Current News

by Alex Hernandez, President of Champlain College I came to Champlain College with a desire to help our students be “ready for work, ready for life, and ready to make a difference.” On a recent Sunday evening, I received an email from a student: “I’m launching my software company tomorrow. Can you give me some feedback?” While being a new college president can keep a person busy, I immediately dropped everything to help this student bring his idea to life. I reviewed his launch plan, we brainstormed, and I connected him with friends at the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies (VCET). We embraced this student who is trying to build his dream and make the world better.

Vermont Business Magazine Following the Vermont State Legislature’s $15 million dollar appropriation to establish a new revolving loan fund supporting educational workforce development, the Vermont Community Loan Fund has been selected by the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board (VHCB) to develop and launch this new initiative. The pool of funds will support the state’s 17 Career Technical Education (CTE) Centers located throughout Vermont. Known as the CTE Construction and Rehabilitation Experiential Learning Program and Revolving Loan Fund, the new fund will expand experiential and educational opportunities for high school and adult CTE students to learn building trades skills and work directly on construction projects.

Vermont Business Magazine The Vermont Division for Historic Preservation announces the opening of the State Historic Sites for the 2023 season. Opening on Friday, May 26, are the Bennington Battle Monument, Chimney Point, Hubbardton Battlefield, Mount Independence, President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site, and Senator Justin Morrill State Historic Site. The President Chester A. Arthur State Historic Site, closed since 2019 due to Covid, will open for the season on Saturday, May 27.

Vermont Business Magazine Bar Harbor Bank & Trust employees recently presented more than $19,000 in donations collected through the Bank’s employee-driven charitable giving program, Casual for a Cause, to nine nonprofit organizations serving Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont residents. The recipients of the donations are: Eastern Maine Community College Foundation, Kennebec Valley Community College Foundation, Lubec Community Outreach Center, Machias Area Food Pantry, and Schoodic Food Pantry in Maine; Dismas Home of New Hampshire and The River Center in New Hampshire; and BarnArts Center for the Arts and Village for Paws Rescue in Vermont.

Vermont Business Magazine Attorney General Charity Clark today sued Michael D. Lansky, LLC, which does business under the name Avid Telecom, for allegedly initiating and facilitating billions of illegal robocalls to millions of people and violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the Telemarketing Sales Rule, and other federal and state telemarketing and consumer laws. Avid Telecom sent or transmitted more than 7.5 billion calls to telephone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry between December 2018 and January 2023 – approximately 13 million of those calls were to numbers in Vermont.

Vermont Business Magazine Senator Peter Welch (D-Vermont) today addressed the New England Conference of Public Utilities Commissioners (NECPUC) in Stowe, Vermont and called for continued support for clean energy and decarbonization efforts nationwide. His remarks to NECPUC addressed the important work ahead on the 2023 Farm Bill to secure funding for initiatives to lower costs, advance clean energy, and support the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure, Investment, and Jobs Act. As chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee’s Rural Development and Energy Subcommittee, Welch plays a pivotal role in advancing clean energy, energy efficiency, and broadband deployment in the upcoming Farm Bill. NECPUC is a non-profit corporation that brings together public utilities commissions across New England to address challenges in the electricity, telecommunications, and water industries.

Vermont Business Magazine PurposeEnergy is proud to announce its commitment to build a new biogas processing plant in partnership with Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. The Saint Albans Industrial Treatment Center (“SAINT”) is a new biogas project designed to produce renewable energy through the responsible treatment of organic waste produced from food and beverage manufacturing. The project is located in St. Albans, Vermont and will serve a collection of Northern Vermont and Upstate New York-based food and beverage producers, including Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s plant in St. Albans, which will be piped directly to the SAINT biogas plant. This latest project is an extension of the partnership struck between Ben & Jerry’s and PurposeEnergy over 5 years ago at the PurposeEnergy biogas facility in South Burlington.

Vermont Business Magazine The Vermont Agricultural Hall of Fame today announced the 2023 inductees. For more than 20 years, over 95 contributors of Vermont agricultural have been celebrated with the Vermont Agricultural Hall of Fame honor. A celebratory luncheon is scheduled during the Champlain Valley Fair on Wednesday, August 30, 2023, at 12pm.

Vermont Business Magazine Widespread frost across Vermont last week is suspected to have severely damaged thousands of acres of crops in Vermont and across the region. Temperatures dropped below freezing in many areas for a sustained time causing early spring crops to freeze. According to the US National Weather Service in Burlington, many below freezing temperatures were recorded overnight May 17th into the early morning hours of May 18th, including a record low of 25 degrees Fahrenheit in Montpelier while Burlington tied its record low of 28 degrees. The owners and operators of Shelburne Vineyard in Shelburne gave a tour of some of the damage to officials on Monday, highlighting that although some damage is obvious now, other impacts are a wait-and-see process.

Vermont State Police On May 22^nd, 2023, at approximately 1645 hours, Troopers from the Vermont State Police – St Albans Barracks were notified of a missing juvenile. Investigation revealed that the juvenile was last seen the night of Thursday May 18^th, before she went missing from her residence in the night. Anybody with information on the juvenile’s whereabouts is asked to contact Trooper Finley at the Vermont State Police St Albans Barracks at 802-524-5993. The Vermont State Police would like to remind the public that harboring a runaway juvenile is a criminal offense.

Vermont Business Magazine Yesterday, the Speaker of the House, Jill Krowinski, delivered the 2024 fiscal year state budget to Governor Scott to be signed, weeks ahead of the traditional timeline. Today, she called upon the governor to sign the budget to ensure funds allocated to assist the most vulnerable Vermonters are available as soon as possible. Anticipating that Scott might veto the budget, or some other bill, the Legislature has scheduled a "veto session" for late June. “I urge Governor Scott to sign the budget without delay,” said Speaker Krowinski.

The Vermont Progressive Party stands against the current iteration of the state budget for Fiscal Year 2024. A core principle of our platform is that housing is a human right. The current version of the budget would take that away from thousands of homeless Vermonters– pushing them out of temporary housing and onto the streets by removing support currently provided by the General Assistance program. As it stands, the version of H.494 that sits on Governor Phil Scott's desk would dramatically ramp down the state's housing program for our most vulnerable residents. By the end of July, roughly 3,000 Vermonters would be left without a place to live, and forced to seek out already critically limited shelter placements, sleep on streets, or in parks.