We have questions:
Why not make it easy for people to do the right thing?
This thought occurred to us while sweltering in our car for an hour and a half at the Household Hazardous Waste Collection event held this month at the Hartford Transfer Station by the Greater Upper Valley Solid Waste Management District. Make no mistake: This is a great service, and judging by the scores of people who turned out for it, much appreciated by many environmentally concerned Upper Valley residents.
But we do wonder how many of them would show up again in view of the length of time involved and the collateral environmental damage done by long lines of cars idling for hours. One solution would be pre-registration for allotted times. Another could be to establish a small, permanent hazardous waste collection station at the transfer facility that would be open for a few hours each week to make it convenient to dispose of that nasty, toxic stuff that most of us reluctantly accumulate.
It’s smart public policy to make it easy for people to do those things that should be done, a point that seems to have eluded the Hartford Selectboard when it cancelled the town’s curbside recycling program this year. We suspect that lots of material that was formerly recycled will end up in the landfill because residents will decline to go to the hassle and expense occasioned by this decision. So much for sustainability in a town that purports to embrace it.
Has anybody seen bicyclists actually using the fabulous new bike lanes installed by the state of Vermont along Route 5 in Hartford?
Because we haven’t, even with the return of seasonable summer weather. Maybe we’re just traveling at the wrong time of day and missing the throngs of bike riders — or perhaps the theory that “if you build it, they will come” requires more rigorous cost/benefit analysis.
If Dartmouth Health has money to burn on union busting and court appeals, what explains its inability to recruit physicians?
Our colleague Jim Kenyon has detailed how Dartmouth Health spent $410,000 last year on consultants to stymie a unionization effort by nurses and is now expending untold thousands of dollars more in legal fees on appealing a wrongful termination judgment. Yet primary care physicians remain in short supply at Dartmouth Health, as do physicians in specialties such as rheumatology. What gives?
Has anybody ever before seen a Major League Baseball game end on a call of catcher’s interference?
We certainly hadn’t witnessed anything like it before Monday’s Red Sox loss to the Phillies, who walked it off in extra innings on an interference call against Sox catcher Carlos Narvaez. We know and understand that lots of people find baseball boring, but for devoted fans, one of the game’s great charms is how often during a season something transpires that they have never seen before.
Why can’t Vermont state government get its act together to take care of some of its most vulnerable residents?
The abject failure of the Legislature and the Scott administration to develop an effective strategy to cope with an acute homelessness crisis is cruel but, unfortunately, not unusual. This dereliction of duty has been well documented and was brought into sharp and tragic relief again by the recent deaths of two homeless men in White River Junction.
And VtDigger reported recently that the state’s failure to build a new secure treatment facility for youths caught up in the juvenile justice system means that they are being held, sometimes for weeks, in a short-term facility that can’t fully meet their needs. Earlier this month, a 14-year-old boy had to be held in an adult prison before being transferred there.
The state closed the Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in 2020 amid credible allegations of horrific abuse. To date it still has not settled on a site for a proposed 14-bed replacement, much less started construction. This is shameful for a state that harbors liberal pretensions.
What would Jim Freedman think?
As part of her Washington appeasement tour, the Trump administration’s favorite college president, Dartmouth’s Sian Leah Beilock, is reported by The New Yorker magazine to have met with Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights. Dhillon is a Dartmouth alum who is now responsible for investigating what is alleged to be widespread antisemitism on university campuses. She also happens to have been editor in chief of The Dartmouth Review in 1988 when it published depictions of then-president James O. Freedman, a Jew, as Adolf Hitler. For those who esteemed Freedman and revere his memory, this is about as offensive as it gets.