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Vermont Business Magazine On Monday, Vermont Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman, upon his return from the National Lieutenant Governor Association’s annual spring meeting, announced that he has joined a group of 22 lieutenant governors in the formation of a Reproductive Freedom Coalition. This group, led by Connecticut Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz, is a multi-state coalition representing more than 165 million people, plans to work together to protect and expand reproductive freedom and access to health care in the wake of unprecedented attacks following the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Vermont Business Magazine Benchmark, the largest senior housing provider in New England, today announced that The Arbors at Shelburne, a Benchmark Mind & Memory and residential care community, has received the Benchmark 2023 Circle Award for the second year. The Circle Award is an annual award recognizing the Benchmark community that consistently achieves the highest resident and family satisfaction through surveys. At the company’s 20th Annual Awards Gala held on March 9, 2023, The Arbors was recognized over 64 other Benchmark independent living, assisted living and Mind & Memory Care communities throughout the Northeast.

Vermont State Police The victim in this incident is identified as Donald P. “Jonesy” Jones, 82, of Richmond. He died Monday evening at Northwestern Medical Center in St. Albans. His body will be transported to the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Burlington for an autopsy to determine the cause and manner of death. Per standard protocol, the death is being investigated by a detective trooper with the Vermont State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigations. The death is not considered suspicious. Emergency crews responded to a call at 2:17 p.m. for a report of a man through the ice several hundred feet offshore in the vicinity of the intersection of Church and Hance roads. Rescuers including the Swanton Village Fire Department located the victim, an 82-year-old man from Richmond, and brought him to shore about 30 minutes after the initial call.

Vermont Business Magazine Secretary of Administration Kristin Clouser today released Vermont’s revenue results for February 2023. For the fifth month in a row, both the General Fund and the Transportation Fund ended with revenue above target. The Education Fund bounced back from its prior month miss to surpass the February target by $1.3 million. Year to date, all three funds remain ahead of their respective targets as adopted by the Emergency Board at its January 17, 2023 meeting. The state’s General Fund, Transportation Fund, and Education Fund receipts in February were a combined $203.6 million, or 15.4%, above monthly consensus expectations. This continues the trend of the first eight months of the fiscal year, where combined revenues across all three funds were 6.3% above the consensus target set at the July 2022 Emergency Board meeting.

by Kelsey Guarino As early childhood educators, our work always focuses on the children, and we honor the unique and wonderful stage of early childhood. We’re highly trained and we center our practice around play-based, developmentally-appropriate learning. We’re grateful to do this work every day – but we’re not sure if we can continue. Right now, many early childhood educators are barely scraping by. Most early childhood educators are women, and chronic under-funding of the child care system as a whole, has suppressed our compensation for decades – disproportionately affecting women of color. A bachelor's degree in early childhood education leads to the lowest paying career of any college major.

Goddard College is deeply committed to the well-being of its UAW (Local 2322) Union staff and respects the right of the Union to engage in concerted activity, including the right to strike. However, we are disappointed by the decision by the UAW Staff Union to strike on Friday (March 24, 2023) as we believed that the Union and the College had made significant progress in negotiations over the past week and seemed very close to a final settlement. Goddard College had been working closely with the Union to ratify a new collective bargaining agreement since the Spring of 2022. The existing CBA eventually expired on June 30, 2022. The College offered a 3% salary increase to take effect January 1, 2023, but the Union was unwilling to agree to language regarding management rights that is standard in almost every CBA in the United States. The College has also repeatedly invited the Union to use the facilitation of a federal mediator to settle our differences, but the Union has consistently refused.

Vermont Business Magazine Average gasoline prices in Vermont fell 2 cents per gallon in the last week to $3.37/g today. Prices are down 7 cents from a month ago and down 84 cents/g from the same time last year. The cheapest price in the state is $2.99 in Middlebury and the most expensive is $3.69 in Derby. The national average price of gasoline has fallen 2 cents per gallon in the last week, averaging $3.39/g today. The national average is up 7 cents per gallon from a month ago and stands 84 cents per gallon lower than a year ago, according to GasBuddy. The national average price of diesel has fallen 5.9 cents in the last week and stands at $4.19 per gallon.

Vermont Business Magazine Vermont Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas held the first meeting of the newly reconstituted Town Clerk Advisory Committee (TCAC) at the Hartford Municipal Building in White River last Tuesday. Reconvening the committee, which has not actively met for over a decade, was a priority for the secretary as she settles into her first term in office. The committee make-up aims to be representative of clerks across the state. The 13 clerks that sit on the committee hail from both big and small municipalities and include both veteran clerks and those new to the office.

Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets Farm to school and early childhood is a broad term. It defines a variety of efforts aimed at educating and engaging children and young adults on the connections that exist between agriculture, nutrition, community and health. The Vision Grant is designed to support innovative projects that engage youth in exploring those connections and addressing contemporary problems such as climate change, food insecurity, food sovereignty, health disparities, and racial injustice. A total of $150,000 is available through this competitive funding opportunity. The minimum award is $5,000 and the maximum award is $50,000. Schools, school districts, early childhood educators, afterschool programs, and non-profits working in partnership within the Vermont Farm to School and Early Childhood Network are eligible to apply.

Vermont Business Magazine The US Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee (HELP), chaired by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), released the following report by its majority staff: "Over the past 18 months, Starbucks has waged an aggressive and illegal union-busting campaign. That campaign has been directed and led by Howard Schultz, the multi-billionaire CEO and founder of Starbucks. Under Schultz’s leadership, Starbucks has adopted an aggressively anti-union stance that is reflected in Schultz’s public statements, the company’s communications to workers, and its scorched-earth approach to blocking unionization activity."