by Michael Del Trecco, President, VAHHS I had the honor last week of attending a health care roundtable with Senator Peter Welch and United States Department of Agriculture undersecretary for rural development Xochitl Torres Small. Representatives from Senator Bernie Sanders’s and US Representative Becca Balint’s offices also attended, as did leaders from Vermont’s health care community. We came together to celebrate recent Emergency Rural Healthcare Grants (ERHC) and Community Facilities (CF) funding for hospitals and health centers, most recently Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital (NVRH) and Copley Hospital.

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 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.

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 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.