Current News

How can innovators have an impact in the field of public health? Organizers of a symposium, “Social Entrepreneurship and the Future of Global Health,” hope to prompt this question among participants when the event takes place at Middlebury College January 22-24. The Middlebury Center for Social Entrepreneurship’s (CSE) fourth annual symposium will feature keynote speakers Jennifer Staple-Clark, founder and CEO of Unite for Sight, and Dr. Mitch Besser, medical director and founder of mothers2mothers. During the symposium, both Staple-Clark and Besser will receive the CSE 2015 Vision Awards. Events, which are open to the public, also include workshops, a hackathon, and roundtable discussions.

Putney Family Healthcare, a BMH Physician Group member, is undergoing renovations to expand its 79 Main Street facility. Practice officials state that this expansion is in response to a growing demand for medical care in the service area, which includes Putney, Dummerston, Westminster and Saxtons River.

GPI Construction began work on the expansion in November, which will create four additional exam rooms as well as increase office space for administrative staff. BMH Director of Plant Services Rob Prohaska is working with Joe Fortier of GPI to manage the project, which is expected to be completed March 1, 2015.

Verizon Wireless recently enhanced fourth generation (4G) Long Term Evolution (LTE) network coverage in and around Mount Snow Resort in Dover, VT. 4G LTE empowers Verizon Wireless customers with compatible devices to surf the Web, post status updates and photos, and download files wirelessly at speeds up to 10 times faster than customers on 3G networks. Verizon Wireless first debuted its 4G LTE network in Vermont in May 2012. Recently, Verizon Wireless enhanced network coverage in and around Mount Snow Resort to include Wilmington, VT.

Rutland Area VNA & Hospice (RAVNAH) will offer a free eight-week hospice volunteer training course for individuals who wish to become hospice and palliative care volunteers in the Rutland County, Dorset and Rupert areas.

There will be eight three-hour sessions beginning in late March that will meet two times a week on Thursday afternoons and Saturday mornings. The content will cover many aspects of the dying process including spiritual and bereavement issues, patient privacy and confidentiality, cultural competence in different settings with diverse populations, and ways in which a volunteer presence can support both the hospice patient and the family or caregivers. Materials will be provided and there is no charge for the training.

The United States Supreme Court today rejected Vermont Right to Life Committee’s (“VRLC”) challenge to Vermont’s campaign finance laws. The Court’s denial of certiorari means that a political action committee must do more than create a separate bank account for independent expenditures to be exempt from the limits on contributions. The PAC must be truly independent of other committees and candidates in order to accept contributions in excess of the limits.

The Court’s action leaves intact the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that VRLC-Fund for Independent Expenditures was not actually an independent expenditure committee. The State had proven that VRLC-FIPE was functionally indistinguishable from VRLC-PC, which made direct contributions to candidates. Since the two committees shared board members and staff, transferred funds to one another, and jointly planned activities, both of them were required to abide by the contribution limits.

Vermont Attorney General William H Sorrell is preparing to continue the State’s battle with alleged patent troll MPHJ Technology Investments, LLC, as the federal district court turned away MPHJ’s latest effort to avoid Vermont courts. MPHJ had sought, for a second time, to move Vermont’s enforcement action to federal court. Echoing his earlier ruling in 2014, Judge William K Sessions III held that MPHJ’s second removal effort was “untimely” and ordered that the “case must again be remanded to state court.” Attorney General Sorrell observed that MPHJ’s litigation tactics have not deterred him from pushing forward with this important consumer-protection litigation. “MPHJ has repeatedly delayed this case with unwarranted procedural maneuvers, but we are ready to move forward now in state court to prove our case and ask the court to sanction MPHJ’s conduct,” he said.

The Vermont Department of Taxes has published lists of the 100 individual taxpayers and 100 business taxpayers with the highest amounts of unpaid tax debt on January 12, 2015. Advance publicity and contacts regarding the lists have already garnered over $730,000 for the state. The list is copied below. The public may also view the lists by accessing a link titled “Top 100 Delinquent Vermont Taxpayers” on the homepage of its website at www.tax.vermont.gov.

In June 2014, the Vermont General Assembly enacted a new law, Act 174, granting Vermont’s commissioner of taxes the ability to compile and publish these lists as a way to obtain compliance from taxpayers. Vermont joins more than 28 states that publish lists of delinquent taxpayers and report that the lists have proven to be an effective compliance tool.

The USDA on Monday announced that 582 Vermont dairy farms – 67 percent of Vermont’s registered dairy farms -- and more than 23,000 of the nation's dairy operations, or more than half of the country’s dairy farms, have enrolled in the new Margin Protection Program (MPP) that was created by the 2014 Farm Bill. The voluntary program offers financial assistance to participating farmers when the margin -- the difference between the price of milk and national average feed costs -- falls below the coverage levels selected by individual farmers. Vermont’s congressional delegation – Senator Patrick Leahy (D), Senator Bernie Sanders (I) and Representative Peter Welch (D) – applauded the program. An additional 28 Vermont dairy farmers signed up for the Livestock Gross Margin Insurance program which offers protection based on the margin between the cost of feed and the average dairy income.

Celebrated author Salman Rushdie will visit the University of Vermont for a sold-out talk on the power of storytelling on Wednesday, January 14. Rushdie’s lecture, which will be live-streamed online, will occur at UVM’s Ira Allen Chapel at 5 pm. His talk, titled “What’s The Use Of Stories That Aren't Even True?,” will include questions submitted from UVM students, and a book signing by the author.

The event is presented by UVM and the Vermont Humanities Council (VHC), which recently picked Rushdie’s 1990 children’s book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, for its statewide Vermont Reads program.

The Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, in collaboration with the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, has announced that Northfield will receive a $43,000 brownfields area-wide planning grant. “Development in our communities can be hampered by past contamination,” said Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner David Mears. “By working together, breaking down the government silos and combining the funding and technical expertise of our two state agencies, we can better coordinate and leverage multiple programs. Our goal is to reduce public health and environmental risks and support community planning and revitalization efforts.”

Governor Peter Shumlin joined by administration officials, leadership from St Albans City and ReArch today opened the new state office building on Federal Street in the city’s ever-evolving downtown. The opening of the new facility caps a major redevelopment project in St Albans that continues to foster economic development, downtown revitalization and job growth.

The project saw Mylan Technologies purchase from the State of Vermont a facility on Houghton Street to accommodate future job growth and expansion in St Albans. Nearly 140 State employees from several different agencies who previously worked in Houghton Street facility will now move into the new Federal Street facility celebrated today, buttressing an already thriving downtown.

Bad mortgages in Vermont continue to fall slightly faster than the rest of the nation. Vermont non-current mortgages were 7.4 percent in November 2014, down 14.4 percent from a year ago. The US average was 7.7 percent, down 13.8 percent. The Data and Analytics division of Black Knight Financial Services released its latest Mortgage Monitor Report, based on data as of the end of November 2014.