stabbing victim.”

On the other hand, Lerner focuses elsewhere. His reporting in the winter issue of Vermont Magazine noted, “Topnotch Resort in Stowe offers a phenomenal guest experience in a breathtaking Vermont mountain setting.”   

What was tragically similar in the Banner and VTDigger stories was the fact that the victims were young: a 29-year-old girl from Derby and a 36-year-old man from Bennington. The young girl was shot numerous times, while the Pownal victim had multiple stab wounds. 

Another similar fact about the killings was that they appeared to have been related to illegal drug deals that, in one way or another, went badly for the victims. Exactly, what went wrong will come out once arrests have been made. 

Vermont Magazine does an outstanding job of bringing to its readers’ attention why we live in Vermont. 

How can you not want to be here when you see the beauty of the fall and winter countryside captured so well in photographs? Or you wish to shop in the country stores that dot the Vermont landscape along with Holsteins and Black Angus.

However, according to Lerner’s report, Vermont is more than just vistas, animals, and buildings. It is also about people who have recently, or for generations, provided so much in art, music, crafts, and literature.

One becomes informed of another Vermont from reading Albans’ February 11^th Banner front-page piece: “The neighbors living along Chickadee Drive inside the Pownal Estates Mobile Home Park are familiar with fear. For the past several years, drugs, gangs, and violence have deteriorated the quality of life inside the small community.” 

What was once an issue of the isolated user is now the shoplifter, people without housing, store closures, drug-related hospital ER and CCU visits, gangs, turf wars, and the failure to pay up. All culminated, at last count, in approximately a dozen drug-related homicides in Vermont in the past several years.

Violence knows no boundaries. No town or village is immune. Violence has occurred on the streets of Burlington and Berlin and the backroads of Danby and Troy.

The Vermont depicted in Vermont Magazine and before that in Vermont Life is at a tipping point. For generations, the tourist industry has invested billions of dollars to develop a destination for millions to enjoy. That investment is now, and has been for some time, at risk.

The Bennington Banner’s recent headline was on point when it described the Pownal murder scene as “no way to live.”

Derek Brouwer, reporting for Seven Days, reinforces this in his February 14^th piece on Burlington’s Decker Towers, located three blocks from Church Street and City Hall, as functioning as “an unfunded warming shelter, unmonitored injection site, and a hub for distribution of drugs and stolen goods. In the past two years, Decker residents (160 apartments) have become collateral damage in an ongoing crisis.”

There are hundreds of agencies, federal and state governments and nonprofits, working on the drug crisis, offering treatments, recovery services, education, housing, and enforcement. There are hundreds of ‘silos’ that are, in one way or another, involved. But are they working together?  Maybe it is time to have one silo, one drug czar. 

The Vermont scenes, as depicted in Vermont Magazine and other tourist outlets, are being usurped, and our Legislative leaders need to stop their denial until the scourge is eradicated. There should be nothing else to work on.  

The author is a U.S. Marine (retired), CPA, and columnist living in Arlington, VT.