For the record, Middlebury College does not require its students who get government-guaranteed loans to get them directly from the Federal Government.

So says Tom Little, the Vice President and General Counsel of the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC), clearing up a misunderstanding that led to an error in Tuesday’s post about VSAC.

Whose executives and workers could not have been too cheerful yesterday, when they heard that President Barack Obama’s budget included a proposal to do away with guaranteed student loans through private companies.

VSAC officials were still trying to get the details late in the day, but the Corporation’s spokesperson, Irene Racz, “it sounds like they want to move everybody to direct lending.”

That wouldn’t totally put VSAC out of business. It could survive – though no doubt as a smaller, less prominent, organization – servicing and guaranteeing student loans.

But don’t count VSAC out yet. Unlike many student lending outfits, it’s a non-profit corporation. It has worked closely with all three of Vermont’s representatives in Congress. All of three of them have influence in Washington, and Sen. Patrick Leahy has influence squared. If he decides to fight for VSAC, he’s likely to prevail.

This was an interesting week for Vermont Newsguy, with two unprecedented occurrences (OK, “unprecedented” after less than three months is a small distinction, but now and then you gotta go with what you got).

For the first time, a post (yesterday’s) was devoted to the goings-on in just one Vermont town. Or, in this case, city. It was Newport, to which the American Institute of Architects is going to send a Design Assistance Team next month to help local residents make plans to spruce up the downtown area.

I knew about the goings-on in Newport because I live nearby. The way the world works is that nobody lives nearby everyplace, and it’s quite possible that something just as interesting is going on near where you live.

If so, let me know. Look toward the upper right hand corner of your screen. It says, “Send a news tip.” That, believe it or not, is the place to click to send a news tip. As in the case of the Newport planning, the tip doesn’t have to be about a scandal or a controversy. An incident, plan or trend can be interesting even if it doesn’t enrage anyone. (Besides, just wait. It probably will by and by).

(Oh, and right above “send a news tip,” it says “donate.” A few readers have this week. Thanks. Others are invited to follow their example.)

The other new development in the short life of this web site is that for the first time it became the object of dispute on another web site. After Monday’s post about last Saturday’s Democratic State Committee meeting, at least one commentator on the liberal blog “Green Mountain Daily” lit into your humble agent as a purveyor of “hearsay” while others leapt to our defense.

Well, it’s a free country, and being lit into now and then is one of the charms of reporting and commenting on public affairs in public. Going into detail on the backing and forthing would not be worth the trouble, but we all owe some gratitude to GMD blogger John Odum for raising three legitimate political questions, as follows:

–Did some of the few Democratic Party operatives who kept going to the office over the last several weeks use their access to computerized voting records to give Secretary of State Deb Markowtiz’s all-but-announced candidacy for governor a head start?

–Were Sen. Leahy and/or Rep. Peter Welch involved in this skullduggery?

–Is EMILY’s list, a big-bucks Washington-based fund-raiser for pro-choice Democratic women, committed to Markowitz, perhaps to the tune of $2 million, even though another pro-choice woman, Sen. Susan Bartlett of Hyde Park, is also considering the governor’s race?.

And the answers are: Apparently so; Hardly likely; Probably (but not $2 million).

Nobody, including Acting Party Chair Judy Bevans has denied that a party staff member or two who either have gone or are in the process of going to work for Markowitz seem to have taken or transferred some files over to her campaign.

As outrages go, this one is pretty minor, if only because it has almost no consequences. As already-announced candidate Sen. Doug Racine said yesterday, “there’s plenty of time” for the other candidates to get those files, and it’s early. Racine said he was satisfied that Bevans will make sure the playing field is even.

One of the alleged perps of the heist was Carolyn Dwyer, who has been a senior campaign operative for both Leahy and Welch. This does not prove they were involved. Getting involved in a primary 18 months from now would be an extremely stupid move for either Leahy or Welch. For one thing, being painted as the choice of the party establishment could  doom a candidate in the primary. Leahy and Welch, neither of whom is even moderately stupid, no doubt know that.

Now, as to EMILY’s list, which is run by a woman named Ellen. (There is no Emily. It’s an acronym for Early Money Is Like Yeast (because it makes the dough rise. Get it?). Its whole idea is that a candidate who gets a little money early can use it to raise her profile and get more.

So EMILY’s list wouldn’t give $2 million in Vermont, where no candidate for governor has yet spent more than about half of that. It gives smaller increment seed money.

But it may have decided to back Markowitz. At least that’s the impression one of its officials gave Bartlett, who said she spoke to EMILY’s list twice, and that “the second time was not as warm a conversation.”

She said that when she estimated a campaign for governor would cost “between three quarters of a million and a million, they said, this is going to be a $2 million race. I said, ‘I don’t think that’s helpful.’”

Bartlett, who agreed that  Markowitz had a closer relationship with EMILY’s list than she did, added that the person on the other end of the phone said, “the guys must be happy to have you in the race,” which she took as a hint that she not run, lest as the “other” woman in the race, she would hurt Markowitz’s candidacy.

“If somebody wanted to get me out of the race, that wasn’t the way to do it,” Bartlett said.

Reached in Washington, Jonathan Parker of EMILY’s list said “we have not made any sort of commitment” to any candidate. But he acknowledged that the organization has had more dealings with Markowitz and “we think she’s great.”

Whatever the EMILY’s list person said to Bartlett, it is probably true that if both women run, both would be at a disadvantage. Gender is not the only factor women voters take into account when deciding which candidate to support. But it is one factor, especially in primaries, where the candidates rarely differ very much on issues.

Markowitz, who has already formed an “exploratory committee” is all but certain to run. Bartlett, who as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee is wrapped up in the state budget controversy, said she has not yet decided

Seated around a conference table, the snow-capped mountains of Vermont looming over Lake Memphremagog visible to those facing north, 18 men and women met in Newport yesterday morning in furtherance of a conspiracy.

Considering that it was open to all, including the press, it is not a covert conspiracy. Considering the participants – a Main Street merchant, the CEO of North Country Hospital, the local school superintendent, among others – it would have to be called quite an Establishment conspiracy.

But it might just shake up Newport.

Which could use it. The Orleans County seat and the self-styled “gateway” to and from Canada, Newport is not without its charms. To begin with, there’s the lake, 687 square miles (mostly in Canada) of cold, deep, water surrounded by hills and woods. Right downtown can be found one superb restaurant, a couple of pretty good lunch spots, and the Pick & Shovel, where it is not quite possible to buy anything anyone might ever want, but close.

On top of all that, the small (about 5,000 souls ) city has what Frank Knoll, who chaired yesterday’s meeting, called its “picture-book setting,” and an old-fashioned, funky feel to it.

But neither is Newport without its troubles. Income is as low and unemployment as high as anywhere else in Vermont. Two thirds of the pupils in the city’s elementary school are eligible for reduced price lunches. Out of work and out-of-sorts young men and women often lounge about Main Street, discomfiting if not actually frightening passers-by.

It isn’t that there is no economic activity going on. Two developers are planning to build hotels along the lakefront close to downtown. City officials aren’t sure whether each developer is trying to scare the other away, or whether they think the city can support two hotels. Some locals are not convinced it can support one.

Newport’s economic woes go back decades, as do well-intentioned efforts to rectify them. This latest try may have some advantages the earlier versions lacked: Outside support (financial and otherwise), local energy, inclusiveness, and a funny name. It’s a RUDAT.

Or, to be precise, a R/UDAT, short for Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team, a project of the American Institute of Architects. The AIA has been running R/UDAT programs since 1967, and 139 of them have been completed, most recently in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, according to the Institute. None of the first 139 projects has been in Vermont

The 140^th is here because the Newport City Renaissance Corporation – that’s the group that was meeting yesterday morning -asked for it, and got it.

What is a R/UDAT?  It’s a planning process. The AIA chooses “a totally volunteer ‘Dream Team,’” of architects, planners, and economists, in the words of  Patricia Sears, the Executive Director  of the Newport City Renaissance Corporation. The experts “visit the community and provide written recommendations addressing planning, economic development, and transportation issues,” according to a document prepared by Sears.

Led by architect James Abell of Scottsdale, Arizona, who has already made one trip to Newport, the five-person team will come to town for five days, first to listen, then to recommend. Its members will listen to anyone who chooses to talk to them., They will recommend ways to perk up Newport, specifically the downtown, the lakefront, and a park and shopping area a short walk across a bridge over the narrow neck of water between the Lake proper and its South Bay.

As was clear at yesterday’s meeting, everybody agrees about one thing “wrong” with Newport: Insufficient access to the Lake, which is there, but hard to get to. It’s also invisible from most of Main Street. To many Newporters, the building in which the meeting was held – the Emery Hubbard State Office Building pictured above) – is part of the problem. No doubt it is an improvement over the dilapidated shops and houses it replaced. But had it been differently sited when it went up in the 1990s, perhaps it would not have blocked the view of the lake.

Magog, Quebec, up at the other end of the Lake, did it better, one and all agreed. Its lakefront is open, accessible, visible. Sears said she plans to take the R/UDAT team up to Magog while they are here.

Worse, the lake itself might be endangered. One of the guests at the meeting, Kingsley Boyd of the Memphremagog Watershed Association, said the lake was “in distress” because of excessive sedimentation, nitrogen, and phosphates.

“If the quality of the water is not addressed,” he said, “that takes away one of your assets.”

The five R/UDAT days begin Wednesday evening, March 18 at North Country Union High School with a sugar on snow party meet-and-greet get-together, or what Patricia Sears called ” a sort of dog and pony show about what a R/UDAT is and what the process is.”

The next day, she said, the visitors, who are donating their time, will tour the city and sit in on a small focus group. On Friday they will meet with various groups of local businesspeople, educators, and officials in the afternoon.

Friday evening, Sears said, there will be an “open mike night town hall meeting.” From Saturday through Monday morning, the team members will “work at their own speed, pulling together everything they’ve seen and heard,” as they prepare their final report.

“Monday we are printing it,” she said, 150 copies of  about 100 pages of a report to be presented Monday evening,” again at the high school.

“Included in the report is an action plan looking at both short-term and long-term goals,” Sears said. “The AIA  will send back one or two people in a year hence to see how we’re doing.”

All this is unprecedented for any town in Vermont. It could also end up being productive for Newport, depending on precisely what the experts propose, and on how much support and opposition it arouses.

It seems noteworthy, though, that so far it does not seem to have provoked any opposition at all. This is the Northeast Kingdom, traditionally skeptical about the advice of outsiders and about planning, which some locals see as a threat to property rights. Not long ago, the prospect of an elite team of outsiders outlining a planning process might well have aroused a lot of talk about “strangers coming up and telling us what to do.”

The R/UDAT process attempts to avoid such opposition by making sure that it is the locals who initiate contact with the AIA, and by including local participation throughout the process. And in this case, the leaders of the Newport Renaissance Corporation made sure that the R/UDAT steering committee was broadly based. It includes local retailers, city officials, bankers, educators, company presidents and the publisher of the local newspaper.

And Sears said that perhaps local people will be more likely to accept the findings of  ”experts who are not beholden to us,” than they would if the team had been selected – and was being paid – by the Renaissance Corporation.

Sill, she, Knoll,  and the others are aware that some kind of opposition may well spring up after the “dream team” makes its recommendations next month.

Not often, but every now and then, a hiker in the woods or a or stroller along the shore of a pond or river will come across a particularly distasteful sight.

Not to mention smell.

A dead animal, killed by gunshot, festering on the forest floor. Or a pile of small fish – ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty of them – rotting on the bank, obviously not washed up by some natural occurrence, but put there by some deliberate human.

Who would do such a thing? Hunters and anglers, obviously.  The fish would probably be perch or some other species not as much fun to catch as trout. Rather than release the perch back into the water (where it might again annoyingly take bait, lure, or fly) some fishermen (and women, too) just throw them on the ground.

The animal, according to wildlife biologists, might be a deer that the hunter didn’t want to bother with, but it is more likely a smaller beast – a snowshoe hare, or even a crow – shot by a hunter who was after bigger game and didn’t want to be bothered with the small stuff.

Or a coyote. Some Vermont hunters really hate coyotes.

Do very many Vermont hunters and fishers behave this way? Almost surely not.  Kim Royar, a Department wildlife biologist, said  leaving dead animals in the woods was by no means “a common occurrence.” From talking with Fish and Wildlife law enforcement officers, she said that “anecdotal evidence indicates it’s  60-to-100 events a year.”

An indication that only a tiny percentage of anglers and hunters are guilty. But that could be enough to tarnish the image of the entire outdoor sportsman community.

Such, at least, is the view of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, which has proposed making such activity illegal.

Under a proposed ” regulation on retrieval and utilization of wildlife,” a hunter would not be allowed to “take any game…by means of hunting and abandon the carcass,” without making a “reasonable effort ” to retrieve it, and “the retrieved animal must be immediately made part of the daily or seasonal bag limit.”

Nor could any “person… take any fish species by legal means and abandon it on land or on top of any frozen body of water.” Any fish “that is not retained as part of a person’s daily creel limit shall be returned to the water body from which it was taken, using reasonable care to keep the fish alive.”

That’s straightforward enough. It’s also similar to regulations already in place in several states and many Canadian provinces. In fact, it’s the law right here in Vermont when hunting migratory waterfowl, which comes under federal jurisdiction.

So no big deal, one might assume. Fish and Wildlife has proposed a reasonable regulation that would affect only a handful of people, mostly people who wouldn’t admit to be doing what they did and who therefore wouldn’t dare to come out in opposition to it.

A done deal, one might assume.

Only if one were unacquainted with both the politics and the psychology  of the  blood sport community.

(Of which – full disclosure – I am a part. Fishing is my past-time of choice. I haven’t hunted in years but might again, and am on record in the public prints of favoring it as a socially and environmentally beneficial activity).

So angry are some hunters and anglers about the “retrieval and utilization rule”  (also known as the “wanton waste rule”) that at the December meeting of the Fish and Wildlife Board,  Dana Kittell, then the Board  chairman, called it (according to the minutes of the meeting) “an insult to the hunting and fishing public.”

The Fish and Wildlife Board, by the way, is not to be confused with the Fish and Wildlife Department. The Board is  made up of 14 members appointed by the governor, one from each county (though the Franklin County seat is now vacant). It is autonomous and quasi-judicial. It is empowered to adopt regulations for hunting, fishing, and trapping, and its decisions are almost final.

The “almost” is because the Board’s decisions are routinely reviewed by a little-known Legislative Committee commonly known as LCAR, the Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules. But according to the current Board Chairman, Brian Ames of Windham County, the committee only “looks at whether we’ve exceeded our authority,” not at the wisdom or merits of the Board’s decisions.

At that December meeting, the Board gave the proposal initial approval. But only by a seven-to-five vote, and Ames cautioned that the vote “shouldn’t be construed too heavily; it just gets it out for public comment.” The comment will come at three public hearings – March 10 in Essex Junction, March 11 in Montpelier, March 12 in Castleton.

They could be interesting evenings. The outdoor sportsmen themselves are divided on the issue, and their passions run high even though the issue itself comes close to being inconsequential. After all, the regulation would affect very few people, and it could only be sporadically enforced

It is, as Fish and Wildlife Department officials candidly concede, all public relations.

“It’s to help the reputation of hunters and fisherman,” said Department spokesman John Hall. “We want to prevent these rare occurrences in which people might think an animal is being wasted. It’s in the best interests of hunting and fishing to remain viable in the eyes of the public.”

There is no mystery about the concern of hunting and fishing enthusiasts. They are becoming an ever-shrinking minority.  Nationally, only about seven percent of the people hunt. In Vermont, the percentage is higher, but not as high as it used to be. Hall said the number of hunters declined from almost 94,000 in 1983 to 83,000 in 2007, and the number of fishing licenses sold has also plummeted.

Not surprisingly, the hunting-fishing community is split over how to react to this decline. The Department, backed by some hunters and anglers, is sensitive about the image sportsmen present to the general public. If there are anti-hunting  forces out there, this faction believes, don’t give them any ammunition.

These sportsmen also tried, with partial success, to ban “high fence” game farms in Vermont, where hunters pay thousands of dollars to shoot fenced-in elk. And they did not oppose efforts to ban coyote hunting competitions which many non-hunters find distasteful.

But there is another faction of organized hunters and anglers that takes a no-compromise attitude. They are motivated partly by political strategy,  apparently believing that any accommodation to the hunting opponents would be a sign of weakness. The web sites of Vermont hunting organizations regularly warn of the threatening power of “anti-hunting forces.”

Besides, these hunters  just resent being told what to do or what not to do.

“This is a moral issue that should be taught in hunter safety classes,” said Ed Gallo, vice president of Hunters, Anglers, Trappers of Vermont (HAT), which opposes the new regulation. A hunting instructor himself, Gallo said,  ”a sportsman who doesn’t play by the rules isn’t a real sportsman,” but didn’t think the state should enforce this rule.

Brian Ames favors the proposed regulation, concerned that “this small percentage can really hurt the image of hunters among non-hunters. Most hunters are real conservationists.”

Ames acknowledges that some of his associates oppose the regulation. One big reason, he thinks, is the coyote, which some hunters hope to exterminate..

“A large contingent of the sporting population blames them for the perceived or actual decline of the (deer) herd,” he said, even though “modern science has pretty much disproved that. My belief is that the coyote is part of our ecosystem.”

Objective political analysis has also pretty much disproved that opponents of hunting are either very numerous or very powerful (though they can be very vocal, or just loud). But some hunters – like some businessmen, college professors, and politicians – luxuriate in the role of misunderstood minority. Modern science and objective analysis can’t trump that.