Current News

by Tera Dacek Vermont not only ranks number one in the amount of breweries per capita, its amount of breweries also doubled from 2011 to 2014 from 20 to 40. With breweries such as the Alchemist, Hill Farmstead, and Lawson’s Finest Liquids bringing in beer tourism from across the country, Vermont is also home to the Vermont Brewers Fest (which typically sells out of tickets in a few days), making this little gem in the Green Mountains big on beer. As new tasting rooms and breweries open their doors, and 22-ounce bottles and 16-ounce cans create a lineup of folks eagerly awaiting their releases, it is hard to think back to what Vermont’s craft beer scene was like before the boom.

Vermont Business Magazine Norwich University will once again host this year’s Vermont State Science and Mathematics Fair on Saturday, March 19. The day-long event runs from 9 am to 4 pm, anchored in Norwich’s state-of-the-art science complex, Bartoletto Hall, with an awards ceremony in Dole Auditorium starting at 2 pm. Free and open to the public, the fair showcases the work of Vermont public, private and homeschool students in grades 5-12 who have won local science and math fair competitions. The students will display projects that tackle questions and pose solutions arising from the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). As such, organizers have renamed the fair to “VSTEM.”  

by Timothy McQuiston Vermont Business Magazine For the fourth time in less than 20 years, the Burlington-area has been presented with a new arena project. The University of Vermont and the City of South Burlington announced last Tuesday a joint study to consider the feasibility of constructing a multi-purpose arena on a site in South Burlington. As envisioned, the arena would provide a high quality venue for UVM athletic events and other university programs, as well as concerts, family entertainment, like Disney on Ice, and could serve as a site for conventions and trade shows.

Vermont Business Magazine Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy on Tuesday led a bipartisan coalition of Senate and House legislators in introducing long-awaited legislation to facilitate travel and commerce between the United States and Canada, the largest U.S. trading partner.  The Promoting Travel, Commerce, and National Security Act paves the way for expansion of preclearance facilities, operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, at land, rail, marine and air ports of departure in Canada.

Vermont Business Magazine Secretary of State Jim Condos is pleased to announce that UNOFFICIAL election night results will be available online for the Vermont Presidential Primary on March 1, 2016. City and Town Clerks are statutorily mandated to post their results to the website on election night. As the results are uploaded by the towns, visitors to the website can view the unofficial results - statewide and by town. "This website will provide more accurate and up to date unofficial election night results to Vermont's public, the media, and candidates," said Secretary Condos.

vtelectionresults.sec.state.vt.us

The website will refresh the display of results every ten minutes to update and add town by town results.

Vermont Business Magazine While Vermont has the lowest rate in the nation, at about a quarter of the US average, a change is under way in the nation's approach to dealing with youth incarceration. Although the United States still leads the industrialized world in the rate at which it locks up young people, the youth confinement rate in the US is rapidly declining. According to research undertaken by the Annie E Casey Foundation: Youth prisons and correctional facilities are dangerous, ineffective and unnecessary. But the good news is that America’s youth confinement rate dropped across all racial and ethnic groups during the last decade — and by 40 percent overall. While these numbers are moving in the right direction, there’s clear room for improvement, according to statistics from the KIDS COUNT Data Center.

by Bill Schubart With the highest incarceration rate in the world, American liberals and conservatives are crossing ideological lines to question why. For every 100,000 citizens, China jails 165, Russia 450, and the U.S. 754. In 2008, one in 100 Americans were behind bars and one in 32 was under the supervision of the criminal justice system. There are many reasons for this, some racist, some paranoid, some xenophobic but very few are based in reality or even on sound penal philosophy. In 2014, 68 % of offenders were rearrested within three years and 77% within five years. So much for detention and the death penalty as deterrents to crime. As The Free Press famously headlined ambiguously some years back, Death Penalty Found to Reduce Recidivism.

Vermont Business Magazine Seven Days, Vermont’s free, independent weekly newspaper, won nine awards in this year’s New England Better Newspaper Competition — including top honors for its government reporting, video journalism and design. The contest is organized by the New England Newspaper and Press Association; winners were announced at NENPA’s annual convention last month in Boston.

NENPA members submitted 3,100 entries, split among five categories: daily newspapers with circulation up to 30,000; daily newspapers with circulation more than 30,000; weekly newspapers with circulation up to 6,000; weekly newspapers with circulation more than 6,000; and specialty publications. Seven Days — which circulates 36,000 copies every Wednesday — competed against numerous other large, New England weeklies.

Seven Days’ nine awards included:

Vermont Business Magazine After forceful winds up to 90 mph that blew thru the state, Green Mountain Power crews have restored power to more than 20,000 customers. Crews will work through the night to complete repairs from the wind damage for the 170 remaining without power at 7 p.m. Current forecasts indicate another bout of severe weather arriving Tuesday evening and into the early morning hours, with snow, sleet, freezing rain and elevated winds. Green Mountain Power is preparing for possible new outages that could develop from the second round of the storm.

A downed powerline in Dorset. GMP photo.

Vermont Business Magazine Governor Peter Shumlin provided the following update on the situation in North Bennington where a number of private wells have tested positive for a potential harmful chemical called PFOA. The public water supply is not affected. Water testing starts today. Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) officials will start collecting water samples from the 80-100 homes within a 1.5 mile radius of the former Chem Fab facility, beginning with those closest to the plant and moving out in concentric circles. Staff will go door to door taking samples from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. It is expected that staff will continue to make home visits to collect samples through Friday, and longer, if necessary.

by Jennifer Nachbur Results of the Insulin Resistance Intervention after Stroke (IRIS) trial presented February 17, 2016, at the International Stroke Conference 2016 in Los Angeles, Calif., and published in an Online First article in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggest a potential new method to prevent stroke and heart attack in high-risk patients who have already had one stroke or transient ischemic attack. University of Vermont neurologist Mark Gorman, MD, professor of neurological sciences, was a co-investigator in this large, international study, which was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).

Vermont Business Magazine The Vermont Center for Independent Living is hosting a vigil at City Hall Park in Barre from 5 to 7 pm March 1 to honor people with disabilities who have been murdered in Vermont and elsewhere at the hands of their caregivers. While this is the first such event in the area, for the last five years, many disability rights organizations (including ADAPT, Not Dead Yet, the National Council on Independent Living and the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund) have come together on March 1, the Day of Mourning, to mourn the lives lost to filicide, bring awareness to these tragedies and demand justice and equal protection under the law for all people with disabilities.