This commentary is by Don Keelan of Arlington, a retired certified public accountant.
It appears that in Russia, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the infamous Wagner Group and the recently aborted coup, was not only in charge of a sizable military force but also hundreds of companies that do business within Russia, Africa and the Middle East, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.
President Putin allowed his former St. Petersburg boyhood neighbor to gain control of Russia’s internal and external operations in communications, security, media, medicine, food distribution, mining and transportation. The Wagner Group’s annual income was billions of dollars.
Much of the Russian government operations are now in the hands of a private enterprise and, as was recently witnessed, are in a state of mutiny. Russia is in the process of dismantling the monster Putin himself had created.
This brings us to Vermont and how we have seen government business delegated permanently to independent companies and sizable nonprofit organizations in just a few decades. This is not addressing subcontracting, which is only for a short period.
For example, take the discussion happening in Brattleboro. The Brattleboro Police Department cannot police the town’s parking garage area nor around certain public buildings. The solution: Hire private security companies to provide “the policing.”
It is not much different than what takes place in Burlington: Businesses have engaged the services of a security firm to offer escort services in the evening for their employees.
Vermont has a severe drug problem requiring attention at many levels. One such level is the distribution of methadone/buprenorphine to addicts in recovery. You would think that the state of Vermont’s health department would operate the clinics (storefronts) where anti-addiction measures are distributed under controlled conditions. Not in all cases. Many clinics are run by a Lewisville, Texas, company, Baymark Health Services, which operates in 36 states and four Vermont towns. It is in the process of applying to operate in Bennington.
Delegation to private companies has been a factor in our state’s correction services for years. Approximately 10% of Vermont’s justice-involved are held at CoreCivic, a privately operated prison in Tutwiler, Mississippi. The percentage used to be even greater.
The Vermont justice-involved juvenile housing has been delegated to the Vermont Permanency Initiative, affiliated with the out-of-state, nonprofit Becket Family of Services, which seeks approval for a six-bed facility in Newbury, Vermont.
The state does not have a well-staffed mental health department. It looks to the private sector to provide the social worker (interventionist) who accompanies police officers/state troopers on specific domestic intervention calls. People trained in de-escalating a situation are generally not state or municipal employees.
Because the state does not have the necessary personnel to staff a mental health agency, it has turned to the nonprofit sector. Most counties in Vermont have a nonprofit agency comprising several thousand employees, delivering mental health services.
In recent years, nonprofit organizations such as Northshire Housing in Bennington County and Champlain Housing Trust in northwestern Vermont have produced many housing units with mostly state funds or state/federal tax credits. Even though the state has a housing agency, it has assigned the business of building affordable housing to others.
I will leave it for the experts to comment on the quality of how nonprofit organizations and private companies are delivering state services. I will comment on how much of the state and local services authorized by the Legislature are not carried out by state agencies but by organizations with their governing structure, free of any input or control by the taxpayers and Vermont residents.
We can determine how big the Vermont state government is by the number of its employees, about 8,300. State government, measured by staff, is geometrically much larger when you factor in the assignments delegated to nongovernment organizations and businesses. The question is, when will it become out of balance?