Interview with Senate candidate Ashley Bartley

By Guy Page

One of the best parts about the Vermont Daily Chronicle is the comments section. You need to provide your name, and we ask that commenters be Sustaining, that is paying Subscribers, and that they not use profanity or explicit racism or mock other commenters, but within those parameters it’s Free Speech Forever, the floor is yours to say what you want. And every day, people do.

The first half of the Friday, October 23 Chronicle Conversations, airing noon – 1 PM on WVMTradio.com (live and podcast), AM 620, FM 101.3 , features comments written in response to the top news stories of the week. There’s also the interview with Chittenden North Senate candidate Ashley Bartley (seen with family, above) from 12:34 – 1 PM. Callers are urged to chime in with their own live, real-time opinions and comments at 888-414-0303. Some of those stories include….

The financial cost of illegal immigration

This story isn’t strictly local, except that Vermont is a border state with a significant population of illegal immigrants. The headline reads – 

White House warns renewed illegal immigration, mass amnesty could cost taxpayers $500 billion in next 10 years

It describes how the White House Council of Economic Advisors took a deep dive on the financial consequences of renewing the kind of cross-border migration we saw during the Biden administration. 

VDC commenter Lester French thought of something even they didn’t mention – 

“Consider that many of those immigrants or illegal aliens are sending most of their pay out of the country, not spending it here.” That is an important data point: many working migrants, legal  or illegal, are sending their paycheck to their families back home – money that would otherwise have been spent supporting local businesses.

Next, some point/counterpoint on the ongoing controversy……

Trapping: animal cruelty or beneficial to wildlife?

Lisa Jablow of Brattleboro often writes letters to the editor in opposition to trapping. Her letter appeared in yesterday’s Vermont Daily Chronicle, and it was not well-received by Mike Covey, executive director of the Vermont Traditions Coalition, who comments:

“Ms. Jablow has done a spectacular job of showcasing her complete lack of understanding of trapping here. Not only are foothold traps designed to hold, not injure, Vermont has the most stringent trapping requirements in North America to ensure the animal’s welfare upon capture.

“An animal with broken bones from a trap is far more likely to escape the trap, so practicality and humanity dictate that trappers don’t want this outcome. She seems unable to digest new information and insists on a perspective of trapping mechanisms that has been antiquated for decades. Nothing new for this set of activists.

“Trapping is a science. Over 40 million dollars and 30 years of research were poured into developing the Best Management Practices that Vermont now has in law to ensure to the highest degree possible that animals are not injured in foothold traps. Contemplate that for a minute.

“I could give you an entire dissertation on various ways that we make traps selective, but the real question is why you should support trapping. The answer is simple. Trappers have a unique ability to provide the Fish and Wildlife Department with biological sampling of our fur-bearing species. What are the logistics of replacing 600 or so people on the landscape who can provide local, regional, or statewide sampling on the health of 13 species? How many employees would the Department need to hire, train, and deploy? Who would pay for it?

“Her virulence and hostility toward the hunting and trapping community is on display here, and that should have been enough for the editor to do at least a cursory fact-check on her assertions. Trappers are your neighbors. We are farmers, doctors, lawyers, ministers, teachers, tradespeople. We come from all walks of life, all ages, all races, and all genders.

“We are the authority on trapping, and if you want to learn about it, we and the fish and wildlife department are the resources for that, not hateful activists who can’t step away from denigrating our community to have an honest conversation and learn.

What happens after Vermont adopts a wealth tax?

Thursday, VDC published a news story about the gubernatorial candidate debate on Vermont Public. Janoo proposes recouping Trump tax cuts from wealthy Vermonters to pay for health care.

Some of our readers are skeptical about how targeting the wealthy for heavy taxes would work out. For example, Thomas Sullivan wrote:

“So $250k is considered wealthy? Give it a couple of years, those families will move, and the label “wealthy “ will be down to $150k.”

And James Vitolanese also weighed in. “Who will she propose to tax when the so-called wealthy Vermonters leave for other states that won’t tax them. The wealthy can afford to leave, leaving us all behind in poverty.”

Clergy in court – what does it say about our churches?

Mike Donoghue yesterday reported on one of the more high-profile anti-ICE protests. 

7 Vermont clergy members deny trespassing at ICE facility in Williston

Neil Johnson of Moretown says this story shows that leftist politics have infiltrated Vermont’s churches. “Most churches have been hijacked, surely. The leaders are more interested in cultural Marxism rather than Jesus Christ. There are many good Christians within Christ’s church, but leadership has been taken over many times. This was one of the main reasons our ancestors fled the corrupted churches of England and Europe. If people read the Bible they would quickly find that bad leadership was common, the book of Kings!”

This next story received 27 comments on VDC and countless more on our Facebook site.

Three Vermont counties identified as potential destinations for immigrant resettlement

This October 21 story tells how a non-profit working for a federal government resettlement planning program has identified Lamoille, Bennington and Windsor counties as ‘baseline’ counties fit for migrant resettlement. Here’s one example of the many comments. Steve Thurston writes: 

“In Vermont the children of non English speaking, low income immigrants are given triple weight in the per pupil cost equation. Instead of paying the cost of one student Vermont taxpayers are charged for three students. The $30k per pupil cost becomes a $90k bill to taxpayers.

“The student does not directly receive these benefits. They go to the school with no requirement on how they are used. Because schools report their student population as “weighted counts” and therefore claim many more students than actually attend, the cost per student is drastically understated.

“According to Grok: “Vermont’s EL and poverty weights are outliers relative to high-performing states, and there is no evidence that current levels are justified by outcomes; sanctuary-style policies and refugee/asylum inflows contribute modestly but measurably to the concentration of high-weight students.”

“Janoo promises to fill rural towns with political and climate refugees to offset the hollowing out that the state’s defacto no growth policies have produced over the years. How has that worked out for European countries that adopted these types of policies decades ago? Just watch the news. What will happen to per pupil costs when the weighting system is applied to this burgeoning population of “New Americans”? You know the answer.”

Editor’s note: I did my own research on pupil weighting and found that, indeed, ESL students are ‘weighted’ at 2.49 times a non-ESL student. Among other things, that means that high ESL districts receive far more state aid that low-ESL districts, explaining in part why Winooski’s own property tax rate has been so low compared to other communities. Here’s a graph from a November, 2023 Joint Fiscal Office memo: