I'm writing to let lawmakers know how a proposed amendment to S.216 would, if it becomes law, impact my wife and me.
We are both registered patients of the Vermont Marijuana Registry program. Under current law, our household, with two cardholders, can grow four mature and 14 immature plants.
Under this new amendment, our household would be limited to what Vermont's recreational users will be allowed as of July 2018: two mature and four immature plants.
Under this new amendment, my wife and I would not have enough material to create the tinctures and salves we rely on to relieve chronic pain and inflammation. The honest truth is we need more plants, not fewer. The dispensaries are overly expensive and don't offer the strains we have learned work best for us.
The stories of neighbors helping neighbors are manifold in this compassionate community of ours. But with the holidays just past, I thought it might make sense to write about the hospitality we are able to show strangers in our midst. As we well understand, this is particularly challenging at...
The Brattleboro Retreat's inpatient unit treatment programming known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) was recently adopted by The Joint Commission as a Leading Practice for Hospital and Behavioral Health Programs. Submissions to the Joint Commission's Leading Practice Library undergo rigorous clinical review. According to Joint Commission officials, the...
“The Flip Side,” a special evening of cabaret song and style benefitting the Brattleboro Concert Choir is set for Saturday, March 10. According to a news release, the Performance Hall at the new Brattleboro Music Center will be the setting for “a trip back in time, when the clubs were swanky and the music cool.” Singers Junko Wantanabe, Jennifer Hansen, Peter Shea, and Charles Mays Jr. will join Concert Choir Director Susan Dedell at the piano for a smooth evening...
Tiny House Fest Vermont in downtown Brattleboro is entering its third year with some significant changes. The annual one-day festival, held in early September its first two years, will now be held in June - Saturday, June 23, to be specific. Also this year, this regional event that explores visions of future housing and public space is supported by a new partnership between the original founders of the festival and Vermont's Yestermorrow Design/Build School. Fest co-founders Erin Maile O'Keefe and...
Southeastern Vermont Community Action's “Good Buy” Thrift Stores are offering customers the opportunity to give to local kids and families in need and get something back at the same time. Through March 31, everyone who donates personal care items to SEVCA's “Care for Kids & Families” Collection Drive will receive 10 percent off any purchase at Good Buy Stores. Diapers, baby formula, shampoo, and toothpaste are some of the items urgently needed by local homeless shelters and food shelves to...
On Saturday, March 3, from 7 to 10 p.m., at the Vermont Jazz Center, the Brattleboro Area Jewish Community will host a dance party featuring The Butterfly Swing Band (Joe LoMonaco, Scott Sizer, Ron Kelley, Mark Anagnostopulos, Lynn Lovell). According to a news release, the “fun for all ages” will include a musical variety show, a costume contest with prizes, and drinks, food, and pastries (including hamantaschen, the special Purim delicacy). Entertainment includes Bard Owl, the acoustic duo of Breeze...
Repairs to begin on Western Avenue BRATTLEBORO - On Wednesday, Feb. 28, and Thursday, March 1, from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., Department of Public Works crews will work on Western Avenue to repair potholes. On Wednesday, the crews will work on the eastbound lane between Academy School and the Interstate 91 overpass. On Thursday, the crews will work on the westbound lane between the I-91 overpass and Academy School. There will be several crews and large equipment in the...
For the past few years, a national program known as “Stop The Bleed” (stopthebleedingcoalition.org) has been working to inform and educate people about how to take life saving action when they are at the scene of an injury involving severe bleeding. Traumatic injuries involving uncontrolled hemorrhaging of blood are the second leading cause of death for those under 45. Evidence suggests that 50 percent of those deaths that are due to external bleeding could be preventable with appropriate action at...
The National Alliance on Mental Illness of Vermont, a grassroots mental health organization dedicated to improving the lives of Vermont individuals and families affected by mental illness, begins the new year by educating and offering support to those with family members who live with mental illness. According to a news release, this “life changing” program is offered yearly in several counties across Vermont. In addition to helping with the everyday challenges that might be expected by the friends and family...
Brattleboro Memorial Hospital, the Brattleboro Retreat, and Grace Cottage Hospital are launching a comprehensive community health-needs assessment to engage the communities they serve and learn more about those communities' most pressing health care concerns and needs. Based on the information received, the medical facilities will develop a three-year implementation strategy to address health care priorities. The three health care organizations are working collaboratively to gather information by surveying area residents and by speaking with medical providers and with representatives of...
Marlboro College welcomes a duo of fascinating figures from New York City for their Music for a Sunday Afternoon concert on March 4. Composer and percussionist Adam Rudolph and pianist Alexis Marcelo will share a concert of wild and wide-ranging music. The concert will be held in Marlboro's Ragle Hall, Serkin Center for the Performing Arts, at 3 p.m., and is free and open to the public. Hailed as a “pioneer in world music” by The New York Times and...
With Town Clerk Denise Germon's upcoming resignation, the Selectboard and Interim Town Manager must find someone else to preside over Town Meeting. Germon has resigned as town clerk and treasurer, effective at midnight on March 5. Ten hours later, Putney's Town Meeting begins. At the Jan. 31 Selectboard meeting, Germon's attorney, Fletcher Proctor, submitted her resignation letter to town officials. This announcement ended a months-long stalemate between Germon and the Selectboard. Germon stopped showing up to work at the end...
Amherst College professor Judith Frank will explore the unique approaches taken by Edward P. Jones' in writing his Pulitzer-winning novel, The Known World, in a talk at Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro on March 7 at 7 p.m. Her talk, “The Known World and the Literary Character,” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council's First Wednesdays lecture series and is free and open to the public. The Known World won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, described as “a masterpiece...
Vermont lawmakers are currently considering three gun-safety bills. Having attended a recent hearing in the House chamber addressing the bills, I walked away with the awareness that those who oppose gun control fear that if just one law passes, more will follow, and legislators will continue to erode the Vermont tradition of guns and hunting. Many opponents cited the Second Amendment - “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people...
I will vote for the clean-energy resolution at Guilford's Annual Town Meeting. I will support this effort to make our state and my town pay attention to how our warming environment affects us all. Guilford is a small town, but we can be leaders in reducing our carbon footprint. Our fire department installed solar panels on its station. These provide power to the firehouse itself, as well as to the town office. That's power the town gets without depending on...
For the weeks following the slaughter of the innocent schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I hardly left the couch of grief and shame. I've taught kids my entire 35-year career, and I felt as if we - teachers, parents, lawmakers, and society at large - had failed. Our primary responsibility is to keep kids safe. When parents leave them with us at the schoolhouse doors, we make a contract, explicitly or implicitly: We will return them to you safely.
Longstanding opponents of Vermont Yankee have continually objected to NorthStar's proposed plan to decommission the nuclear plant within the next 10 years despite all of the near-term benefits. Most recently, a number of individuals have demanded that the Vermont Yankee site should be decontaminated to the level of 10 millirems, rather than the 15-millirem level proposed by NorthStar. The Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Japanese government in Hiroshima, has led...
It's ironic that Suzie Webster-Toleno, M.Div., finds a contraindication to “our culture of toxic masculinity” in Scripture. Beginning with God's complicity in the classic blackmail scheme of Abraham and Sarah, in which they shame the noble Pharaoh into buying them off with uncountable riches (a scam they repeated years later with King Abimelich), the deity in which she finds examples to assuage revengeful rage is Himself the quintessential enraged avenger. “My name is Jealous,” He informs us, as gay-loving Sodom...
As a retired nuclear engineer, I can attest that 15 millirem (mr) is both an acceptable and conservative radiation level to prescribe for a greenfield project. Under NorthStar's proposed 15 mr level, a farmer can safely live at the decommissioned site, raise livestock, and eat the crops grown there. If the town of Vernon proceeds with its plan to develop another industrial site on the property, there is no environmental reason to reduce the radiation level as the site is...
I am a candidate for the remaining one year of a three-year term on the Dummerston School Board. As a lifelong resident of the area, after graduating from Brattleboro Union High School, I left the area thinking I would not come back. However, after eight years away, Vermont beckoned to me, and I was able to return. In 1970, my husband and I were fortunate to be able to move to Dummerston to raise our family. We have two sons...
An exploration of watercolor painting will be offered on Friday, March 16, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the First Universalist Parish in the Stone Village on Route 103. The instructor, Nancy Lent Lanoue, is a member of the Vermont Watercolor Society and has been painting in watercolor for 20 years. The workshop is a collaborative effort of the Stone Village Art Guild and the First Universalist Parish of Chester. Lanoue is a charter member of the Stone Village...
Back in my mid-20s, I spent a year as a student at Marlboro College. I had arrived there with the aim of pursuing an interdisciplinary major involving anthropology and ecology. My goal was to look more closely at human cultures and ecological connection. In my studies, I found as the prevailing theme an intertwining story of human and ecological conflict, injustice, and suffering. I realized that whether we like it or not, this is the story of the time we...
With Town Meeting Day approaching, I am contemplating how Vermont's direct democracy tradition tends to moderate political opinions expressed publicly and how a shared cultural experience means everyone is starting from the same set of assumptions about the nature of reality and knowledge. In a world in which first motor vehicles and then global communications in the palm of our hands every waking and sleeping moment have resulted in massive cultural upheavals and mobility, it's not hard to understand why...
On Tuesday, March 6, Brattleboro's voters (along with nearly 40 towns throughout the state) will get to vote on a climate-action resolution brought forward by 350 Brattleboro, a local group of 350 Vermont, a climate justice organization. Local volunteers spent much of December and January having conversations with people in the town to gather the 450 petition signatures required to get the article on the ballot. The advisory resolution aims to do two things: tell our state legislators to make...
I grew up in central Maine, on a modest homestead surrounded by 22 acres of forest, with a stream winding through it. From the time that I could walk, I spent more time outdoors than in. I would explore and play in the woods with my brother and our friends for as many hours as our parents would let us. We built forts, climbed trees, made bridges and dams, collected nuts and other “treasures,” and learned about our world with...
David Van Deusen: With any due respect, I call BS on your lies. The vast majority of Vermonters, including gun owners, want, even demand, sensible gun control, including background checks, a ban on military-grade weapons, and appropriate waiting periods for potential gun owners. Half of Vermonters support restrictions on open-carry. You are engaging, under the pretense of representing “leftist” views, in the exact same lies and fear tactics employed by the NRA, Trump, and the GOP as they attempt to...
I'm raising a young Vermonter who we may very well see in the Statehouse in the future. It's this time of year that my daughter goes into the woods and reports back to me that she saw thousands of mouse tracks, one rabbit, and a few squirrels. It is also this time of year that I mourn most deeply for what Vermont and our children are losing to climate change. Winter days are in the 50s - and 75 degrees...
Good day to you, windy hamlet dwellers! Actually, by this Friday, the county that occupies southeastern Vermont may live up to its name, especially in the high terrain. For the mid-week period, we will enjoy above-seasonable temperatures and calm conditions. However, by Thursday night into Saturday morning, we will be watching several atmospheric features that may combine to produce a late-season snowstorm accompanied by strong easterly winds that could cramp the style of many a southern Vermonter. It could cause...
Broadway comes to Saxtons River as some of the area's most talented performers present a cabaret of show-stopping tunes Saturday, March 3, at 7:30 p.m. at Main Street Arts. My Favorite Broadway features cast members of the upcoming winter musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, which opens Thursday, March 29, for a two-weekend run at the Bellows Falls Opera House. The cabaret promises a rousing evening of show-stopping tunes that will highlight the talent the performers are bringing to Andrew Lloyd Webber's...
When I was a kid in Vermont, I ran around in the woods all the time, and I'd never seen a tick. When I was a kid, it didn't rain after every snowstorm. Have you forgotten already how different it was back then, when I was a kid? I'm not even 30 years old. When I was a kid, I read all the time. Fantastical adventure stories where the protagonists saved the world from certain destruction - a destruction brought...
Athens Annual Town Meeting takes place at 10 a.m. at the elementary school. • New reserve funds: Voters will be asked whether the town should establish a Capital Reserve Fund to pay for emergency spending not covered by FEMA, as well as a Long Term Highway Project Fund. • Fixing up the Town Office: Voters will consider authorizing the Selectboard to spend up to $115,000 to renovate the Athens Town Office, and to borrow up to $77,000 of the cost...
“You guys, rightfully, can be pounding the table to be getting some resources,” said U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt. “This budget situation in Washington is a disgrace. We know it. So, I don't want anybody, ever, apologizing for saying they need some resources. It's absolutely outrageous what's going on.” At the Brattleboro Retreat on Feb. 20, Welch met with an interdisciplinary community team - leaders from law enforcement, mental health workers, the school system, local employers, and those with lived...
The arts, affordability, and building a diverse and thriving community were among the topics taken up by the four candidates for the Selectboard in the March 6 town election at a televised forum on Feb. 22 co-sponsored by Brattleboro Community Television and The Commons. Candidates took questions from panelists Olga Peters, host of WKVT's Green Mountain Mornings, and local activist Anne Braden of the Windham County Community Action Network. This reporter served as the moderator. Running unopposed for the three-year...
I am a medical marijuana patient. I suffer from multiple medical conditions that qualify me for a medical marijuana card. I find that blending varieties of cannabis help relieve my chronic and often acute pain caused by several conditions that I suffer from. Often I go without this important therapy, as it is already very difficult to have enough medicine available under Vermont's restrictive home-grow regulations. Without access to enough cannabis, I will be forced to ask my medical doctor...
I am writing this after a drab, gray, and very unsettling spell of February weather, including a 70-degree day - part of a disturbing trend toward perpetual weather weirdness. Six towns in Windham County will be considering a town meeting resolution sponsored by 350 Vermont, making it clear that our communities want to become part of the work to improve our chances of leaving our grandchildren a livable world. Town Meeting resolutions propose to support our state in moving toward...
Because of the language in a proposed amendment to S.216, I feel it necessary to let lawmakers know the impact it will have on both my husband and me. We are both registered patients of the Vermont Marijuana Registry program. This amendment seems to be designed to kill Vermont's medical marijuana program. I would like to remind you that this year the medical marijuana program added $300,000 to the General Fund. This will only increase, as we are the second-fastest-aging...
Given the uncertain future that New England Center for Circus Arts faced last year, its Circus Spectacular looked like an annual event that might not happen. Between moving into its new state-of-the art facility at 10 Town Crier Drive in Brattleboro, and surviving the attempted ouster of its founders, Elsie Smith and Serenity Smith Forchion, 2017 proved a monumental year for the circus arts nonprofit. “NECCA is in a good place right now,” says Forchion, with a sigh of relief.
“My name is Jazzmeia Horn and that is not a mistake,” she says. “God does not make mistakes.” This powerful statement is backed up by the truth. She is a naturally gifted musician who grew up in a family passionately rooted in gospel music; her grandmother, a jazz-loving pianist, gave Horn her name. “I guess she knew I was going to be a musical child,” Horn said. Time has proved her grandmother right. On Saturday, March 10, at 8 p.m.,
The regular season is over for the Brattleboro ice hockey teams and the area girls' basketball teams. Now, it's playoff time. Girls' basketball • Brattleboro closed out the regular season with a 47-45 road win over Burr & Burton on Feb. 22. Good defense by the Colonels in the fourth quarter forced multiple turnovers, and clutch free throw shooting also made a difference. Hailey Derosia filled up the stat sheet with 15 points, nine rebounds, five assists, and eight steals...
Most likely, the name Zachary Stephens has a familiar ring if you've read the Brattleboro Reformer at all this past decade. Or if you were a student taking classes at the In-Sight Photography Project. Or if you knew someone who was. Stephens, the Reformer's principal photojournalist for several years, has served as program director at In-Sight over the past decade. Two years ago, he decided to get his master's degree. He pursued this goal while raising his family and still...
I urge Vermont senators not to accept the proposed amendment to S.216, which would restrict the ability of medical marijuana patients - who now may grow two mature plants and up to seven immature plants - to the right to grow only two mature plants and four immature plants. The bill would also pare down the ability of medical marijuana patients to possess 2 ounces to 1 ounce. My husband is a medical marijuana patient. He suffers from two distinct...
If you've driven through Westminster West recently, you may have seen an artful “village” of wooden structures at the Westminster West School building and grounds. This is the home of an educational program serving all of the Westminster children enrolled at the town's public elementary school. “Studio Y: The Story Adventure Goes West” was launched at the beginning of this school year to support and enhance student learning. The program builds on an educational approach developed over many years by...