As previously announced, the News Guy is taking Labor Day off.

The hardest of the hard-line anti-environmentalists – the folks who not only think global warming is a fraud, but that the best policy is to burn more coal, even coal stripped from mountaintops that are then dumped into rivers – are holding a big bash in West Virginia on Labor Day.

The main organizer of the “Friends of America” rally is Don Blankenshhip, the head of Massey Energy Co., one of the biggest (and most frequently cited for pollution law violations) coal mining companies in the country.

Among the sponsors are other coal and energy firms from West Virginia and Kentucky, construction companies, truckers, Verizon Wireless, the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, machine tool……

WAITAMINIT.

Back up there.

Verizon Wireless? The company advertising on its web site that it “works every day to protect our environment”? The company boasting it has “eight solar powered cell sites in the Western United States…a shining example of innovation at its best?” The company vying with AT&T to see which can sell the most cell phone contracts in environmentally-conscious New England, including Vermont?

Yup, that one.

The one related to the Verizon unit that enraged many northern New Englanders by first chintzing on its land line telephone operations in the area and then selling them to Fair Point Communications, which appears incapable of handling them.

The one that, while headquartered in New York, is a potent political force throughout New England.

The sponsorship is not intended as a political statement, company spokesman James Gerace told the Associated Press. Gerace said the company got put on the sponsors list after (as the AP paraphrased him) it paid a fee “to support the community and gain access to the event to sell its products.”

In the spirit of taking people at their word, let’s take Gerace at his, in which case Verizon officials are guilty only of gross naïveté. The home page of the rally’s web site urges viewers to sign a petition opposing the climate change bill that passed the House of Representatives earlier this summer. The rally is political from top to toe.

Gerace spoke after the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity and the non-profit long distance company Working Assets (among others) issued statements urging Verizon to withdraw its sponsorship.

Poor (in this context only) Verizon. Whatever it did it would offend somebody, either the hard-line climate-change denialists or…well, or perhaps everybody else. Not an easy choice. According to a rash of polls, including a recent one showing majority support for that climate change bill, a substantial majority of Americans think the Global Warming deniers behind the Labor Day rally are wrong, if not bonkers.

But as is often true, the folks on the minority side might be more intense.

So, from a pure public relations point of view, hunkering down might have made some sense.

Then things got worse. It seems that the person from Working Assets leading the charge against Verizon’s sponsorship is its political director, one Becky Bond. And while no doubt it was not intended for public consumption, an email from Gerace, apparently to a colleague, said, “This is how our response is going over with the activists. Becky once lived in a tree for a while. At least now I know where the emails are coming from.”

It is entirely possible that Bond once lived in a tree. Efforts to contact her and Gerace have so far proven unsuccessful. But from a pure public relations point of view, that email was probably a mistake.

Especially considering that even before that email leaked out, Verizon had received at least 66,000 emails urging it to drop its sponsorship of the rally, according to Tierra Curry of the Center for Biological Diversity.

So far, Curry said, no one is planning to organize a boycott of Verizon. They are “just asking people to contact” the company urging it to drop its sponsorship of the event.

A boycott campaign probably wouldn’t work, thanks to one of the two lessons of this flappette. The first lesson is that smart people (assuming here that top executives of Verizon meet that description) sometimes do dumb things. The second lesson is that, at least in the communications realm, they can probably get away with doing dumb things because consolidation and standardization have made big companies all but immune to consumer retaliation. Corporations spend millions on “image” advertising to make them look good. But these days, they rarely suffer much from looking bad.

For most people, boycotting a cell phone company would be expensive and inconvenient. A consumer usually signs a two-year contract, and has to pay a fee to break it. And how many alternatives are there? In Vermont, basically one – AT&T – though Sprint and TracFone have a few customers. The dominance of one or two companies makes it difficult for consumers to register whatever objections they have by switching to the competition. Think about boycotting Google. It’s possible, but not easy.

Besides, Verizon didn’t organize this confab. It just goofed by agreeing to be one of many sponsors, and then goofed by ignoring the reasonable objections. Rather few people are sufficiently concerned over the issue to go to the trouble and expense of changing cell phone companies just because theirs displayed ignorance and arrogance one day.

But it might be a good idea if many of its customers sent them yesterday’s story about the new study in the journal Science noting that the Arctic is warmer than it has been at any time in the last 2,000 years.

Enough of that, which would do it for the day, except that some Vermont news operation should take note of the atrocious journalism presented Wednesday evening by WCAX-TV (Channel 3).

On the 6PM news, WCAX reported that the state had reached a $135,000 settlement with Kevin Farnan, who had accused state police of using excessive force when they arrested him four years ago. The account then quoted Attorney General Bill Sorrell defending the police and insisting the state only agreed to the settlement because a loss in court might have cost much more.

So far, so good. But then anchor Marselis Parsons, chatting with correspondent Brian Joyce, said, “it is not uncommon is it… settling even though you know you did nothing wrong… it has happened to all sorts of professional and responsible people .. who figure that paying off a lawsuit is cheaper than fighting and running up legal bills in court…That has even happened to us.”

As though Parsons knew that the state and its law enforcement officers had done nothing wrong, were perhaps the aggrieved party. He knew no such thing. The most obvious assumption to start out with when one side settles a lawsuit is that it had done something wrong, and was therefore reluctant to go to a jury.

That includes WCAX. If this is an example of its journalistic competence and integrity, it probably settled because it feared losing in court.

(And this program note. A holiday weekend looms, ending with Labor Day, in observance of which the News Guy plans to withhold his labor. The next new posting will be Wednesday, September 9.

So where do you think the population is falling?

Florida, precisely the place which (to hear some talk) Vermont should emulate by cutting taxes and weakening regulations lest thousands flee to…well, someplace like Florida

Could be. But right now, Vermont’s path looks a lot safer.

Its population is growing (slowly) and it is one of the few states gaining jobs these days. It’s Florida which folks are fleeing.

The news was right there on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, which noted that after a century of almost unbroken population growth, Florida actually lost 58,000 people between April 2008 and April 2009.

In percentage terms, 58,000 is a tiny chunk of more than 18 million. But by all accounts, the decline is continuing. And in part because of that lack of an income tax, population decline hits Florida especially hard. Without an income tax, the state relies heavily on sales and property taxes. When property values go down and people buy less (both because there are fewer of them and the ones who stay cut back), the loss of state revenue is even more acute than it is elsewhere.

Ah, but there’s hope on the horizon, some Floridians think. The state has always been a retiree Mecca, and as those millions of Baby Boomers start to retire in the next few years, perhaps many of those millions will emulate their elders and head to the Sunshine State.

But not everyone is confident that they will. The big question, the Times quoted a Florida professor saying, “is will they choose the same type of retirement as their parents.”

An interesting question because of a new study, reported here last week, indicating that Baby Boomers might be less likely to retire to Florida than to….could it be Vermont?

Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. When it comes to attracting retirees, Florida will continue to have two advantages over Vermont: (1) No state income tax; (2) Warm winters.

But it’s crowded, without many areas of remoteness, and as outlined here on August 19 (The Boomers Are Coming) new data indicate that in retirement, the Baby Boomers will not crave urban conveniences as much as “desirable physical attributes – pleasant climates, mountains, beaches, lakes,” and all of it far from the metro area crowds.

All of the low-tax Southern states have pleasant climates (for those who like heat and humidity), and many have mountains, beaches and lakes. But they’re all relatively crowded, which is why the News Guy speculated (without first having the chance to talk to the authors of the report) that Vermont might be a desirable destination for Baby Boomer retirees.

As it happens, one of the two authors, Peter Nelson, is a Vermonter, a geography professor at Middlebury College on sabbatical in Washington, D.C., for a year as a visiting scholar for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, which released that study.

When reached, Nelson said that, yes, there could be a “strong propensity for these Baby Boomers to find at least certain types of areas in Vermont attractive.”

Left alone, these Boomer retirees could be economically beneficial to rural Vermont. Most of them will have some money, which they’ll spend at the local shops and restaurants. Some of them no doubt will hire locals to build, repair, or clean houses, do yard-work, and the like.

But Nelson has an idea. It’s not yet a fully-developed idea, but he plans to spend the next few months trying to develop it. His idea is not to leave these Boomer retirees alone, but somehow to enlist them – their expertise and their money – to help perk up local rural economies.

“It’s hard for communities to direct these newcomers’ energies in ways that benefit the general population,” he said. A lot of the people arriving potentially have something very meaningful to contribute but I haven’t seen a community that’s effectively organized itself to harness this potential. If you’ve got five or six retired folks from financial services, what kind of organizational structure could be developed to harness their expertise to create some employment opportunities for local people in their twenties and thirties?”

As Nelson sees it, the county economic development agencies are the best vehicle for trying to get wealthy retirees to start or finance local businesses.

“The selectboards are dealing more with day-to-day operations of municipalities,” he said. Regional economic development agencies, their charge is more how do we create a stable economy for not just a town but an aggregation of towns. They operate at larger scale.”

But he acknowledged that he was not sure exactly how to transform this concept into action, and not everyone involved in rural economic planning is convinced that the goal is realistic.

“I’m a little skeptical,” said Jerry Johnson, a political science professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, identified by Nelson as one of the scholars interested in the concept. “It’s a great idea but I’m not sure if it’s gonna fly anywhere.”

Johnson said that while he agreed that retirees want to have an impact on their new communities, they were more interested in volunteer work than in going into business,

“They work on the arts festival, at the library,” Johnson said. “They didn’t retire to start another business.”

Also skeptical, but somewhat more optimistic, was Ray Rasker, another Montanan, an economist who specializes in rural economic development.

“People don’t start up a business to create jobs,” Rasker said. “Their motivation is to make money. A side effect of it is that it creates jobs.”

But, he said, “I don’t think I would discount the wave of retiring baby boomers, people who’ve had a career, who are well-connected. “ Some, he said, “might keep working to a certain extent.”

Rasker said he thought the capital and the expertise of rural retirees could be tapped, but only if the other fundamentals of rural economic development were in place. The most important of these, he said, was protection of “environmental amenities.” After that come “good schools, high quality of life. access to markets, capital, transportation.”

As Nelson acknowledged, the importance of transportation makes economic development difficult in places such as the Northeast Kingdom, just because the nearest airport isn’t all that near.

In those areas, Rasker said, the best strategy might be to try to attract retirees by making sure local high-quality health care facilities were available.

“If I was king of economic development I’d insist on three things,” Rasker said. “Airport access, health care, education, and not necessarily university, probably more vo-tech.”

All of which, of course, costs money. So maybe the best economic development policy for places like rural Vermont requires some (selective, prudent) government spending as well as enough regulation to protect those “environmental amenities.”

Not, in other words, the Florida model, which for the nonce at least does not seem like a model to emulate.

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