I live in a small town called Putney. 3k people, its biggest claim is its wee people enclaves and fairy dust. It has the largest per capita number of artisans in the country. Every year the artisans let people into their studios, and people come from all over on thanksgiving weekend and fill their minds with the treasures of artistry. Deb, one of the artists, provides the yearly flyer, done right, glossy and perfect. Pictures of every artists’ goods, with a map for visitors.
Artists are in a heaven when they are in the zone. Been there. I got called out to duty. Being in the zone as an artist is better than drugs. Downloading love as beauty.
This is why, I believe the majority of Putney just doesn’t want to deal with hatred. They just listen to public radio and appear to believe it, it floats by in the background as they work in their studios, certain words punching through. Insurrection. Danger to democracy. Racist. Oh No! And he eats Mcdonald’s (you know who). We eat organic, and local. NO! Damn they missed again! They think. Gotta save democracy. In the background of their heart thoughts, a meandering stream of themes like “Everyone deserves love and everyone deserves a home. Everyone must keep each other safe and take the path of mutual insurance.” flows miserably to a sea of communism.
So while our Putney creatives are basking in the glory of Source inspiration, and feeling untouchable in the clearings in the woods, some with the brook babbling by their wooden homes, the advance of the corporate enemies has come to our door. I have to compose a letter to the editor this morning. I have yet to learn how to write one thing with my left hand and another with my right to come up with 2 for the time of one.
Our little town (as well as all of Vermont) is a haven for the non-profit scamsters. We are the most injected state in the Union. In Putney, during covid, the elementary school saw fit to have the children climb onto chairs set below windows and through those windows in the morning to get to their classrooms in the ranch style building nestled below 200 acres of school forest. Luckily, the teachers organized lessons in that forest, and now the trails have little meeting places with stumps in a neat circle and some places with tarp over a white board and a color full of markers. I know because I hike there, more so in hunting season, since the hunters are flushed by my dogs, and they do not like that!
Windham Windsor Housing Trust, now owns the majority of rental units in this town. Until now they have found places to hide, tucked away. This nonprofit is like cream cheese and honey icing on a shit cake. They suck on the granola heads’ ( that’s us non native Vermonters) highest intentions for the welfare of everyone. They are a bear on the rock in the stream on grant money, snatching out the best salmon. No that’s too nice. They have a net, and they stretch it across the stream and get all the grant money. Then they build inflated price buildings. Then they fill them with the most indecent, incapable and helpless amongst us, and order them to vacate if they ever get a job and become prosperous enough. So they don’t.
Now they want to fill our last open field that sits before the community gardens, the farmers market and the local coop, with a big box housing with (I think) 25 units ( 23 or 27) where the best return for their money are people who, as I said, cannot care for themselves. By design!
When I ran for governor, I met a lot of people, one of them was a woman on the streets of Montpelier who became almost apoplectic when I proposed the housing solution I thought would work. “You can’t do that! They won’t Let you! They make too much money off the homeless.” She was homeless, and about 65 years old. She didn’t seem homeless when I first asked her for her signature. And indeed they do make lots and lots of money off the homeless. Now the immigrants. They suck it right up!
IN advance of this building they want to bring in, where they say they will solve the housing problem since the legislature has made it impossible for good landlords to kick out bad tenants, so they all move to short term Air BNb. So the taxes are rising, I hear 45% for some local property owners. And the people who work the coop, the general store, the new teachers and the gas station attendants can’t find rent that doesn’t take over 1/2 of their income.
I used to house homeless people in my home for 7 years. Then I rented rooms. Now I am so thrilled to have no one here at all like that. I can think! I can walk without a shirts or pants from one room to the next, if I have to. I’m fully clothed now, I wouldn’t write like that. I’d stick to the chair.
Here’s the scam, although the trust could give grants to buy the available houses here, priced at about 500 k (there are several on Main Street), and more a little tucked back, each with room for 2-4 apartments, and the local landlords would be better managers of the renters, and each generating roughly 10-13k in tax “revenue” the non profit wants to build a big ugly fucking BOX filled with helpless people, for which they cannot by law prioritize putney working class (tho they say otherwise), at the tune of 15 million and pay 22 k in taxes. This means the town’s taxes have gone up to pay for the police and ambulance costs etc. Each 500 - 800 square foot apartment is going to cost 500-600k.
So we all know that an apartment in a building costing 500k per unit ought to be a luxury place, marble and steam baths, but its not, it’s designed to fall apart in 50 years. That is also part of the scam, to rebuild on the back of grants, which is taxed money. If you were a private builder looking to build a nice building with 25 apartments, you might pay 200-250 a square foot (these days since they (the cult of power) crashed the economy deliberately) a square foot. Since you have a common roof and building envelope, you can certainly create a 700 sf apartment for 175k apiece. Likely better. But these ones are 500k to 600k, and who gets over paid? The doogoodies, the cream cheese iced shitsters. It’s all about over pay.
But It’s grant Money! It’s free! It’s all about being the preferred contender in the grant stream.
Here’s the other scam, The people they rent these apartments to, who are themselves on section 8 and SSI for the autism or whatever caused by the pharma decimation of health, get their income from taxes as well. But even if the renters could turn it around and experience the power of their own purpose, the deal is that they cannot have more than 2k in savings, and if it ever goes higher they are booted out of a home. And boy, the renters have a part time job just to prove their own helplessness. It’s an art. Vermont is in the business of creating adeptly helpless people.
That is why here in Vermont with 650k people our state’s budget is 8.4 billion, next door, New Hampshire, has 1.25 million and a budget of just over 3 billion. Their people are happier, healthier, safer and more prosperous. The average pay for working for the state of Vermont is 76K and the average per capita income for a vermonters is 46k.
Now I have to write a letter to out the local select board chair, who fits the description of the queen in Alice and wonderland, for verbal assault on an elder artist who brought forward the fact that the field where they want to build this new monstrosity sits on a class 3 road and it should be a class 2, which would garner more money from the state to upkeep and to fix. The road bisects the property the Windham Windsor Housing Trust wants to build on, and because it does, there is not enough land by statute to build such a big box housing unit. Therefore the push is to NOT call it a road at all.
They are in court (with Deb) to call the (unbuildable) land across the street actually contiguous with the field before the farmers market and the community gardens and the coop, and therefore enough land to build a big box housing unit on. They are raising local taxes to pay for the services for people they have trained to be helpless. So the Select chair treated Deb with slander and defamed her, and gaslit her, Deb, who has little experience standing up to assholes like I do, was ordered from the meeting with a mightily mad slam of the gavel, as Eileen the select board chair declared: OFF WITH HER HEAD! (to paraphrase), She actually said “GET OUT!”
Deb did. I wish she hadn’t. Now Im here to stand up for her.
Next they (Wyndham Windsor Housing trust) served her with no trespass order from a field filled with ticks, which are, by the way, listed as Vermonts most dangerous animal. Since lyme was developed as a bioweapon, it is. However, Green Mountain Tick formula on the neck wrists ankles and head, and anywhere else works like a perfect charm, along with raw cloves garlic on a spoonful of honey or peanut butter, which also rebukes any colds. Just an FYI. PS they are also dropping rabies pellets to ostensibly keep rabies down ( NOT! its making rabies increase). I have a friend who was playing harmonica in Burlington outside her apartment and a raccoon came up and bit her ankle. Unprovoked. She called me, what should I do?
I avoid the scene because I am working on a bigger better solution, but sometimes you have to stand up for your friends. I have explained the situation in minimal detail and now I have to compose a 300 word letter regarding the first article of the VT Constitution and the problem. This obviously is too long.
Just phoned them, I get 700 words, if I say things that do not touch the press’s complicity in the Covid. Obviously.
Putney has a selectboard chair who should not remain. For some reason she is power hungry and mean. No NO that won’t do…. Ill write it elsewhere and get back to you.
Keep that letter on point, Emily--kudos!