What bad luck.
Less than eight months after Peter Shumlin took office as governor, Vermont was hit with its worst natural disaster since the flood of November 1927.
Last Aug. 28, Tropical Storm Irene dumped more than seven inches of rain on parts of southern and central Vermont, killing six people, knocking out power for thousands of homes, damaging more than 500 miles of highway and more than 200 bridges, isolating 13 communities, and threatening the state’s economy.
Shumlin had run for governor pledging to revamp the state’s health care system, promote “green” energy, put fewer non-violent offenders in prison, and create jobs. He hadn’t signed up to manage a crisis. Bad luck indeed.
Except, it seems, politically.
Managing a crisis, it turns out, can be a boon for an incumbent chief executive of a city or a state, sometimes even if the executive doesn’t manage it all that well. If the mayor or governor shows up at the scene, displays sympathy for the stricken, and insists that “we will rebuild,” his or her poll numbers usually shoot up.
Shumlin did all that, and more. In this case, the chief executive managed his crisis quite well indeed. At least no one has made the case to the contrary. Asked whether he knew of any criticism of the Democratic governor’s post-Irene accomplishments, one of Vermont’s most aggressive conservative Republicans said any such criticism “would just come across as sour grapes.”
Still, it’s worth asking just what was so special about Vermont’s post-storm performance – other states were hit just as hard by Irene and also recovered quickly – or whether the Shumlin administration deserves all the credit it’s getting (and, of course, claiming). After all, recovering from natural disasters is what state governments are supposed to do. Capable officials ran Vermont’s agencies and departments under former Gov. Jim Douglas, a Republican. Wouldn’t they have done just as good a job? Or did Shumlin’s policies and decisions make a discernible difference?
Maybe. Sue Minter, still officially the deputy secretary of Transportation but for now mostly the Irene recovery officer, recalled that when Shumlin first met with his top administration officials in January 2011, one of the first things he said was, “I want to bust through the silos. We work together as a team.”
“Silos” is government jargon for the tendency of each department to build itself up, all but ignoring the other departments. Shumlin was hardly the first executive in public or private life to give this kind of “work together” pep talk. But it was a sentiment he kept repeating, as though he meant it. When officials think their boss means something, they tend to alter their behavior accordingly.
That could explain why in the days and weeks after the storm, Vermont’s state government agencies, which have different and sometimes incompatible missions, displayed an uncommon level of cooperation and coordination. So did the state government and the private sector, including the construction and utility industries.
“It wasn’t just the state government, either,” Minter said. “It was amazing how the state pulled together, so you’d see contractors and (government) agency personnel working well together,” along with the National Guard, federal officials, and non-profit organizations such as the Vermont League of Cities and Towns.
The cooperation and relative lack of turf conflict might have been the result of the extent of the devastation. Rather the way Americans pulled together right after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Officials, workers and ordinary citizens in the storm-damaged areas of the state seemed to accentuate cooperation and de-emphasize self interest for at least a few weeks last year.
“People pulled together in wonderful ways,” Minter said. “I credit our governor and his leadership but I also credit the people of the state.”
Alexandra MacLean, officially the secretary of Civil and Military Affairs, but also one of the governor’s primary political operatives, also cited (by email) the Shumlin administration’s refusal to let “red tape or bureaucracy stand in the way of our emergency response or long-term recovery,” by, for instance, temporarily lifting bans on heavy transportation equipment so road repair could begin immediately. “As a result, many devastated roads — like Route 4 and Route 9 – that would have taken months to repair under normal circumstances, were open in a matter of days.”
Shumlin also made what turned out to be the smart decision to hire Republican Neale Lunderville, who had been Douglas’s secretary of the Agency of Administration, to co-ordinate the Irene recovery effort. At the time, some political observers wondered if the governor was protecting himself by arranging for a Republican to take the blame if things went wrong.
But very little went wrong. Lunderville, as Shumlin apparently knew, turned out to be a skilled coordinator of complex organizations.
At any rate, the results speak for themselves. Within days, roads were opened to isolated communities and almost all power had been restored. Before the year ended, all highways were open and passable, almost all bridges restored or replaced. And while many individual businesses suffered losses – and some closed by the flooding will never reopen – the state’s economy as a whole seems all but unaffected. Vermont’s Gross Domestic Product is higher than it was before Irene.
So Peter Shumlin gets an A for the way he handled Irene? Well, maybe an A-minus or even a B-plus. Along the way, he ran into several complications. And at the very outset, he said something that had consequences that may or may not have been unintended, but were clearly undesirable.
The complexity arose because among the buildings Irene ruined was the 54-bed Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury, the facility for the most severely ill mental patients. Somehow, some kind of replacement was needed, but what kind, where and how became a subject of disagreement within the mental health care community, between the two houses of the Legislature, and between some lawmakers and the governor.
The outcome was an agreement to build a new 25-bed mental hospital – fewer beds than the old one, but more than Shumlin wanted – in Berlin and to expand facilities for mental patients in both public and private hospitals around the state.
In the view of many experts, such as Floyd Nease, executive director of the Vermont Association for Mental Health and Addiction Recovery, that outcome is preferable to a large, centralized mental hospital.
“It puts people closer to their homes and they’re not as dependent on inpatient care,” which should be used only in the most severe cases of mental illness, he said. “I think it’s the model for the future.”
But right now there are not enough beds for psychiatric patients, and other experts worry that the new plan relies too much on private hospitals, especially because one of them, the Brattleboro Retreat, is under investigation after the death of a patient there last January (as reported in VT Digger last week.
As to that thing Shumlin said … well, one thing he said was, “We’ve got to get in here and get this work done. Irene left a mess behind and it’s got to be cleaned up.” In and of itself, that may be unobjectionable, in part because it’s so vague. But exactly how some people interpreted what he said is not in doubt: they thought he said, “Get that heavy equipment into the rivers and dredge them out.”
And so they did. Town governments and individual Vermonters dredged, scoured and straightened 406,000 feet, or 77 miles of stream, according to a report by biologists at the Fish & Wildlife Department. They were apparently convinced that if they made the river deeper, it wouldn’t flood as much, which is sometimes true, but only at the cost of worse flooding downstream.
Asked if the governor or his aides now acknowledge that lifting the restrictions led to some excessive dredging, MacLean tersely replied, “No.”
To say the least, that assessment is not universally accepted among environmentalists, anglers, scientists, or even many officials of Shumlin’s own Agency of Natural Resources and its Fish & Wildlife Department. Without, of course, implicating the governor, a Fish & Wildlife report noted that “activities such as channelization (and) excessive streambed excavation…greatly reduces (sic) the quality and diversity of aquatic habitats necessary (for) fish populations.” The dredging that followed Irene, the report said, leads to “very poor aquatic habitat and will take many years, if not decades, to recover.”
Also without blaming Shumlin, ANR Secretary Deb Markowitz acknowledged that “in some places, people over-did (dredging).” At the Vermont Natural Resources Council, Kim Greenwood, the water program director, was less restrained. Noting that some dredging continued more than a month after the floodwaters receded. Greenwood, a scientist with a degree in aquatic resources, said, “It went far beyond what was necessary.”
The governor was definitely not helpful. He sent the message, “go ahead and dig.”
Well, nobody’s perfect, and the over-dredging is not expected to hurt the governor politically; voters who care about the environment generally support Shumlin and are hardly likely to vote Republican. By and large, thanks to how Peter Shumlin did his job, Vermont is recovering as quickly as possible from Tropical Storm Irene.
Except, of course, for those 77 miles of river.
