Category Archives: Local Issues

A Distinct Smell of Fish

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Marathon, Florida incorporated as a city in 1999 for the obvious tax advantages. See, cities have taxing authority. It scrawls across Knight’s Key, Boot Key, Key Vaca, Fat Deer Key, Long Point Key, Crawl Key and Grassy Key in the middle Florida Keys, right next door to beautiful South Puffin. The population was 14 in 1820 and reached a peak of 10,626 as of the 2005 U.S. Census estimate.

8,461 souls make Marathon home today.

Marathon’s Finance Chief oversees the city checkbook on a contract basis. Bishop Rosasco & Company gets paid $384,063 for their fiscal year 2013-14 contract.

384,063 U.S. dollars.

8,461 people.

As a comparison, St. Albans City, Vermont, had a population of 6,918 in 2010. It is right down the road from lovely North Puffin. In 2014 St. Albans City, Vermont, budgeted $52,530 for finance and a huge additional cost of $9,000 for audit and audit consulting.

$384,063. $61,530
8,461. 6,918

Wow.

Taxes Going Up. No Down. No Up.

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I helped to found and was the first chair of the Parent Support Group at Missisquoi Valley Union High, the 7-12 public school my kids attended.

The new high school opened in Highgate, Vermont, just outside the village of Swanton in 1970. The school district is a union of Franklin, Highgate, and Swanton kids. An unusual series of interconnected circular buildings called pods with a network of outdoor paths serve about 1,000 students.

I never liked the name (we were parents supporting the kids and the school, not parents getting psychological help) and the architecture was a mistake in the frozen north, but I did like the group.

MVU was in trouble by the 1980s. Student morale was down. Teacher morale was down. And no one in the community liked the place.

Graduation rates were low. Teachers earned less than shelf stockers in Ames. And the moat around the school widened the town-gown divide.

We did a lot. We opened the front doors wide and drained the moat. Started a goal setting group and an arts council. Promoted the change from “junior high” to “middle school.” Championed pay parity for teachers and learning parity for students. Got the Gov on stage. Test scores rose. Salaries rose. Community spirits rose.

Unfortunately, test scores have fallen, salaries keep rising, and community spirit is back in the toilet.

I blame part of that on the isolationist feel that creeps into so many schools.

I blame more on salary creep. See, the average salary for a professional teacher is now significantly higher than the average wage for the taxpayer paying that average salary. Worse yet, Joe the Plumber sees immediate results when he does a job — the leak stops. Then Joe the Plumber sees that test scores at the professionally run school keep hemorrhaging.

And school taxes, now collected by invisible people in Montpeculiar, keep on going up.

Vermont Business Week reported that a Vermont House committee will “increase the statewide property tax rate for fiscal year 2015. The homestead rate will go up 4 cents and the non-residential rate will go up 7.5 cents under the House Ways and Means Committee proposal. In December, the forecast for the rate was 7 cents for homestead property taxpayers.

“The committee was able to reduce property tax rates because statewide school spending increases were less than expected.”

Lemme see if I have this right.

“The homestead rate will go UP 4 cents and the non-residential rate will go UP 7.5 cents…” but “the committee was able to reduce property tax rates.”

That has to win the doublespeak award for 2014.

Once upon a time a property tax reduction meant that your taxes (and mine) would go down. “The homestead rate will go UP 4 cents and the non-residential rate will go UP 7.5 cents…”

Good that we are teaching such fine arithmetic in Vermont these days. Must be those Common Core standards.

“Prove in 112 steps that a change from 94 cents to 98 cents is a decrease of 4 cents.”

Annie - the MusicalMVU has some great programs. The school musical, long a community favorite, is Annie this year. It takes the stage in the school’s world class theater on Thursday. Caroline Bright of Franklin, the 2010 Miss Vermont, is an MVU graduate. MVU won the large gold traveling trophy champion of the 2013 Vermont Treasury Cup Challenge, an academic challenge of personal finance and economic knowledge.

But.

I’m now an outsider looking in at the school my children invested in. What I see saddens me.

What I see is the state charging us more and more and the school giving us less and less.

The $15.7 million MVU budget would cost about $16,000/per student. That budget was defeated.

MVU has fewer students this year than it did in the 1980s. MVU has more “educators” this year than it did in the 1980s. MVU ranks 42 out of 53 Vermont high schools on the 11th grade NECAP Mathematics and the NECAP Reading assessments (we don’t call them tests anymore). Two Franklin County schools are in the bottom fifth: MVU at #42 and Richford Junior/Senior High School at #49. Enosburg Falls Junior/Senior High School almost made it at #39. It gets worse. MVU also ranks 79 out of 86 Vermont middle schools on the NECAP 8th grade Mathematics and Reading tests. That’s the bottom ten percent. Heck, even the top ranked Vermont school still has more kids falling behind than surging ahead.

I’m glad to report the outdoor paths between MVU classrooms have been moved inside. That didn’t help test scores.

It’s time to wrest our school back from the people who think rising taxes cost us less. It’s time to wrest our school back from the people who think the best way to fix falling test scores is to stop giving tests. It’s time to wrest our school back from failure.

 

A Day in the Life — Day 1-10

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Didya ever wonder…?

The truck developed a second issue right after Anne arrived here in South Puffin.

Flat tire.

Really flat.

All the way around.

I felt around the tread and found a screw. Knowing that one shouldn’t use screws to plug the holes in tires (they make a clickety racket underway and the heads wear down soooo fast), I stopped at the tire guy over on 107th Street to get the tire plugged. He, of course, wanted to sell me new tires. The truck rubber is older than I realized but they don’t have that many miles; I bought them in 2009, some 20K miles ago. Or fewer. They haven’t been terribly satisfactory since new, thanks to the slow air loss from all of them. I’m still unsure if that’s the tires, the rims, or the valves which have always been suspect. Anne’s Honda tires lost air, too. I always figured we got a bad case of tire valves but Anne has BFGs, too. Hmmm.

She was driving the truck and complained that the brake pedal was down to the floor. Really low fluid. Puddle. It had a leak somewhere.

Have I mentioned how much I like groveling around in the gravel under a truck?

Chevrolet trucks have an online reputation of rusted out brake lines. Another brake line had rusted out.

Note to truck owners: when one goes, replace all of them, front to back.

The shops here in South Puffin are busy and expensive. I opted for immediate and cheap.

3-Wheeled Chevy PickupStoner Steve has been a mechanic here for not quite as long as most folks can remember. He works out of a shipping container over by the docks. It’s a neat container with an air compressor, laptop station, parts shelves, and tools scattered around. Stoner Steve promised to replace the brake line the next day.

If I had an inverted flare plug I could simply block off the rear brakes which would make driving the truck to Steve’s way less worrisome. Who needs rear brakes, right? Still, we took the truck(s) over to Steve who wasn’t in his container, then shopped and came back, all without touching the brakes. OK, I had to use them on Joe’s truck, but I got from here to Steve’s container with very careful timing and a little bit of low gear on mine.

He called the parts place with an order and I made a run to buy the 3/16″ lines and rubber brake hoses and fittings he wanted.

Steve uses a nearby loading dock as his lift but he spent a couple of days “unable get the truck up there” first because there was a forklift on it and then someone else had parked on it. He did replace one brake line. It wasn’t the one that ruptured.

I spent an hour or so with Steve every day. I chased parts. I brought beer. I did see his legs sticking out from under the truck once.

Thanksgiving came and went. Black Friday came and went. Small Business Saturday came and went. After 10 days, Steve still had one brake line to do (that would be the one that ruptured), plus bleeding the brakes.

Joe and I drove over to the container on Sunday. Keys were in the truck and I drove it (very slowly and carefully) back here. I was tied up myself the next day so Day 11 came and went. Jacked the truck up in the driveway. Pulled the rear wheel. Looked at the rusty line. Chevrolet uses 1/4″ brake lines to carry the load from the front to the back of the truck, not the 3/16″ Steve ordered.

Have I mentioned how much I like groveling around in the gravel under a truck?

I made a run to the parts store to buy a 1/4″ brake line and fittings.

Installed same.

I HAVE BRAKES!

Now, what do I do with all these extra 3/16″ parts?

 

Cluster Fudge

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My second favorite fudge, layered of chocolate and Key lime, comes from Key Weird. This ain’t that.

Still, South Puffin is in about the geographic middle of Monroe County, the southernmost county in Florida, and home of that fudge. Cluster and otherwise.

Our county School District is $1.2 million in the hole again.

Regular readers might recall that the Monroe County School District has a history. A jury found former school superintendent Randy Acevedo guilty of three felonies for abetting his wife’s theft of public funds and off to jail he went. His wife, ousted Adult Education Coordinator Monique Acevedo, had pled guilty to six felony counts for stealing $413,000 from the district, although she blamed her crimes on an “undetected bipolar disorder made worse by an addiction to oxycodone.”

Alrighty then.

Enter Gov. Rick Scott who “gave” teachers a $2,500 raise this year; the boost was one of his priorities from the 2013 legislative session. So far, 17 Florida school districts have sorted out the pay raises and 50 have not.

Monroe County’s new school superintendent went a different route.

See, Mr. Acevedo and his successor, Jesus Jara, left district finances in the toilet. The unions refused to let the board reduce salaries. The electric company refused to waive the electric bills. The buses were already running on fumes. The board opted to furlough teachers, staff, and blue collar workers.

It was not a popular move among teachers, staff, and blue collar workers. They called the furloughs a “pay cut.”

“Randy and Jara spent your paychecks,” Superintendent Mark Porter told the teachers.

The furlough program has been in place since 2011 and has saved the district $1.7 million each of the past two years but it was a bad solution to a lousy problem and Mr. Porter wanted to end it.

The super tapped $1.4 million from Gov. Scott’s mandated teacher raise program to underwrite the cost of ending the furloughs.

Now state officials say the new’s plan to use the new state money is illegal. That means the state says we had to keep furloughing our employees to cover costs but we also have to give them raises while they are not being paid.

Huh?

Flag of the Conch Republic -- Motto: We Seceded Where Others FailedAs an aside, it’s mostly our (local) money. Because Monroe is considered “property-rich,” 90% of school funding is raised through local property taxes, with the remaining 10% coming from the state. That means of the $1.4 million earmarked for the raises, the state kicked in about twenty-seven cents.

There was a reason the Conch Republic seceded from the United States in 1982. It is time to remind Tallahassee we still have our flags.

Worth remembering: the word “Fudge” in this usage is not the chocolatey goodness that sticks to your fingers but rather a substitute for a fine, graphic, four-letter Anglo-Saxon term.

 

Do Not Feed the Bears

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Vermont lawmakers passed only 89 new statutes this year, and dozens of them took effect with the start of the new fiscal year last Monday.

Among the new laws, Act 200 replaced the state’s criminal penalties for possessing marijuana with civil fines. Another gave local and state officials the authority to inspect home-based breeders of dogs, cats and wolf-hybrids. A third instructed employers to “consider in good faith” requests for flexible work schedules.

The State of Vermont also made it illegal to feed bears.

Legislators did go a little overboard again this year but that one strikes me as one of those are you Nuts? rules. After all, is anyone reading this actually out there in the dooryard singing “here beary, beary, beary” and whistling?

Lordy Lordy™.

“You’ll starve!” Liz Arden said.

I know!!! I AM™ soooooooooo worried.

I want to know if the law targets only gay bears or if it is every man who might be furrier than me.

Oh.

Forrest Hammond, the state wildlife biologist, reports that bears are looking for food at bird feeders, bee hives, chicken coops, cookie jars, and the like all across Vermont.

So maybe “feeding” the bears means leaving a bird feeder out or letting them eat the chickens in your coop.

Next year, Act 1999 will make it illegal to feed burglars by leaving your jewelry on the bureau. And to feed car thieves by leaving the keys…