‘Worst daddy’
Sinking feeling
Comedian David Cross on Hollywood, fatherhood
Climate change and our underwater history
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Volume 52 Number 35
shelburnenews.com
August 31, 2023
Town prevails again in public records suit filed by ex-employee
Opening up
LIBERTY DARR STAFF WRITER
PHOTO BY LEE KROHN
A flower spreads its petals wide as if smiling for the camera.
A Vermont Supreme Court recently affirmed a lower court decision ruling in favor of the Town of Shelburne and its former town manager Lee Krohn, following a public records request lawsuit with the town’s former zoning and planning director, Dean Pierce. The case, which began more than a year ago, involved several records requests made to the town by Pierce beginning in December 2021, seeking copies of various materials involving the Town Manager, the selectboard, and the planning and zoning department. Additional records were requested a month later, including communications related to development projects in the town, materials related to the town manager’s interviews with a local reporter, a document visible on-screen during selectboard meetings, zoning permits or certificates of occupancy signed by the town manager, and a letter placed in town employee’s file along
with meeting minutes from a February meeting. The requests were denied on the basis of “personal documents,” and the issues erupted at a contentious selectboard meeting, also in Febuary, when Pierce made the appeal for the records. Pierce filed suit in April, alleging the town improperly denied his requests and sought the requested documents in their original electronic format, later amending his complaint to include a request for a letter placed in a town employee’s file as a result of selectboard action on Feb. 17. To evaluate whether records were properly withheld, the lower court directed the town to provide either a detailed affidavit describing the records withheld or to submit the records for in-camera review before the judge. In accordance with the order, the town submitted a Vaughn index, an affidavit, and the documents for in-camera review, which the court in December determined were, in See LAWSUIT on page 12
Champlain school district works to address aging buildings COREY MCDONALD STAFF WRITER
As kids in the Champlain Valley School District begin their academic year this week, the school district’s administrators and board members are staring down what will be a challenging five years. The district’s school buildings are aging and will need millions
of dollars in renovations. Federal Covid-19 relief funds are soon ending — funding that has paid for more than a dozen school counselors, social workers, interventionists, and other positions within the district. And updates to Vermont’s education formula means the district will have to adjust to these factors while raising taxes or cutting programs. Those three converging factors
bearing down on the district were laid out during a school board meeting last week, where officials said the district will be implementing new measures to try and limit any new spending — including requiring offsetting reductions for any new proposed expenses. “We’re going to have to make some really difficult decisions together,” chief operations officer Gary Marckres said.
Vermont’s new education formula, signed into law last year, corrects what researchers at University of Vermont and Rutgers University showed was an insufficient pupil weighting system for low-income students or non-English speaking students. The new formula tries to correct that, but because of the shift, several districts that have historically benefitted from the weighting —
Champlain Valley, South Burlington, Essex, and Mount Mansfield Unified Union among them — are now facing dwindling student counts, meaning those distrcits will eventually have to start raising taxes or cutting spending to fill in the gap. Because of this, the Champlain See SCHOOL on page 13