Lowell church gets a new steeple

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Posted on June 19, 2013 by nataliehormilla

Omer Roberge (left) and stepson Brian Dodds top the new steeple of the Lowell Congregational Church with a new stainless steel cross on Saturday. Over 140 hours of work went into welding the cross, which was created by students at the North Country Union High School Career Center. Photos by Micaela Bedell

by Micaela Bedell

LOWELL — A new steeple was installed on Lowell’s 72-year-old Congregational Church building this past Saturday.

Open the doors of Lowell Congregational and you’ll find a large, diverse family, said member Becky Erdman at Saturday’s steeple raising. But the congregation wasn’t always so big, and a new steeple wouldn’t have been possible without material donations and volunteer work from an influx of new members.

“It’s literally standing room. We have to put chairs in the aisles,” said Mrs. Erdman of the 30- to 80-member increase in membership.

Verniece St. Onge, the longest participating member of the congregation at over 50 years, attributed the increase in membership to “young blood.”

“We’ve got a young family here with a new pastor,” she said. “And a choir, which we haven’t had in years. We’re just booming. We’re full of life again.”

Mrs. St. Onge and others attribute recent membership increases to Pastor David Dizazzo.

“When this pastor took over full time there was just — I don’t know. People were affected,” said new member Don Nolti. “He’s a great Bible-believing, Bible-preaching pastor, which is what attracted me.”

The Lowell Congregational Church acquired a new steeple Saturday. The process took more than four hours, and over 20 congregation members gathered to watch.

A new steeple tops the Lowell Congregational Church.

Pastor Dizazzo, who gave his first sermon in the church on January 1, 2012, calls it more of a “right place at the right time” situation. As he watched the beginning of the installation process, he mused on the symbolism of raising a cross higher onto the church.

“It’s very symbolic to us because, as a church, the goal is to lift Jesus higher,” he said. “As we lift him up in our own lives, on top of the church is also this stainless steel cross.”

After a new church steeple was installed on Saturday, Lowell Congregational Church Pastor David Dizazzo embraces member Omer Roberge (left) in celebration. Former Pastor John Genco’s wife, Ruth Genco, admires the steeple, and other members of the congregation clap for Mr. Roberge.

Mrs. Erdman agreed that the cross is symbolic, but took it further.

“It’s a very modern cross going onto a very conservative church building,” she said. “And [the combination] is going to work. Because that’s exactly what’s going on inside.”

It took more than four hours to put up the new steeple Saturday morning. It was done by congregation member Omer Roberge and his stepson Brian Dodds. Over 140 hours went into welding the cross that topped the steeple, a product of North Country Union High School’s Career Center. Instructor Roger Wells led seniors Ben Duranleau and Calvin Peacock and junior Paige Gagnon on the project.

Mr. Dodds constructed the base for the steeple, and roof brackets were donated by Guay General Repair and Steel in Newport Center. Desrochers Crane Service in Derby also donated some time and equipment.

As the 170-year-old bell of Lowell Congregational rings to announce the new addition there are smiles all around. The church has never had a steeple, but as eight-year-old Caleb Dizazzo put it, “This church was made for a steeple.”

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O’Hagan case: Fletcher sentenced to 15 years, eight months

Posted on June 12, 2013 by nataliehormilla

Mary Pat O’Hagan was a dedicated community volunteer, mother and grandmother, and organizer of the Sheffield Field Day each Labor Day. Photo courtesy of the O’Hagan family

by Bethany M. Dunbar

RUTLAND — A suspect in the 2010 murder of Mary Pat O’Hagan of Sheffield was sentenced in U.S. District Court hereTuesday to 15 years and eight months in prison for producing child pornography. Once Richard Fletcher, 26, of Sheffield, serves his jail time he will face a lifetime of supervised release under a long list of strict conditions.

Chief Judge Christina Reiss ruled that she had been convinced by a “preponderance of the evidence” — after two days of testimony — that Mr. Fletcher was, in fact, involved in cleaning up the crime scene at Ms. O’Hagan’s home after she was murdered almost three years ago, and that he offered the use of his truck to move the body. Soon after that, he had the truck crushed.

The child pornography and murder cases are completely unrelated, but the sentencing for the first one was overshadowed in the two-day sentencing hearing by testimony about the murder.

Federal prosecutors made an effort to take over where state prosecutors left off in punishing someone for the murder of the beloved grandmother in Sheffield.

The state prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General Cindy Maguire, has said the state does not have enough evidence to prove Mr. Fletcher’s involvement beyond a reasonable doubt — the higher standard that would be needed to charge and convict him for homicide in state court.

Assistant U.S. Attorney William Darrow had asked the federal judge to consider increasing the sentencing guidelines for child porn, which calls for a 15-year minimum sentence. The charge was that he met a 12-year-old girl from Utah online and convinced her to send him pornographic photos of herself from her cell phone.

Federal sentencing rules allow the judges to consider all sorts of information about the defendant’s past, including criminal activity for which the person has not been convicted.

Mr. Darrow asked the judge to add five years to Mr. Fletcher’s minimum 15-year sentence — based on his alleged involvement in Ms. O’Hagan’s murder.

It was an effort that failed. While the judge ruled that she was convinced of Mr. Fletcher’s involvement, she was not convinced that the sentencing guidelines should be increased due to that factor.

Instead, she sentenced him to the highest possible sentence within the guideline, which was 15 years and eight months. That sentence will not start until Mr. Fletcher has served the rest of a state sentence for unrelated crimes. That sentence runs until February of 2016.

Many of the O’Hagan family members sat through two days of sentencing in hopes that, in their minds, justice would be done. To that end, they said after Tuesday’s hearing, they felt “outraged and appalled.”

“Obviously we think our mother’s worth a lot more than eight months,” said her son Matt O’Hagan.

One of the judge’s decisions was that the O’Hagan family would not be allowed to testify as victims.

“It’s not that it’s not important,” Judge Reiss said. “It would abuse my discretion.”

The O’Hagans said they were disappointed but would not give up, and they would continue to follow the court process. Two other men prosecutors believe were involved in Ms. O’Hagan’s face unrelated charges.

The O’Hagans also made a plea in front of two local television stations and three newspapers for anyone in the Sheffield area who knows anything that hasn’t been presented yet to come forward. If no more evidence is found by September, the three-year statute of limitations will run out on the crime of being an accessory after the fact, such as cleaning up the crime scene.

They also suggested Vermont law should be changed to increase the statute of limitations, or to allow a charge of felony homicide. That charge could come into play if a person, or a group of people, commit a crime and a killing occurs as part of it. Anyone in the group could face the charge, even if only one of the people pulled the trigger on the gun.

Two other people who prosecutors believe were involved in the death of Ms. O’Hagan are in court for other matters. On Wednesday, June 12, Michael Norrie, 22, of Sheffield is scheduled for a change of plea for being an unlawful user of controlled substances and knowingly possessing a .22 caliber revolver, knowing or having reason to believe it was stolen.

Vermont State Police did multiple interviews with Mr. Fletcher, Mr. Norrie, and Mr. Norrie’s brother Keith Baird, 31, who is charged in state court with 48 counts of violating an abuse prevention order and being an habitual offender.

Police officers in front of the O’Hagan home just after she was reported missing in September of 2010. Photo by Joseph Gresser

The court heard tapes of police interviews with Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Norrie, including confessions. A corrections officer, Katina Farnsworth, testified that Mr. Fletcher had told her he’d been involved in the O’Hagan death and wanted to get it off his chest.

Also testifying was an inmate who had been Mr. Fletcher’s cellmate. The inmate, Aaron Smith, said he had talked to both Mr. Norrie and Mr. Fletcher about the O’Hagan murder.

Mr. Smith, who is awaiting sentencing on a charge of receiving child pornography, testified that he was hoping his cooperation in this case would help him get a lighter sentence in his own case.

“Mr. Smith has a lot on the line here, but since I’m the sentencing judge, I’m aware of that,” said Chief Judge Reiss.

She said she would take his motivation into consideration.

Mr. Smith went through a detailed description of Mr. Fletcher’s confession to him about what had happened.

“He was concerned that Norrie was going to spill his guts,” said Mr. Smith. “Even though he was extremely proud that there was no evidence.”

As outlined by Mr. Smith, Ms. O’Hagan was accidentally killed by Mr. Norrie, who shot her while the other two were robbing her house. Mr. Fletcher cleaned up the crime scene, and the others used his truck to get rid of her body.

Mr. Fletcher’s attorney, Karen Shingler, cross-examined Mr. Smith about the charges against him, including describing some of the images and videos police had found on his computer.

Once testimony was done, the judge asked Mr. Fletcher if he had anything he’d like to say.

“I just want to say I’m sorry for my crimes your honor,” he said.

The O’Hagans said they hope the memory of their mother will shine through in all of this, a woman who was a pillar of the community.

“There’s a lot of people just like her,” Terry O’Hagan said, noting that the reason his mother even knew Mr. Fletcher was because she had helped him with an adult education class.

“She was helping Richard Fletcher get his GED,” he said.

He said the community of Sheffield and the surrounding towns have been so good to the family, he is glad at least that the names of the perpetrators are now known at least. It will mean even if they don’t spend time in jail for this, people will know who they are, he said.

“They know what to look out for,” he said.

Matt O’Hagan thanked the Vermont State Police for their two years of efforts and for the help of the press.

“You left us to our privacy when we asked it, and we appreciate that,” he said.

contact Bethany M. Dunbar at bethany@bartonchronicle.com

O’Hagan case: Police testify about homicide confessions

Posted on June 5, 2013 by nataliehormilla

Mary Pat O’Hagan was a dedicated community volunteer, mother and grandmother, and organizer of the Sheffield Field Day each Labor Day. Photo courtesy of the O’Hagan family

by Bethany M. Dunbar

copyright the Chronicle June 5, 2013

RUTLAND — Vermont Assistant Attorney General Cindy Maguire told a federal judge last week she does not have enough evidence, at this time, to prosecute Richard Fletcher in Vermont District Court for killing Mary Pat O’Hagan more than two years ago.

Yet much of the rest of the day was spent in a “condensed homicide case,” as the federal prosecutor put it, in United States District Court here.

On its face, the sentencing hearing was meant to determine how much time Mr. Fletcher should spend in jail for creating, receiving, and possessing child pornography. But prosecutors argued that he should serve more time for that offense if he was also involved in an unrelated killing.

In a complicated twist of the rules of sentencing in two different court systems, Chief Judge Christina Reiss of the U.S. District Court told attorneys in court on Wednesday, May 29, that she would listen to evidence of the homicide.

“The law is fairly firm,” she said, that she can consider this evidence. “I am less convinced as to how it can be used.”

Ms. O’Hagan was a beloved grandmother and community volunteer who lived in Sheffield. She was 78 years old when she was killed. She was missing for a month before her body was found in the woods in the next town.

Mr. Fletcher is 26 years old and lives in Sheffield.

Assistant U.S. Attorney William Darrow has yet to spell out a recommended sentence to the court, but he has asked the judge to consider a longer jail term based on criminal activity Mr. Fletcher was likely involved in — even though he has never been charged for it or convicted of it.

In a lengthy sentencing memorandum filed May 17, Mr. Darrow spells out the evidence to suggest that Mr. Fletcher and Michael Norrie, 22, also of Sheffield both had a part in the death and disposal of the body of Ms. O’Hagan on September 10, 2010. The memo says Mr. Fletcher knew details of the crime scene and the scene where the body was found that were not known by anyone but police and the killers. It also includes Mr. Fletcher’s confession, although the descriptions of the events of the night Ms. O’Hagan died vary considerably from interview to interview.

The sentencing memo says that including information about the homicide is legal in federal sentencing, where the U.S. Attorney must only have a preponderance of the evidence to talk about the past behavior of a defendant. To get a homicide conviction in state court, the prosecutors would need to meet a higher standard of proof — guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Sentencing guidelines in federal district court are not mandatory. But in order for a judge to increase a sentence beyond the guidelines, the judge must do a guideline analysis.

In Mr. Fletcher’s defense, Attorney Karen Shingler said even if the guidelines are not increased, her client is looking at 21 years in jail. That is because Mr. Fletcher is already serving time for other unrelated charges, so he cannot get credit for time served for those until February 2016. That means a 15-year sentence would keep him in jail until 2031.

The judge decided to divide the sentencing hearing into two parts. The first was about the child pornography case. The second part of the sentencing — testimony about the murder of Pat O’Hagan — started on May 29 but was not finished. The judge set June 11 to hear the rest of the testimony.

Child pornography

On November 17, 2011, a grand jury passed a seven-count indictment for child pornography. Charges include production, receipt and possession of child pornography. Mr. Darrow says Mr. Fletcher found a 12-year-old girl who lived in Utah online while he was at home on furlough from other convictions. He told her he loved her and would be her boyfriend, and convinced her to take pornographic pictures of herself on her cell phone to send to him. He told her that he would kill himself if she didn’t do it. He sent her photos of himself with a gun to his own head, according to court records.

Ms. Shingler described Mr. Fletcher, 24 years old at the time, as “a very immature kid.”

Mr. Darrow said Mr. Fletcher was not a kid, as he had already been convicted of aggravated assault for threatening to kill a man with a shotgun, and another charge of assault for threatening a woman with a knife. He was on furlough when he committed this crime, which, the attorney said, is why the sentences must be served after ones he is already serving — not at the same time.

Mr. Fletcher’s 12-year-old victim is now 15, and she flew to Vermont from Utah to testify. A slight, soft-spoken teenager, she walked to the podium and read a prepared statement. She said she met “Richie” online when she was in the middle of a hard time in her own life. Her mother was quite sick, and her father had his own issues. Mr. Fletcher gave her attention she needed at the time.

“He acted like he cared about me and made me feel important,” she said. “He would listen when I needed to talk about all the things that were happening in my life. The hardest thing now is coming to grips with the fact it wasn’t a sincere relationship. The relationship alienated me from my parents at a time when I really needed to be close to them.”

She said he called her all the time when she was in school and made it hard to focus, and he called her at night and kept her awake all night talking to him. “The worst part was the pressure he put on me to send him pictures of myself,” she said. “I was scared and overwhelmed. I was only 12 at the time, so this was definitely not what I should have been dealing with. I didn’t do any of the things a normal kid my age was doing.”

“Today is the first time I have ever seen Richie in person. Part of me still wants to believe he is the person I got to know online, but the bigger part of me knows he is not. It makes me both sad and very angry. I hope he never has the chance to hurt anyone else the way he hurt me and my family.”

Ms. Shingler argued that the case is a run-of-the-mill child pornography case and much smaller than many.

“This is a production case, small p,” she said. Mr. Fletcher received six images, did not share them with anyone, did not obtain money for them or put them online, she said.

Judge Reiss dismissed one of the seven counts in the case, saying that a person cannot be convicted of both receiving and possessing the same piece of pornography. Mr. Darrow has filed a motion to reconsider, saying the receipt and possession charges stemmed from different times. The possession count was for owning the pornography more than a week after Mr. Fletcher received it.

Police officers in front of the O’Hagan home just after she was reported missing in September of 2010. Photo by Joseph Gresser

Homicide

Ms. O’Hagan’s sons, a nephew, and others were on hand for the sentencing hearing. At the end of the long court day, they came out to give a brief statement to the press.

“We were hoping that it would have been resolved today,” said Matt O’Hagan. “It’s been two and a half years for us. So another couple of weeks, we can wait. This is a new process to us.”

He added, “We’re hoping for a positive outcome.”

For much of the afternoon the family watched as police investigators took the stand. They then listened and watched as tapes of police interviews were played in their entirety, a prerogative Ms. Shingler asked for in order to put Mr. Fletcher’s confessions into context — and possibly to raise issues of whether or not the confessions were legal.

“We’re not saying that the state of Vermont will never bring a murder charge against Mr. Fletcher,” said Mr. Darrow. “We’re saying it is not likely,” given the current state of the evidence.

“Would you then ask me to resentence Mr. Fletcher?” asked the judge. She asked if Mr. Darrow wanted a split sentence — one for child pornography with a specified amount of extra time tacked on for homicide.

“I would have to carve off a portion of the sentence,” she said.

Mr. Darrow said he did not expect a two-part sentence with a certain amount of time set for the homicide. Should Mr. Fletcher ever get convicted of homicide, the sentencing judge could consider running the homicide sentence concurrently with the existing sentence, Mr. Darrow said. (In other words, the sentences could be served at the same time.)

Lieutenant J.P. Sinclair of the State Police was the first to take the stand. He is the forensic liaison with the crime lab and was in charge of the team at the crime scene. He described the crime scenes at Ms. O’Hagan’s home and an old class-four road in Wheelock where the body was found later.

Ms. O’Hagan was shot in the head with a small-caliber gun.

Photos of the scenes were displayed on television monitors around the courtroom, but a photo of O’Hagan’s body was not shown during the hearing May 29.

Ms. Shingler argued that it was not necessary.

“It proves nothing, supports nothing that is in dispute,” she said. She said the prejudicial impact of showing it outweighs any advantage. Mr. Darrow said the condition of the body is an issue in the case, as are items at the scene where she was found. The judge suggested the attorneys could stipulate that the body is, indeed, Ms. O’Hagan.

State Police Detective Sergeant Jason Letourneau testified about interviews with Mr. Fletcher, in which he described details of the scenes that were not known publically. In the first interview, Mr. Fletcher said he’d heard things about the crime scene and that he knew rumors were going around town about him and Michael Norrie.

“She was shot, killed, and supposedly raped. That’s what I heard,” Mr. Fletcher told police. “I heard there was a shot in the ceiling.”

Police had released no details of the scene, and in fact, there was a shot in the ceiling and Ms. O’Hagan had been shot. Her body was left with no pants or underpants on, and it was not buried.

Mr. Fletcher was interviewed three times, and during one of the interviews, police seem to badger him and say they know he is not telling the truth. In a second one, police spend a half an hour before the interview asking him for advice fixing a clutch in a vehicle, even asking him to look at a photo of the problem on the officer’s cell phone.

“I think it’s important for the judge to understand the kind of professional tactics that were used,” said Ms. Shingler.

“I don’t think it was your idea,” says one of the officers interviewing Mr. Fletcher in the second interview. “Did you try to help her? Was she already dead?”

“I got sucked into it,” says Mr. Fletcher at one point. “I’m not wearing a wire,” he says later in response to a suggestion by the officers that he could help them convict Mr. Norrie.

A video interview with Mr. Norrie shows him weeping and almost incoherent.

In the first interview, Mr. Fletcher says he has heard things but doesn’t admit being on the scene. In later interviews he says he helped Mr. Norrie dispose of the body. He says Mr. Norrie shot Ms. O’Hagan accidentally during a robbery.

“When I left, she was standing there alive,” he says at one point. Then he says he heard two gunshots.

To put the statements in perspective, the officer says he interviewed about 800 people who said they had information about the case, and no one mentioned the gunshot in the ceiling except Mr. Fletcher.

Police took him to the O’Hagan house, asking him to show them how he found the body and the crime scene. He said he saw an end table tipped over (which was the same end table that had been actually tipped over) and described where Ms. O’Hagan’s body was.

The judge asked to hear directly from the state prosecutor, who told Judge Reiss that the state had very little physical and forensic evidence: no seminal fluid, no blood, and no firearms directly linked to the case.

Ms. Shingler said she wanted the judge to hear the entire tapes of some of the interviews because she believes there are issues about whether or not they are admissible.

“The April 11 interview which we have yet to hear… has some clear Miranda violations,” she said. Mr. Darrow said the fourth and fifth amendments would not be applicable in this case.

Testimony will continue on June 11.

contact Bethany M. Dunbar at bethany@bartonchronicle.com

Hunters skeptical of state deer count

Posted on May 30, 2013 by nataliehormilla

by Paul Lefebvre

LYNDON — A deer hearing at Lyndon State College last week may have been lightly attended, but it still attracted hunters willing to cross knives with the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“I think the deer herd has plummeted since the department took over the herd,” said Rodney Elmer from Northfield.

He said the Vermont herd, estimated at 130,000, would do better if biologists relied more on Mother Nature.

A hunter from St. Johnsbury aired his disbelief over estimates from department biologists that indicate the deer herd is healthy and growing.

“I seriously question where those statistics are coming from,” he said, adding that he has been seeing fewer deer.

He said he hunted every day of rifle season last year and saw 17 doe and only one buck.

Perhaps he would have enjoyed more success if he had hunted in Orleans County.

Recently, the department published its deer harvest report for 2012, showing that Orleans County was the hottest of spots among the three counties in the Northeast Kingdom.

Hunters there last year took a total of 1,151 deer over the course of four seasons involving archery, black powder, rifle and the special youth weekend hunt. That total far exceeded the 819 deer harvested in Caledonia County or the 231 that were taken in Essex County.

Statewide, the largest harvest of 2012 occurred in Franklin County, where just under 2,000 deer were taken.

The department’s deer project leader, Adam Murkowski, told only a dozen or so hunters last Wednesday night that the deer herd constitutes a robust population. He attributed the herd’s growth to back-to-back mild winters and a management plan intent on keeping the numbers of Vermont deer in balance with the habitat that supports them.

He said Vermont’s deer population has a fluctuating history, with numbers soaring when the winters are mild and plummeting when they are severe. Using a PowerPoint presentation of graphs and statistics, he showed how the harvest of bucks has stabilized since 2006.

Antlerless permits given out on the basis of deer density in any given zone, and the youth deer season weekend, were among the management tools he credited with bringing about that desired end.

Still unknown are the effects global warming will have on the herd. Warmer winters suggest that the herd’s population is likely to grow. But if the herd gets larger, will the state have the habitat to support it?

The ten-year West Mountain Wildlife Management plan is coming up for its renewal. Public hearings will be held on June 11 in Brighton and June 13 in Lyndon to review how the state has been managing the 22,000 acres that were acquired, mainly through the Champion Lands deal of 1991.

Mark Scott, the department’s director of wildlife, told hunters last week the department is counting on public involvement to both preserve and improve wildlife habitat.

The habitat statewide is changing, and Mr. Murkowski noted the pressure is on to keep harvest levels stable while maintaining a healthy herd.

Among the hunters present, Mr. Elmer expressed fears that the big deeryards that were crucial to the herd’s survival are disappearing. He attributed part of the decline to the way the forest is being managed, opining that hardwood is pushing out the cedar and spruce stands that deer need to survive.

“We want what’s right for the land and what’s right for the deer,” he said. “If we try to grow a bigger herd in the Northeast Kingdom and the land won’t support it, that’s a bad move.”

The hearing last week was the fourth in a series held by the department on the status of the Vermont deer herd. The fifth and final one will be held on June 5 in Manchester.

contact Paul Lefebvre at paul@bartonchronicle.com

Lake Region rocks at Parker Pie

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Joseph

On the stage at the Lake Region Rocks concert at the Parker Pie Friday night are, from left, Caleb Sweeney, Katie Lucas, Celine Marcotte, Averill Snyder, Sara Doncaster, Jared Wigget, and Isaac Seeeney. Photo by Meg Gibson

copyright the Chronicle 5-22-13

WEST GLOVER — “It’s different on a lighted stage than on the gym floor,” Jared Wiggett observed Friday night. He was taking a breather on the deck at Parker Pie during a break in a concert called Lake Region Rocks.
The stage he was talking about was upstairs in the restaurant’s Village Hall. And the gym floor was a few miles north at Lake Region Union High School, where generations of students have demonstrated their musical talents for their parents, grandparents and the community’s music lovers.
Friday’s event was decidedly different.
“It’s a lot more like a rock show,” said Spencer Perry, who like Mr. Wiggett, had already taken the small stage at the Pie several times to play or sing.
Students kept popping up in different combinations, with different instruments. Sometimes they teamed up with professionals.
One was Dr. D., their new music teacher. Sara Doncaster backed her students up on piano, sang with them, and seemed not at all like a classically trained musician with a doctorate in music theory and composition from Brandeis University.
The other three pros make up a popular local band, The Evansville Transit Authority. Kyle Chadburn, Chris Doncaster and Travis Leblanc are Lake Region alumnae.
“After all the things we did at Lake Region, it’s an honor to be asked back,” Mr. Chadburn quipped as his group opened Friday’s show.
The idea, dreamed up by Parker Pie’s events and design director, Meg Gibson, was to team student musicians up with professionals in the sort of setting they can look forward to, should music become a career pursuit.
“I just wanted to give these kids a chance to get up on the stage,” Ms. Gibson told the audience that packed the small house Friday night.
Interviewed during the break, Mr. Chadburn, lead vocalist and guitarist with his band, confessed that he was having a pretty good time.
Indeed, he said, “We’re having a blast.
“They make us think again,” Mr. Chadburn said of the student musicians. “They’re keeping us on our toes. I’m hoping this will become a yearly thing.”
Part of the fun, Mr. Chadburn said, was due to the “overwhelming enthusiasm” Ms. Doncaster has for music and the students who like to make it.
She has stepped into the very large shoes of Peter Gage, who taught music at Lake Region for 37 years. And if Ms. Doncaster’s style of leadership is a departure from Mr. Gage’s, she nevertheless brings a strong sense of continuity to the position.
She grew up on Warebrook Farm in Irasburg and graduated from Lake Region in 1982. She still has her fourth-grade clarinet music book with Mr. Gage’s hand-written annotations, she said in an interview after Friday’s show.
She is familiar with some of her present students as both a private teacher and a music teacher in the elementary schools of Lowell, Newport Center and Coventry.
One such student is Katie Lucas, who stopped the show Friday night with a stunning blues number, her voice backed up by Dr. D. on keyboard, her nephew Chris Doncaster on bass guitar, and Spencer Perry on drums.
Ms. Lucas, a freshman at Lake Region, now lives in Brownington. But she grew up in Lowell, where Ms. Doncaster was her music teacher.
Another fine voice on Friday’s stage emerged from Celine Marcotte of Barton, who started studying piano with Ms. Doncaster at age five.
Friday’s show left one with the impression that people had a wonderful time on both sides of the footlights.
And that, Ms. Doncaster said, is entirely the point.
“Performance is not about perfection,” she said later. “It’s about getting the feeling — about enjoying themselves.”
There is one sad footnote to this story. Ms. Doncaster’s commitment to her new job has forced the cancellation of a project she began in 1991, while still a student at Brandeis. The Warebrook Contemporary Music Festival, which for decades has brought composers and performers of new music to the family farm and concert halls around the area, will not take place this summer.

Prisoners favor new anti-addiction drug

Posted on May 15, 2013 by BethanyMDunbar

by Joseph Gresser

copyright the Chronicle 5-15-13

NEWPORT — Some inmates at Northern State Correctional Facility here are exploring new frontiers in prison contraband. In the past month or so, several people have appeared in the Orleans Criminal Division of Superior Court and admitted trying to smuggle buprenorphine strips into the prison.

Buprenorphine is an opiate that was developed to treat opiate addiction. It is used like methadone, but is believed to be less addicting itself.

While it may appear that prisoners are trying to smuggle in drugs to treat their own addictions, “our experience is that people who use it tend not to use it the way it was intended to be used,” said Pam Bushey, program services director for the state Department of Corrections.

Although most of those who are incarcerated have substance abuse problems, Ms. Bushey said, “We generally do not continue medically assisted treatment past 60 days.”

People who are incarcerated for fewer than 60 days and who have valid prescriptions for a drug like methadone will receive their medications, she said. (The methadone clinic in Newport does not dispense buprenorphine.) But those who have longer sentences have their dosages tapered off and no longer receive substance abuse medications after two months.

Ms. Bushey said that substance abuse treatment, as such, is not a major focus of the corrections system.

“Even though we are the Department of Corrections and part of the Agency of Human Services,” she said, “our main focus is on risk reduction.”

Risk reduction, Ms. Bushey explained, means reduction of risk to the general public from released inmates.

“Generally what the research says is while 75 to 80 percent of the incarcerated population may have a substance abuse diagnosis, the larger issues are antisocial thinking and antisocial personality traits,” said Ms. Bushey.

Drug resembles Listerine strips

Buprenorphine is produced as a tablet or in the form of a strip of film that can be dissolved by placing it under the tongue.

Dominic Damato, interim director of facility operations for the Department of Corrections (DOC), said what he calls “bupe strips” look like Listerine breath freshening strips, but are orange in color.

According to the manufacturer of the films, sold under the trade name Suboxone, the drug works by binding to the same receptor in the brain that is used by heroin or other opiates.

Suboxone combines buprenorphine with another drug, naloxone, which blocks the same receptors. The combination is intended to produce immediate withdrawal symptoms if a person tries to abuse the drug by injecting it.

Because the effects of buprenorphine seem to plateau at a relatively low dosage, taking more of the drug will not produce an increased effect, according to the label information.

DOC officials offered several possible answers to the question of why someone would risk arrest to get a drug that was designed to be difficult to abuse into the hands of inmates.

“Science lags behind the experience of abusers,” Ms. Bushey said dryly.

“You have to understand, many of our inmates who have a lifetime of substance abuse just chase the high. They’d take sugar pills,” said Mr. Damato.

He suggested that the buprenorphine strips, which are easily concealed, might also be valuable as an item in prison commerce.

In at least three cases over the past month, people have admitted trying to pass slugs, containers wrapped in electrical tape containing contraband including buprenorphine strips, through the fence at the prison. In each case the plans were broken up by police who were alerted to the smuggling plot by prison officials.

According to court files, the smuggling plots were hatched over phone lines monitored by prison guards. Mr. Damato said that every phone call between inmates and the outside world is preceded by a taped message that both the caller and the person receiving the call can hear warning that the call may be monitored.

“The criminal mind is willing to take that risk,” he said.

Mr. Damato said that buprenorphine smuggling does not appear to be a national trend yet. In fact, he said, officials at out-of-state prisons which house Vermonters were caught by surprise when the drug turned up in their facilities.

He said inmates have devised a variety of ways of trying to get hold of buprenorphine in both of its forms. In addition to passing slugs through the wire, attempts to smuggle the drug in by leaving it in a bathroom have been foiled and resulted in court charges.

Other methods of trying to get the drugs to inmates include crushing tablets and placing them under stamps or stickers on letters to inmates, concealing them in documents or newspapers, and even using dissolved strips to paint on children’s drawings.

Mr. Damato said the DOC is pretty good at stopping these attempts.

“We have a pretty good security process, but it’s not foolproof,” he said.

It is too bad, Mr. Damato added, that prisoners can’t have drawings from their kids, just because some try to take advantage of sentiment. He said the DOC is working on an e-mail system to allow more contact between inmates and their families.

Much of the problem, in Mr. Damato’s view, comes from doctors who write what he termed “frivolous prescriptions.” The result is a large amount of medically unnecessary buprenorphine at large in the community, he said.

Behind jail walls, the drug becomes part of a prison economy in which anything of value can be used as currency to buy anything from snacks to contraband from other inmates.

“That’s one reason that we have uniforms. It takes the value of clothing away, so inmates won’t change Michael Jordans for contraband,” Mr. Damato explained.

He compared commerce behind the walls to life on a desert island. “Coconuts would be valuable there,” he said, “if you had them and someone else didn’t.”

Discovery program seeks risk reduction

In its pursuit of risk reduction, Ms. Bushey said, over the past two years the DOC has instituted a new way of working with inmates to help them learn how to act in a way that will not return them to prison.

The program, called Discovery, is designed to teach inmates “to avoid rule-breaking behavior,” Ms. Bushey said.

Ms. Bushey said it is too early to have firm data on the success of the program — judged by the number of people who have gone back to prison within three years of their release — but, she said, anecdotal evidence suggests that the program is achieving its goals.

The curriculum for the Discovery program is based on principles of cognitive behavior therapy, which seeks to change people’s actions by giving them new ways to deal with impulses that might lead to trouble, Ms. Bushey said.

Earlier programs, she said, “were doing a lot of cognitive work, but not doing a lot of behavioral work.” The behavioral aspect of the program is intended to give inmates new ways to deal with the impulses that the cognitive portion of the program brings to their attention.

One of these strategies, she said, is called urge surfing. Its premise is that an urge to do something, such as use drugs, may be intense, but if it is not acted on goes away quickly, she said.

The urge surfing technique encourages people not to concentrate on the desire to take drugs, or to fight it. Instead a person is taught to pay attention to particulars of the urge, such as where in the body it is felt, and to notice how it builds in intensity and then drops off, Ms. Bushey said.

She said that inmates are also helped to see what sort of situations provoke urges and, if possible, to avoid these situations. If a person with an alcohol problem — and alcohol is by far the substance most abused by inmates — finds that he faces a strong temptation to drink when he plays cards with his buddies, it might be best for him to skip the game.

Unlike earlier attempts to help inmates, the Discovery program demands a great deal of work from participants, Ms. Bushey said. She refers to more intensive classes as an “increase in dosage.”

Completing the Discovery program requires 200 hours of class time, she said, and at least 14 weeks. When inmates’ work schedules are taken into consideration, that represents a major commitment of time and energy, Ms. Bushey said.

Another change is that the program is no longer filled primarily by people who volunteered to participate. Instead, Ms. Bushey said, inmates with a high or moderate risk of offending are picked.

In addition to working on dealing with impulses that might lead to illegal behavior, inmates are taught social skills, Ms. Bushey said. Among them she listed active listening, giving feedback, dealing with negative feedback from others, negotiating and problem solving.

Ms. Bushey is optimistic about the new program, which she said has already been tried with success in Oregon, Ohio and Washington institutions.

If she is correct the question of smuggling could be lessened as inmates learn to avoid the kind of behaviors that lead to that kind of trouble.

contact Joseph Gresser at joseph@bartonchronicle.com

Roberts’ death marks end of an era

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Posted on May 8, 2013 by Tena Starr

Marcel Roberts, real estate agent, developer, auctioneer, businessman, and iconic Northeast Kingdom character, died on Monday, May 6. Here he is at a daughter’s wedding looking much like Boss Hogg, the TV character he was nicknamed after. It was a name he found amusing, his family said. Photo courtesy of Jena Stewart

copyright the chronicle 05-08-13

by Tena Starr

NEWPORT — Marcel Roberts — real estate agent, businessman, auctioneer, and lender, the man widely known as Boss Hog — died on Monday after a long battle with cancer.

With him goes a vestige of another time in the Northeast Kingdom, a time when dairy farming was quite a different business than it is today, and when what happened to Northeast Kingdom land was less of a civilized matter.

Mr. Roberts was colorful, controversial, and clever, an iconic Northeast Kingdom character who drove a white Cadillac, wore a flashy diamond ring, and was nicknamed Boss Hogg after a character in the Dukes of Hazard TV show.

He was, however, a far shrewder man than his TV counterpart. A self-made man, a farmer himself at one time, he went on from poor roots to become a well-to-do man and a mover and shaker in the volatile world of dairy farming and land sales during the 1980s, a man who had a mixed relationship with the farmers he mostly made his money from.

Mr. Roberts’ name will forever be associated with a time in the Northeast Kingdom when small dairy farmers were rapidly going out of business, but there were always others waiting in line for the cows, buildings, machinery, and land that Mr. Roberts both bought, sold, and even financed.

In an interview with this paper in 1988, Mr. Roberts insisted there was little future for the small, family dairy farm in Vermont, and made no bones about his own thinking:

“Every goddamned farmer’s got a rope around his neck and his tongue’s hanging down to his toes,” he said in his typically flavorful, and straightforward, language. “It’s a hell of a feeling to see some of them walk away with the wolves snapping at their heels, after them for money, and they don’t have it.”

Mr. Roberts himself was sued more than once by farmers who believed he was, in fact, one of those wolves, a man who lent them the money to get in, or stay in, business, but then turned around and foreclosed, or took back their cows when they were struggling.

That was Marcel Roberts, viewed as a fiend by some, a friend, often of last resort, by others.

“I can’t say anything bad about him,” said Roger Lussier, who calls himself a business friend and was a longtime lender and president of the Lyndonville Savings Bank who often worked with Mr. Roberts. “He was a market maker. He created a market for a lot of people. I begged him to go to auctioneer school. No, I can’t say anything bad about him.

“Years ago everyone was putting farmers in business,” Mr. Lussier continued. “The way the market went there was enough money to operate small farms. I really miss those small farms. It changed kind of fast. I loved doing business with farmers. Far as I’m concerned, farmers were the most honest around. Marcel helped out a lot of guys. He took money from his own pocket when they couldn’t get money somewhere else. His word was good as gold. I can’t say nothing bad about Marcel.”

Mr. Lussier vigorously defended Mr. Roberts in a 1987 lawsuit where the real estate agent was accused of illegally repossessing cows he’d sold to an Albany farm couple. The trial was one of many instances where Mr. Roberts was portrayed as both a sharp wheeler dealer and one of the few men farmers and people with bad credit could turn to for help.

At that trial, which Mr. Roberts lost, Mr. Lussier argued that the verdict would be a serious blow to farmers with shaky credit. People who need co-signers for a loan — and Mr. Roberts often did co-sign loans — will have a far tougher time getting loans if co-signers are afraid of getting sued, Mr. Lussier argued.

“Years ago, when you financed people, they came and thanked you for helping them out,” he said at the time.

“Marcel was basically one of a kind,” said Barton lawyer Bill Davies, who once represented Mr. Roberts in a lawsuit, and who was also sued by Mr. Roberts.

“He was from a different era than we have today. He was very personable and he certainly was bright. I do think that Marcel, while being a shrewd business person, generally thought he was helping the people he was involved with.”

His family said they are aware Mr. Roberts’ long career was often a controversial one, but they want people to know the generous, kind-hearted side of him as well.

His daughter Lori said she’d like him to be remembered for his good heart. “He helped so many people.”

Family members said he helped friends and acquaintances who were short of money to buy Christmas gifts for their children, he paid for one woman’s trip to Hawaii to see an injured family member, and he helped many others with money or time.

“These are all things people never knew about him,” said Stella Roberts, his wife of 51 years.

He acquired the nickname Boss Hogg — a name that amused him — when David Turner, a business friend, bought him a white Stetson hat. “The name just stuck,” Mrs. Roberts said. “He thought it was a big joke.”

He was born in East Albany on the farm his father worked; his mother was a real estate agent. And he was a farmer himself, his wife said in an interview at their home on Tuesday.

“We started out on a 1,000-acre farm in Lowell,” Mrs. Roberts said. At the time, they were 19 years old. “The neighbors said we were like kids playing house.”

But farming is no game. It was a hard life, still is, and it can be a hard one in which to turn a dollar. Later in life, Mr. Roberts expressed little sentimentality about farms, which he believed had to be operated as a business.

“He thought there was probably an easier way to make a living,” Mrs. Roberts said about her husband. “So he went to auctioneer school. By then we had three little girls. He practiced in the barn auctioneering the cows, the kids, everything.”

Sue Rhodes, one of Mr. Roberts’ daughters, joked that she’s still around, so apparently no one bought the kids.

Mr. Roberts’ first farm auction was the Lowell farm that he and his wife had owned and operated for five years.

The family moved to the Lake Road in Derby, and the prime years of Mr. Roberts’ career as an auctioneer took place there, Mrs. Roberts said.

At the age of 12, his daughter Lori, who now runs Roberts Real Estate, Inc., became his scribe, meaning that when there was an auction she wrote down what was sold, to who, and for how much. She said it was not uncommon to be taken out of school to work at an auction.

“I learned a lot more than I would have sitting in school,” she said.

Mrs. Roberts was the cashier.

In 1988 Mr. Roberts was still going strong. In an interview that year he said he had no idea how many auctions he’d held, but he was certain it was a record year. He was holding auctions at night to accommodate farmers working in their fields in the day.

At the time, he predicted that the combination of low prices for milk, lack of labor, and the trend toward automation would continue forcing small farmers — and himself — out of business

“I’m putting myself out of business,” he said. “But I can always jump into something else.”

One thing Mr. Roberts jumped into was the subdivision and sale of land, which he called a farmer’s nest egg.

In 2003 a Washington Superior Court judge ordered him to sell some of the subdivisions he’d created illegally through a plan that came to be known as pre-subdivision, where sellers were asked to subdivide land before sale in order to avoid Act 250 review.

In the end, he sued seven local attorneys for giving him bad advice on the pre-subdivision matter, but lost the suit.

“Marcel was a force in our community for many years and he’s going to be missed,” said attorney Greg Howe, one of the lawyers Mr. Roberts sued.

Hard feelings didn’t often linger in Mr. Roberts’ world. “You always knew where you stood with him,” Mrs. Roberts said. “That’s the way he was.”

Mr. Roberts died at age 70. In his later years he spent more time with family, and with his poker buddies, Mrs. Roberts said. He was also active in the Fraternal Order of Eagles #4329, the Orleans County Board of Realtors, and the annual Christmas Charity Auction.

Friends of Mr. Roberts may call from 6 to 9 p.m. on Thursday, May 9, at the Curtis-Britch-Converse-Rushford Funeral Home at 4670 Darling Hill Road in Newport. Funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. on Friday, May 10, at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Newport.

contact Tena Starr at tenas@bartonchronicle.com

News analysis — Power siting commission issues report

Posted on May 3, 2013 by chris@bartonchronicle.com

copyright the chronicle 05-08-13

by Chris Braithwaite

Type Writer by Anna Baker-pages

Opponents of big wind who have knocked heads with devel

opers in front of the state Public Service Board (PSB), and lost, will find no magic bullet in the final report of the Governor’s Energy Generation Siting Policy Commission, which was released Tuesday.
But they may find a few encouraging words.
Developers of big wind projects will be relieved, if hardly surprised, that the commission would leave the permitting process in the hands of the PSB. It’s a process they’re familiar with, and appear to have mastered.
Developers may, however, feel that in its effort to fix a process that “lacks sufficient clarity, transparency and predictability,” the commission has made recommendations that would make their job more difficult.
One lobbying group, Renewable Energy Vermont, went public within an hour of the report’s release with a statement of “significant concern with some of the recommendations, which threaten to take Vermont’s energy progress backwards.”
Although the commission would probably deny it, its 103-page report is really about industrial scale wind projects. Governor Peter Shumlin didn’t mention renewable energy — let alone wind energy — when he created the small commission with the very long name last October.
He asked it for “guidance and recommendations on best practices for the siting approval of electric generation projects larger than the net metering threshold, and for public participation and representation in the siting process.”
But it was created in the aftermath of some very bitter battles over two big wind projects in the Northeast Kingdom. The Governor, an enthusiastic advocate of big wind, was taking some heat, and the Legislature was about to take up a bill that would impose a moratorium on such projects.
If the commission’s political purpose was to deflect any move against big wind, it seems to have succeeded. As Paul Lefebvre reports elsewhere in this week’s paper, the wind moratorium bill is limping into a committee of conference as a study, which will give due consideration to the recommendations of the Governor’s Energy Siting Policy Commission.
The commission recommends that communities have a bigger say in the power siting process — but there’s a catch.
The communities involved are large, the collections of towns that make up each of the state’s 11 regional planning commissions (RPCs). In this area, that would be the Northeastern Vermont Development Association.
The commission would set the 11 RPCs to work on “energy guidelines, policies, and land use suitability maps as part of their regional plans.”
And it would have the state give each RPC $40,000 to accomplish the task.
Properly drafted, the commission says, such plans should be “dispositive” before the PSB. That would seem to mean that if a developer proposed a project that didn’t fit the regional plan, the PSB’s answer would be a firm “No.”
That recommendation was singled out by Renewable Energy Vermont. Regional planning commissions, it said, “neither have the staffing resources nor the expertise to be energy siting experts. They should not be put in that role.”
But here’s the catch: The regional plans — individually and collectively — would have to pass muster with another state entity, the Public Service Department (PSD).
Here’s the language: “Once updated, the elements of each regional plan affecting energy will need to be reviewed by the PSD, concurrently with other updated regional plans to determine both individual plan consistency and — in the aggregate — overall statewide consistency with the legislated energy goals and the CEP (Vermont’s Comprehensive Energy Plan).”
The commission is careful to say that “for a region to simply opt out or construct a blanket prohibition against any particular technology does not constitute adequate planning….”
Only after satisfying the PSD would regional plans be “dispositive” before the PSB.
And the state’s renewable energy goals are extremely high. Among them, 25 percent of all energy from in-state renewables by 2025, and 75 percent of all electricity sales from renewables by 2032.
The power this proposal would put in the hands of the Public Service Department led one commission member to issue a two-page dissent.
It comes from Louise McCarren, who was the first woman to head the PSB, under Governors Snelling and Kunin, and who also served as commissioner of the PSD.
She writes: “A fair interpretation of the proposal is the that the PSD will have the authority, if it determines that in aggregate there has been insufficient land designated for the siting of electric generation, to specify regional and municipal land use obligations and locations for generation siting….
“This centralization of decision making regarding electric generation site selection reduces the role of municipalities, may relieve developers from working closely with municipalities, and enshrines the non-statutory CEP as the controlling land use document.”
If anyone should understand the levers of power in utility regulation it would be Ms. McCarren. And her dissent suggests that, while appearing to put much more power in the hands of regional planning commissions, the proposal in fact would pass that power up to the commissioner of public service, who is an appointee of the Governor and serves at his or her pleasure.
Ms. McCarren, indeed, puts into simple English something critics of big wind have been struggling to articulate for years. If renewable energy siting decisions are driven by the Legislature’s explicit renewable electric energy goals and by the administratively generated Comprehensive Energy Plan, these become the state’s “controlling land use document.”
That’s what happened to Lowell Mountain, and to Sheffield Heights.
And that realization is what recently led Senator John Rodgers to say that these very specific goals should be scrapped, and Vermont should start to plan its war on global warming all over again.
The commission, in fact, cites an alternative goal early in its report, straight out of Vermont statutes: “by 2028: 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions; 75 percent by 2050.”
That goal targets the real culprit, greenhouse gases, rather than a single source that is actually remarkably clean in Vermont, electric power. And that would make possible a much more cost effective attack on the problem that could include the big greenhouse gas sources in Vermont, heating and transportation.
That’s what one of the Lowell Mountain project’s most articulate critics, Ron Holland, tried to tell the PSB in 2011. The board could only reply that, given the Legislature’s specific commitment to in-state renewable electric power, wind was the most efficient alternative. Thus the towers on Lowell Mountain would be in the public interest.
The commission made passing reference to Dr. Holland’s perspective on Tuesday. In a section called “cross-cutting recommendations” its report calls for “consideration of economic efficiency and least environmental damage with particular attention to climate change.”
But that brief, rather obscure sentence, buried in a very long report, is unlikely to save a single ridgeline.
The full report is available at http://sitingcommission.vermont.gov/publications.

contact Chris Braithwaite at chris@bartonchronicle.com

Lake Region ranked third among Vermont high schools

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Posted on May 1, 2013 by BethanyMDunbar

by Tena Starr

copyright the Chronicle 5-1-13

Lake Region Union High School has been named the third best public high school in Vermont for 2013 by U.S. News and World Report, which annually ranks high schools throughout the country. Last year it ranked Lake Region seventh best in Vermont.

For 2013, Lake Region is number 1,223 out of the 21,035 public schools in 49 states and the District of Columbia that were reviewed — all of the U.S. public high schools with enough data to analyze.

Montpelier High School is considered the best high school in Vermont, with Oxbow second. In order to receive a ranking, a school must be rated a gold, silver, or bronze medal school. In Vermont this year, nine schools earned a silver medal, and three earned a bronze. The rest were not ranked.

Lake Region Principal Andre Messier said he’s certainly proud. Like any set of statistics, you take them for what they’re worth, the good and the bad, he said. But he noted that the rankings are done by a reputable organization that looks at a wide variety of factors, not just test scores.

The U.S. News ranking takes into account eleventh-grade scores from the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) tests, but it also looks at how well the school serves all of its population — not just the college bound — at how many kids are at an economic disadvantage, and how students perform given their socioeconomic circumstances.

Mr. Messier said it’s in that area, in particular, that he believes Lake Region has made great progress and excels.

Lake Region appears to have closed the achievement gap between haves and have-nots, he said. In fact, recent test data indicates that poorer students have tested higher than their more advantaged classmates at Lake Region

“When you look at the disaggregated data, the free and reduced lunch students had a higher percentage of proficiency,” Mr. Messier said.

“That’s not supposed to happen. I guess we’re an example of it doesn’t matter what your social background is — if you’re impoverished, or your parents are divorced, you can still succeed.”

He said he wants young people to have choices when they leave Lake Region. “We’ve worked hard to give kids that confidence that when they leave here, despite these barriers, despite these red flags, they can succeed.

“Our elementary schools play a key part in that as well,” Mr. Messier said. “Lake Region is getting the recognition, but it’s everyone, it’s the whole supervisory union. It goes back to our communities who support our schools. They want to make sure kids have a quality education, and that can’t be said for everywhere.”

The U.S. News report is the result of a collaboration with the Washington-based American Institutes for Research (AIR), one of the biggest behavioral and social science research organizations in the world, according to U.S. News.

The rankings are based on the principle that a “great high school must serve all of its students well, not just those who are college-bound, and that it must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show the school is successfully educating its student body across a range of performance indicators,” says a U.S. News article, explaining how the rankings are calculated.

The first step in the process is to determine whether each school’s students are performing better than statistically expected for the average student in the state.

For the schools that make it past that step, the next is an examination of how well their least-advantaged students are doing compared to the state average.

Schools that get through the first two steps are then judged on college readiness, using Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate test data. College level classes are offered in high school through both programs.

That third step measures which schools produce the best college-level achievement for the highest percentages of their students.

The report offers the following information about Lake Region:

Its student-teacher ratio is 12 to one, which is higher than the state average. The school has 31 teachers and 379 students.

Twenty-seven percent of the students tested for college readiness passed.

Thirty-four percent of the students tested were deemed proficient in math, which is near the Vermont average. And 81 percent of students tested were considered proficient in reading, which is above the state average.

About 52 percent of Lake Region’s students are considered economically disadvantaged.

Montpelier, ranked the top school in Vermont, had 80 percent proficiency in reading and 56 percent proficiency in math, with 26 percent economically disadvantaged.

Oxbow, which serves Bradford and Newbury, tested 80 percent proficient in reading and 35 percent proficient in math, with 41 percent of students economically disadvantaged.

Mr. Messier noted that in high school only eleventh-graders take NECAP tests. In the elementary schools, several grades take them.

“When we’re consistently seeing our scores up there year in and year out with completely different class profiles, that’s an indication of your program rather than, oh, you’ve got a smart class this year,” Mr. Messier said.

contact Tena Starr at tenas@bartonchronicle.com

News analysis: The high cost of clean power

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Posted on April 17, 2013 by BethanyMDunbar

by Chris Braithwaite

BARTON — Solar energy may come to town soon at the Barton Solar Farm at 1603 Glover Road. A fairly large project at 1.8 megawatts (MW), it would produce the amount of power consumed, on average, by more than 300 Vermont homes.

The project has no local permits yet, the developer said last week, and still faces the detailed scrutiny of the state Public Service Board under Section 248. What it does have is acceptance as a SPEED program, a key ingredient in the state’s effort to make a major shift to renewable electric energy.

“We’ve come out of the gate,” said developer Robert Grant of Essex County, Massachusetts. “Now we have to start running the gauntlet.”

Meanwhile the voters in Newport Center approved at Town Meeting a selectmen’s proposal for a $200,000 “Community Energy Solar Garden.”

Steve Mason, chairman of the Lowell School Board, is looking into working with a Westminster, Vermont, company called Soveren to install a solar system that would provide power to Lowell’s town and school buildings. Under a deal with Brattleboro Schools that caught Mr. Mason’s eye, the schools will pay none of the capital cost, and save 10 percent on its energy bills.

And small solar installations are popping up at homes in the area at what looks like a steadily increasing pace.

The trend to solar energy is not being driven by the fact that, with no fuel required, it’s cheap energy. It’s nothing of the kind.

But solar energy is clean energy, and in its haste to clean up Vermont’s electric energy supply, the state has compelled its utilities to buy solar energy at prices that make installations financially attractive.

Those premiums get passed on, through the utilities’ rate structure, to customers who don’t have solar panels on their roof or a wind turbine in their yard.

That’s a concern to some observers, who fear that the state’s strong embrace of renewable energy is based on more emotion than reason; that policies were adopted without due consideration of what they may ultimately cost.

There are, indeed, two programs in Vermont, SPEED and net metering, that pursue the goal of more renewable electric energy in different ways, and with no apparent coordination.

It also puzzles some energy critics that this battle to reduce the state’s carbon footprint, thus contributing to the effort against global warming, is focused on an energy sector that is already remarkably clean. Vermonters use relatively little electricity. Vermont residences, on average, consume 573 KWh of power a month, compared to a national average of 940 KWh.

In its “Vermont Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory,” the state Agency of Natural Resources said that, in 2008, electricity accounted for 4 percent of the 8.37 metric tons of carbon dioxide the state releases into the atmosphere. The bulk of carbon dioxide came from heating and transportation.

The end of contracts with the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant may have altered that picture since 2008, but utilities have turned to other nuclear plants to make up at least some of the difference.

One concerned observer is Willem Post, a frequent source of widely disseminated e-mails on the Vermont energy picture. In a recent interview, Mr. Post said he is a mechanical engineer with 40 years’ experience in the utility business.

Mr. Post is concerned about a program called SPEED, which stands for Sustainably Priced Energy Development. It supports moderate to very large renewable projects by offering premium prices for their power.

Any sort of renewable energy gets a premium price compared with the current wholesale price on the New England grid of about 5 cents a kilowatt hour (KWh). But solar power sits at the top of the heap at five times that rate, 27.5 cents per KWh. Other prices, freshly recalibrated by the PSB for SPEED’s Standard Offer program, range down to a “levelized” price (which starts lower and climbs higher over 20 years) of 25.3 cents for wind projects over 100 KW, 11.8 cents for larger wind projects, 14.1 cents for farm methane, 12.5 cents for biomass, 12.3 cents for hydro, and 9 cents for landfill methane.

SPEED projects that exceed the 2.2 MW limit of the standard offer program negotiate rates with the utilities, like the 40 MW Sheffield wind project, or are owned by the utilities themselves, like Green Mountain Power’s 63 MW Lowell project. (One megawatt is 1,000 kilowatts.)

The 2017 SPEED goal, according to its Internet site, “is to have 20 percent of total statewide electric retail sales during the year commencing January 1, 2017, generated by SPEED resources that constitute new renewable energy.”

Vermont consumes about 5.5 million MWh of power a year, so the SPEED goal is about 1.1 million MWh.

According to a recent status report, SPEED projects are already generating an estimated 570,843 MWh, a little over half its target.

That total comes overwhelmingly from big projects outside the Standard Offer Program. Led by Lowell Mountain, nine big projects are expected to make more than half a million MWh a year, while about 30 Standard Offer projects make about 54,000 MW.

Another 213,162 MWh are expected from SPEED projects “in active development,” about evenly split between four large projects and various standard offer projects.

That would bring total SPEED production to 784,000 MWh, 316,000 MWh short of its goal.

Existing Standard Offer projects lean heavily to farm methane (14) and solar (12). But on a list of pending projects that will take advantage of high Standard Offer Prices 18 are solar, five farm methane, and three hydro.

The clear preference for solar power worries Mr. Post, the engineer, because of its high, 27.5-cent cost to utilities.

He calculates that the Standard Offer projects already online cost utilities — and their customers — $3.4-million above the average New England grid power price in 2012.

If enough solar Standard Offer project were permitted to meet the SPEED goal, he calculates, the excess cost would rise beyond $50-million in 2017. And that doesn’t count the cost of the big projects like Lowell, he notes.

In SPEED, he sees a program that was not rationally designed, and is running on autopilot.

He uses the metaphor of a frog in a frying pan of water, with the stove on. The effect may be gradual, he said, “but it will eventually ruin the Vermont economy. We will end up with rates that are significantly higher than other states, put ourselves at a further disadvantage.”

But the man who bears the title of Vermont SPEED Facilitator, John Spencer, said Monday that, with their relatively small, 2.2 MW maximum size, Standard Offer projects can’t close the gap between SPEED’s target and its current and scheduled production. That would mean that the expensive solar projects Mr. Post worries about can’t be hurried forward at the rate he fears.

Mr. Spencer is executive director of a non-profit called VEPP, Inc., that serves as a sort of broker between SPEED producers and the utilities.

Under state law, he said, “I can only take Standard Offer programs at the rate of five MW a year.”

When it comes up against a capacity limit, solar energy is hampered by its low capacity factor of 15 percent.

Five MW of solar power would yield about 6,570 MWh a year.

To fill that 316,000 MWh gap by January 1, 2017, SPEED needs to add about 105,000 MWh a year.

So where will the renewable power come from?

Probably from out of state, Mr. Spencer said.

That is apparently a loophole in the program that has been devised to close the gap. In 2011, when the Lowell Wind project was being debated before the Public Service Board, the SPEED program was key to its economic justification, and SPEED projects were defined then as in-state renewable generation.

But, somewhat to Mr. Spencer’s dismay, “in-state” has been dropped from the definition. Energy from new renewable projects in other states can be counted toward the SPEED goal, Mr. Spencer said, as long as they carry their renewable energy credits with them when they cross the state line. Vermont utilities don’t need those credits, so can sell them to utilities in other states.

Robert Dostis, head of external affairs and customer relations at Green Mountain Power, confirmed Tuesday that his utility is buying SPEED power from Granite Reliable Wind, a New Hampshire project.

That will help GMP meet its 20 percent target, Mr. Dostis said. “It won’t be easy, but we’re working on it.”

Net metering

Net metering is a program designed for smaller renewable projects that are linked directly into a utility’s lines through a meter that spins backwards when the customer doesn’t need all the power he or she is producing.

For wind, methane or hydro systems, net metering offers the local utility’s retail rate for power from small renewable projects up to 500 kilowatts (KW) — compared with the 2,200 KW limit on SPEED Standard Offer projects. But people who install solar panels get a premium big enough to assure them a rate of 20 cents per KWh, a bit above the state’s average residential rate of 17.7 cents.

Not surprisingly, solar installations account for 88 percent of net metered projects, and are driving a growth rate in the program that the state’s Public Service Department (PSD) recently described as “exponential.”

Net metering goes back to 1998 in Vermont, though limits on the size of both individual projects and their total statewide capacity have been increased several times.

In a recent report on the program to the Legislature, the PSD noted that the statewide limit on net metering was raised from 1 percent to 2 percent of Vermont’s peak load of about 1,000 MW in 2002, and that was doubled again to 4 percent in 2011.

In terms of capacity, the PSD said, net metering has climbed past 20 MW statewide, and so is approximately halfway to its current 40 MW limit.

However because it is so heavily weighted to solar power with its low 15 percent capacity factor, net metering accounts for considerably less than 1 percent of the state’s power consumption.

Net metering is growing fast in other parts of the state. A state list of projects “deemed approved” from the first of this year through mid-March listed 136 statewide, but only one in Orleans County.

For people who have the means to do it themselves, net metering can be attractive. Mr. Spencer, the SPEED facilitator, installed one at his home for $15,000. Federal tax credits and state rebates reduced his cost to $10,500, he said, and he hopes the system will eliminate his electric bill of about $1,200 a year. He calculates a return on investment of about 12 percent, a rate, he notes that is “pretty hard to get in other places.”

For people who want to avoid the up-front cost or the complexity of installing their own system, companies like AllEarth Renewables and its competitors stand ready to install one at no cost. The homeowner gets a guarantee that his or her electric rates won’t rise, and the installer gets whatever tax credits, rapid depreciation and state rebates are available.

AllEarth has more recently teamed up with Green Lantern Capital to offer such deals to municipalities and non-profits like schools and hospitals that pay no income taxes. In these deals, the tax advantages go to Green Lantern’s investors, and the municipality is offered a modest saving on its electricity and a chance to buy the system at less than half its cost after seven years.

With such a deal on the table, said AllEarth spokesman Andrew Savage, “there is no sane reason an entity that doesn’t pay taxes would bond for the full cost of a project.”

Mr. Post, the energy policy critic, objects to the idea that the many projects are being financed by millionaires who, while their consumers harvest the power of the sun, are harvesting the substantial tax benefits attached to renewable projects, along with the high rates.

Meanwhile, he said in one e-mail, ordinary Vermonters are saddled with higher power rates.

The DPS study was undertaken to answer just that question from a legislator: “…whether and to what extent customers using net metering systems… are subsidized by other retail electric customers who do not….”

The study found that they were not. But that was only after a cash value was factored in to reflect the fact that renewable energy doesn’t generate harmful greenhouse gasses.

Without that calculation, the study showed that net metering costs exceeded its benefits by 0.6 cents a KWh for fixed solar installations, 1.5 cents per KWh for solar systems that track the sun, and 9.1 cents for a 100KW wind generator.

Rian Fried has made a close study of renewable energy for his company, Clean Yield Asset Management, which evaluates investment opportunities for its clients in terms of both financial return and social value.

The company decided some time ago not to recommend any large wind projects, but has invested in solar companies. Mr. Fried recently installed a net metered system at his home in Stannard.

But he’s not sure anyone at the state policy level has a handle on the long-term effects of our pursuit of clean energy.

“I think you have a political situation in this state now, where the Green Mountain Power people, Shumlin’s people, Paul Burns (the head of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group) and a lot of Progressives are talking about the public good and completely whitewashing the numbers part of it,” he said in an interview. “There’s going to come a time again when we’re going to talk about rates.”

At Green Mountain Power Mr. Dostis said his utility looks carefully at its mix of power sources to make sure its rates remain competitive with other New England utilities.

“We have a voice in the legislative process,” said Mr. Dostis, himself a former state representative. “In the end the ratepayers will absorb any cost. We are very mindful of that, and we make sure the Legislature is very mindful of that.”

Mr. Dostis sees big changes ahead in his industry “as more and more people put on solar projects that meet 100 percent of their power needs. Their bill is zero. Other customers are paying the cost of maintaining the overall grid. It’s an issue the Legislature will have to deal with.”

At the Legislature, Senator John Rodgers of Glover has taken the position that Vermont’s renewable electric energy goals should simply be scrapped.

“My concern is that the renewable goals are driving the Public Service Board’s decisions when they’re siting these projects. I don’t think that’s how siting should be driven.

“Ridgeline industrial wind is absolutely the worst of all the possible tools at our disposal,” the senator said. Instead he’d like to see more support for “small, local stuff” like farm methane and power dams that have fallen out of service.

Canadian hydro power is another option that should be expanded, he said. “I don’t see any problem with using very reasonably priced power produced north of the border with renewable resources.”

He challenges the idea that Vermont should not only use more renewable electric power, but also generate it. “Most of the appeal of Vermont is that we have resisted destroying our environment for the sake of commercial enterprise,” he said.

contact Chris Braithwaite at chris@bartonchronicle.com