Current News

Vermont Business Magazine Vermont's congressioinal delegation issued the following statements on President Trump’s press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki today.

Vermont Business Magazine More than 250 Vermont schools have applied for funding to make security upgrades to their facilities. The state will award $4 million in grants by this fall to help schools strengthen security, using guidance from a statewide safety assessment conducted earlier this year. Governor Phil Scott ordered the assessments after an alleged school shooting plot was uncovered and averted in Fair Haven in February.

Vermont Business Magazine Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos was sworn in today as the President of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), at their summer conference in Philadelphia. NASS is the nation's oldest, non-partisan professional organization for state officials. Condos will serve the one year-term ending July 2019.

As a member of NASS, Secretary Condos has been very active in promoting voter participation and election cybersecurity. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the U.S. Senate Rules & Administration Committee on behalf of NASS to discuss what the states are doing to protect elections from cyber threats and attacks. Secretary Condos previously served on the NASS Executive Board as President-elect and Treasurer.

by Timothy McQuiston Vermont Business Magazine In a dramatic restructuring that will allow employee-owned Chroma Technology Corp in Bellows Falls to take advantage of rapidly expanding international markets, the company announced today that former IBM-GlobalFoundries leader Janette Bombardier has accepted the newly created position of Chief Engineering Officer.

Chroma CEO Paul Millman said Bombardier is a dynamic leader and manufacturing expert and licensed professional engineer. Bombardier said she is looking forward to helping to drive Chroma's worldwide growth while leading the company's engineering and technical functions. At IBM/GlobalFoundries, Bombardier was not only the company's senior site location executive; she also had a wide breadth of technical, management, leadership and continuous improvement positions.

Vermont Business Magazine Green Mountain Power is excited to announce that customers ranked GMP second highest for mid-sized utilities in the East Region in J.D. Power’s 2018 electric utility residential customer satisfaction study. GMP has achieved a high-ranking three years in a row, demonstrating a strong record of continued excellence. GMP’s results have risen every year over the past six years, showing a 20-percent increase in customer satisfaction.

Vermont Business Magazine Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) will host a live streamed town hall tonight in Washington at 7 pm to address the enormous disparity between the wealth of corporate executives and the wages and treatment of the companies’ workers. Sanders will be joined by workers from Amazon, Disney, McDonald’s, American Airlines and Walmart, and he has invited the CEO of each company to attend.

Vermont Business Magazine The Office of the Attorney General announced today that it has concluded its investigation of the Brattleboro Retreat related to allegations of improper Medicaid claims, finding no criminal misconduct. Other investigating agencies, including the United States Attorney’s Office (USAO), reached the same conclusion. The AGO’s investigation was conducted by its Medicaid Fraud and Residential Abuse Unit after receiving a referral from the Vermont State Auditor.

The AGO investigation did identify several areas of billing deficiencies that need to be corrected, but which did not result in net financial harm to the Vermont Medicaid program.

by Joyce Marcel There are beers. There are unicorns. There are unicorn beers. Less well known are unicorn breweries — they make the unicorn beers. Perhaps the best-known is Vermont's own The Alchemist, which makes Heady Topper, an unfiltered double India pale ale (IPA) with an 8 percent alcoholic kick and enough hops to make the inside of your mouth feel like someone's been playing a bass drum back there. (It has a sister IPA named Focal Banger that tastes like the whole marching band went through your mouth. On horseback.)

by CB Hall How much can malted grain, hops, water and a bit of yeast do for a little state's economy? Vermont's breweries numbered 58 at press time, by VBM's count, and the growth in Green Mountain State brewing continues at its almost frantic pace. It makes one wonder if beer has supplanted maple syrup as the state's trademark liquid, but it also makes one ask: How long can the boom keep booming?

Fuse, Burlington, Vermont In the past decade, there have been frequent reports about the decline in sports participation. But in a reverse of that trend, the Sports & Fitness Industry Association (SFIA) recently revealed sport participation is growing again. While the SFIA study details what participants are playing, we thought it important to understand why the growth is occurring, so in June 2018 Fuse surveyed 2,000 US teens to find out.

by Timothy McQuiston Vermont Business Magazine The University of Vermont Medical Center is preparing to get back to a regular work schedule Saturday morning after a nursing strike sent about 1,700 union members to the picket line for 48 hours starting Thursday at 7 am. This is the first nurses strike in the hospital's history.

Nurses were scheduled to strike during what would be their usual shifts. Of the 1,800 unionized nurses, 93 elected to go to work on Friday, a few more than the hospital reported came to work on the first day of the strike.

UVM Medical Center President Eileen Whalen said Friday afternoon that the hospital is ready to welcome back all nurses starting Saturday morning.

She said they've budgeted $3 million to cover the full cost of bringing in nearly 600 replacement nurses, though they will not know the full costs, higher or lower, until a full accounting is taken after the strike.

Senator Bernie Sanders: "The indictments announced today by the Justice Department confirm once again that Russia interfered in our elections to benefit Donald Trump. The fact that these indictments name 12 members of Russia’s military intelligence service strongly suggests that the interference was directed from the highest levels of the Russian government."