Salmon drops back from Senate, gubernatorial races; Vermont GOP in wait-and-see mode for 2012

Tom Salmon, Vermont State Auditor.

Tom Salmon won’t be running for governor – or a U.S. Senate seat – after all. The two-term state auditor has decided to carry on with his duties as the state’s chief CPA because, as he put it in the subject line of his email announcement, “Irene is a game changer.”

Salmon said leaving the auditor’s office would be disruptive at a time when the state faces fiscal challenges in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene. The floodwaters caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to the state in a 24-hour period. Vermont officials are still tallying the total cost of rebuilding the state office complex, more than 1,000 homes, hundreds of businesses, and dozens of roads, bridges and municipal buildings.

Salmon said he is worried about the “audit challenges” his office will confront. He recently held a meeting with the state’s audit contractor KPMG and Jim Reardon, commissioner of the Department of Finance and Management, to discuss the state’s options, given the damage to documents at the state office complex. State workers, who would be involved in the audit, have been displaced, and that complicates matters further, he said.

As a result of these factors, the timing of the audit, which affects the state’s bond rating, is at risk, Salmon said. His office is taking an inventory of the paperwork at the office complex, which housed the biggest agencies in state government – human services and natural resources.

“It’s (Irene’s aftermath) going to be part of my work for the next two years,” Salmon said in an interview. “I was humbled by devastation I saw firsthand — that really was what drove it (his decision).”

Salmon had been exploring both a run for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Bernie Sanders,I-Vt., and a race against Gov. Peter Shumlin.

The Republican Party has not yet fielded a candidate in either 2012 race. No other potential contenders have emerged for the Senate seat. Three GOPers, on the other hand, have made noises about the gubernatorial race – Salmon, State Sen. Randy Brock, R-Grand Isle-Franklin, and former Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie, who lost to Shumlin in 2010.

Prominent GOP members had said that a decision about who would run for what would be announced by Labor Day, but the holiday deadline passed without announcements in the midst of the Irene recovery efforts.

Maybe Columbus Day weekend? Don’t count on it.

Dubie is mum on the subject and won’t return phone calls. He has, however, started a political consulting firm, “Dubie Solutions,” according to a report by Peter Hirschfeld of the Vermont Press Bureau.

A recent “robo” poll shows that Dubie would lose in a second set-to with Shumlin by 8 percentage points. http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2011/08/shumlin-in-strong-shape-for-second-term-as-vt-gov.html

The other potential GOP contenders would also be left in the dust. Shumlin would beat Brock, for example, by 20 percentage points, according to Public Policy Polling.

Brock says it’s still early, and he has “no decisions to report.”

“I haven’t reached any decisions yet,” Brock said. “We still have over a year. I don’t know that there’s as much urgency as some would suggest.”

Even party insiders have said, however, that the sooner a candidate announces, the easier it will be for the GOP to raise money and broaden its political assault on the Shumlin administration.

Meanwhile, it’s up to party chair Pat MacDonald to serve as the standard-bearer. McDonald, a longtime leader in the state bureaucracy (she was a state representative and served as commissioner of Labor, Employment and Training, Motor Vehicles, Human Resources and secretary of Transportation), is no stranger to one of the most effective catapults at hand – the email blast.

McDonald sent out one such email on Friday, alleging that the governor is considering new taxes to pay for impending Irene costs (though Shumlin has said publicly that tax increases would be a last resort). She urged the governor to call a special session of the Legislature to “re-prioritize” the current budget year. In addition, McDonald says Shumlin should freeze all “non-essential” spending and “implement education finance reforms,” and lower staffing levels in school districts across the state.

McDonald calls into question the governor’s leadership and asserts that Vermont was on a “fiscally imprudent trajectory” before the storm.

Whether or not this is an effective strategy for sowing doubt about Shumlin’s handling of the Irene crisis remains to be seen.

Eric Davis, a retired Middlebury College political science professor, told Vermont Public Radio on Friday that a change in administration would set back the recovery effort by three to six months.

Listen to the VPR interview.