Some notes and comments on the summer just past:
Last we checked, New Hampshire Republicans were threatening to impeach the lone Democrat on the state’s five-member Executive Council, Karen Liot Hill of Lebanon. They object to Liot Hill’s scouting out potential plaintiffs to challenge the new voter suppression law that they passed in the Legislature this year. Since then, Gov. Kelly Ayotte, also a Republican, nominated to a seat on the state Supreme Court Bryan Gould, a lawyer who as recently as April actually sued the state Department of Environmental Services on behalf of an affiliate of his longtime corporate client Casella Waste Systems. Hmmm.
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The Vermont Agency of Transportation has been slow to roll out a pilot program employing surveillance cameras to counteract an uptick of drivers speeding in work zones, recklessly exposing workers to injury. From mere observation, we do not doubt that this is a serious problem. But we do think that state and local road crews and utility contractors could take some additional steps to protect themselves.
One is to better coordinate multiple projects in main corridors so that drivers are not forced to run a gantlet of delays on a given route, as has happened on several routes during the current construction season in the Upper Valley. While motorists should certainly obey the speed limit at all times, mounting frustration at being funneled from one work zone into another within relatively short distances is bound to test the patience of even the best-intentioned drivers.
Along the same line, providing adequate public notice of upcoming road work would cut down on the number of drivers pressed for time who suddenly encounter lane closures or other delays they had not anticipated. It’s unreasonable to expect drivers to routinely build extra time into their daily commutes on the chance they might encounter a pop-up road or utility project.
Finally, flaggers need to make sure that their clothing is highly visible and that their hand signals to motorists are abundantly clear. We have seen multiple examples of the opposite this summer. We do not intend to blame the victims here, only to enhance the safety of those who do a thankless but important job as well as to ease driver stress.
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Give Owen Foster, chairman of Vermont’s health care regulator, the Green Mountain Care Board, credit for rare candor and eloquence in a public official. In calling out the Vermont Health Network, which consists of the University of Vermont Medical Center, two other Vermont hospitals and three in eastern New York State, Foster said this during a recent budget review: “University of Vermont Health Network does not provide health care. It’s essentially an expensive and ineffective layer of overpriced and unnecessary corporate bureaucracy that has proven itself both physically and spiritually distant and unconnected from the mission of our flagship academic medical center and the needs of Vermonters.”
The proximate cause of Foster’s ire was the network’s dramatic increases in the cost of care; the shifting of $10 million in revenue from UVM Medical Center to its three less profitable New York affiliates at the same time it was shutting clinics in Vermont; and awarding top executives a total of $3 million in bonuses last year.
A week later, the president and CEO of the UVM Health Network, Sunny Eappen, and its board of trustees announced Eappen’s resignation after three years on the job. Draw your own conclusion.
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The rush by New Hampshire conservatives to memorialize Charlie Kirk by naming legislation after him calls to mind another charismatic leader of religious impulse (although of a markedly different kind), himself an apostle of nonviolent action who was also cut down untimely by an assassin’s bullet: Martin Luther King Jr.
New Hampshire, you may recall, was the last state in the union to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day, some 17 years and many legislative battles after President Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill in 1983 making it a federal holiday.
Reflection on that long timeline led us to revisit some of King’s speeches, and we found words there that resonated at this moment when democracy is on the ropes. These were delivered in 1965 in the context of the civil rights movement, and are excerpted here: “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. . . . I know you are asking today, “How long will it take? . . . I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because ‘truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ How long? Not long, because ‘no lie can live forever.’. . . How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
