Jumping Ugly In Montpelier

    Though it looked like the usual statehouse affair – badly organized and late getting started – yesterday’s press conference in the Cedar Creek Room was an unusual and exceedingly interesting event.  Words like “seminal” or “landmark” might even apply.
    For openers, it was the first time in the memory of many veterans of Vermont’s political wars, that the business community looked to be coalescing and fighting back against one of the beatings it has so routinely and stoically endured at the hands of the legislature.
    “You know,” one old hand was heard saying, “I remember talking to Dick Snelling, back in his first term, and asking him when the business community was finally going to get in the ring and join the fight.  And he looked at me and said, ‘When it is in enough pain.’”

Perhaps that time has come in the form of legislation sailing through the statehouse that would require Entergy to put up some $400 million for decommissioning the Yankee nuclear plant.  Opponents of the bill – in and out of the business community – see it as:

•    Another attempt by the legislature to stick it to Yankee, something that happens every session.  The legislators cannot seem to help themselves.  Just as some dogs cannot be broken from chasing cars, they suffer an irresistible impulse to take a bite out of Yankee.
•    Certain to cause a sharp rise in the cost of electricity in the state, which will make it just that much tougher to do business here.
•    A message to other businesses that Vermont is hostile territory.

    Honorable people can disagree about the merits of these arguments and many do.  But most of the disagreement in the statehouse, even before the press conference finally got underway, was decidedly uncivil. Lobbyists for and against were raising their voices and pointing their fingers, calling names, and getting purple in the face. Then it got ugly.
    The press conference consisted of a few muted remarks from representatives of the Chamber of Commerce, the utilities, and individual businesses, most conspicuously IBM, the state’s largest, private-sector employer.  At the conclusion of these remarks, the floor was opened to questions, several of which came from the Rutland Herald’s Louis Porter, who was both aggressive and respectful.
    Then, the event took an unusual turn, John Campbell, the majority leader of the Senate, took the floor and made a speech in which he accused the business people who had come to make their case of not understanding the bill or, perhaps, of not having read it.  He made his case in a smug, condescending manner that is the default mode of the professional politician.  We know better than you.  We have superior gifts.  Who are you to challenge us?
    Fair enough.  That’s what politicians do.  They are in the business of selling the illusion that they have all the answers.  And Campbell brought it off.  Because he is good at this kind of thing.  It is what he does and why he keeps getting re-elected.  The people from the utilities, IBM, and other, (much) smaller businesses merely read balance sheets and make products or provide services.
    And it struck you then – if you were just another visitor to the statehouse – that there was something unusually rude and bullying about Campbell’s performance.  If this had been a contingent of schoolteachers come to protest the passage of some education bill, you could be sure that they would have been greeted obsequiously, listened to respectfully, and fawned over attentively by legislators who could not say, often enough, how deeply committed they were to the cause of education and the fine work that teachers do with the children because children are the future and blah, blah, blah.
    Likewise, if these people had been advocates of more subsidies for the non-profits engaged in building affordable housing and protecting the land from the ravages of sprawl.  Or nurses come to show their opposition to legislation that imposed more financial burdens on the state’s hospitals.
    But this was the business community.  These were business people. And for them, the rules are different.  When they plead their case, you do not listen respectfully and then assure them that we all have the best interests of Vermont at heart and can surely work together to make good things happen in the Green Mountains.  No.  What you do is … attack. 
    Some people have been making the argument that the political powers-that-be in Vermont, and the constituency they represent, are hostile to business.  That this hostility is visceral and that it manifests itself, among other ways, in a nearly obsessive urge to go after Vermont Yankee.  To make this argument is to be immediately accused of being paranoid, or worse.  You are, you will be told, just another sorehead right-winger bent on running down the state.  Vermont is utterly friendly to commerce and a wonderful place to do business.
    Campbell’s pugnacity made it pretty plain that this is not so.  He also made it exquisitely clear that he had no truck with any of the business people who had come to Montpelier that morning to petition him and his worthies for redress of grievances.  His message to them:  “You don’t know what you’re talking about and, by the way, who do you think you are?”
    Senator Peter Shumlin, who had been moving through the room like a cat on the stalk, waited until the press conference had concluded, then pounced on John O’Kane of IBM.  Mr. O’Kane is a man of sweet and gentle disposition but Shumlin wasn’t doing civility this morning. The conversation turned hot quickly and people who moved in close, including one with a television camera, were startled to hear Shumlin say to O’Kane, “You’re lying.”
    Not mistaken.  In error.  Confused.  Or uninformed.
    Lying.
    There was much talk around the statehouse – then and for the rest of the day – about this breech of decorum and Shumlin, who can sense a one-degree shift in which way the winds are blowing, made a gesture of contrition saying he didn’t say it or didn’t mean it or something. 
    All of which amounts to the kind of puny little tempest that gets the juices flowing “inside the building.”  The bigger point, one thought on leaving town that night –along with the business people who had come to make their case and experienced something other than a warm welcome – was not that Peter Shumlin could be rude or that politics ain’t beanbag.  No, one’s dominant feeling – aside from a vast relief at getting out of town – was that perhaps the business community had at last seen, up-close and personal, the face of the enemy.  And that maybe we are reaching the point  -- that level of pain -- that Snelling said needed to be reached before the business community would organize and defend itself.
    Question is – might it not be too late?

Comments

[Green Mtn Punter]

Is the Counter-Revolution finally underway?! Time to attack, attack, attack! It's time for the Opposition Party, i.e., the Republicans, to rise to the occasion, to soundly defeat the Democrats and then exercise the political power necessary to fix this mess.

[Nate Freeman]

Jeezum Crow, Art, when are you going to finally point out some of the advantages Vermont businesses enjoy? Like Vermont's cheaper than average labor force, for example.

I say this being a business owner, and frankly I find most of the whining about how difficult it is to run a business in Vermont is the CoC's way of shooting itself in the foot. Why would I want to join the Chamber if all it can muster is how awful it is to do business here?

There are legitimate views on both sides, and it's unfortunate everyone got so huffy in Montpelier. Yankee has taken two hits in recent memory, this session and last; and despite what any one says about it, two facts remain: we need affordable energy and we need to ensure that the facility remains safe, especially after last year's multiple safety issues.

Is this a Republican vs. Democratic issue? Doubtful. This is a pragmatic reality polarized by certain politicians and bloggers, including you in this particular post.

Art, I hear so often about your fantastic credentials, but frankly I sometimes consider you only to be as apt an observer of Vermont as say, Frank Bryan. Since you are truly more qualified than so many other people, why not offer intelligent, moderated comments instead of Us vs. Them diatribes.

Sure, I'm a Democrat posting on a conservative blog. But I also appreciate and sometimes even agree with views and opinions from either side of the aisle so long as they are backed with a sound argument.

Higher energy prices will impact Vermont businesses, but relatively speaking it's only been of recent times that we've enjoyed lower rates than other New England states. My question is, what is a reasonable solution?

If you were to suggest, for example, decommissioning Yankee and calling for a new nuclear plant simultaneously, well that might make sense from a safety perspective. But your implied assumption that we can just let Entergy run Yankee until 2025 at full steam while it's cooling towers crumble, that really doesn't make much sense from either a safety or economic persepctive.

Nate Freeman