In 13 months of existence, the News Guy has so far declined to deal with one of Vermont’s most important and most contentious issues: what to do about Vermont Yankee.

The subject has not been inadvertently overlooked; it has been deliberately avoided for two reasons.

The first is that the debate over re-licensing the nuclear power plant in Vernon for another 20 years has hardly been ignored by Vermont’s established news organizations. Sometimes it seems as though no one at the plant can sneeze without the Brattleboro Reformer, the Burlington Free Press and VPR recording how many co-workers said, “God Bless You,” and seeking comment from VY’s owner, the Louisiana-based Entergy Company.

Considering that one reason for the News Guy’s existence is to cover what others do not, not covering what others do made sense.

The second reason is that this dispute is both financially and scientifically complicated, and that one ought to know what one is talking about before talking about it.

That this precept is not universally followed renders it no less worthy.

Just how dangerous are those dry casks of nuclear waste stored at the plant site? How hard would it be to replace the power Yankee produces annually? Will that one-degree increase in the Connecticut River’s temperature degrade the river’s ecological integrity? Does the spinoff of Yankee to a new, highly leveraged, company mean Vermont taxpayers are likely to be stuck with the cost of shutting the plant down?

Because the policy here holds that knowing what you’re talking about involves more than just quoting the (often shrilly expressed) opinions on both sides of the debate, answering those questions and more would take more time than has been available. Hence the absence of Vermont Yankee coverage.

By now, though, enough of that information has been gathered to probe into some of the politics and economics (if not the nuclear physics) of the Vermont Yankee dispute. Besides, in recent days, the political aspect has moved center-stage, allowing the political observer to comment with more authority.

Actually, the tumult of the last few days has inspired some exceptions to one of the most obvious political facts of the Yankee debate – its tribalism. An outspoken Vermont Yankee supporter is likely to be…well, let’s just say a proper person (and, yes, we’re engaging in a little simplistic stereotyping here, just to make the point quickly). Possibly a Republican, but at any rate a pro-establishment sort, someone who admires – or at least is not bothered by – large corporations, the consumer culture, suburbia.

But find a populist Vermonter (left or right) who rails against corporate dominance, gas-guzzling vehicles, and consumerism, and who has some counter-cultural sympathies, it’s a probable twelve-to-seven that he or she wants Vermont Yankee shut down yesterday.

On neither side of the divide is anyone likely to change his or her mind because of anything as trivial as evidence.

Which, when you think about it, is a pretty foolish foundation on which to conduct an important discussion.

Herewith, then, the first of three conclusions about the Vermont Yankee debate: It is entirely possible to be a reasonable, thoughtful, intelligent, well-meaning, public-spirited person and be in favor of relicensing VY for anther 20 years.

Or to be against it.

And that’s because of the second of three conclusions about the Vermont Yankee debate: Everyone living in Vermont now or who gets born or moves into it over the next 20 years can live healthy, prosperous (and electrically-powered) lives if the plant shuts down in 2012 or earlier.

Or if it continues to operate for another 20 years.

Which is not to say that the choice is not consequential, merely that it is not cataclysmic. Without Vermont Yankee, electricity might cost more, and Vermonters in effect might have to burn more coal, producing more greenhouse gas. (“In effect,” because Vermonters wouldn’t themselves burn the coal; it would be burned for them to provide some of the power now produced by Yankee).

If the plant continues to operate, it will continue to produce some radiation pollution. Then there is the danger, minimal but potentially catastrophic, of leakage from those storage casks. (But that danger already exists, from the gunk already there. Whether another 20 years worth substantively enhances the danger is one of those scientific questions this site is not yet competent to answer).

These are the kinds of choices societies have to make these days, and, as stated above, are matters on which decent and reasonable people can disagree. In an ideal world – or even a reasonable one – they would disagree civilly and rationally.

A challenge rendered more difficult by passions on both sides, but especially these days by the conduct of the plant’s owners, whereupon we come to the Third conclusion about the Vermont Yank debate: Entergy officials may be competent managers of an efficient and safe power plant. But when it comes to dealing with the public, they…well, to clean up the line Lyndon Johnson (unfairly) used about Gerald Ford, they can’t find their collective behind with both hands.

A reality evident even before this latest debacle about the underground pipes and lying to the authorities. There was the collapsing water tower in 2007, the inadequate studies about the safety of the waste storage, the failure to follow the Public Service Board’s order requiring it to monitor radiation levels in the spent fuel containers, its procrastination in making a price offer to the utility distributing companies.

Then consider the company’s new advertising campaign, the one highlighting the fact that 650 people work at the plant.

As they do. But half of them live in Massachusetts. And if they were all Vermonters? They would comprise some three tenths of one percent of all the jobs in the state. The people of Vermont don’t rely on Yankee to provide jobs. They rely on it to provide clean, reliable, inexpensive electricity. Sometimes, marketing “experts” can be too cute for their own good.

Then of course we come to the latest fiasco. ‘Oh, we do have radioactive material in underground pipes after all, even though we said we didn’t; even though we said it under oath.’ (But using words perhaps designed to avoid to perjury. “I don’t believe there is active piping service today carrying radionuclides under ground,” said Entergy Vice President Jay Thayer. It’s all but impossible to prove that a person did not “believe” what he said he did at any moment).

It’s as though nobody ever told these guys that the best – actually, the only – way to appear to be transparent is to…(hold your breath here for the shock)…be transparent. It’s a public process. You can never be sure of not getting caught if you say something false. Ergo, say nothing false.

In all likelihood, then, most Vermonters now view Vermont Yankee as a company from which they would not buy a used car, were it in the car business, because: (a) they wouldn’t trust it not to have rolled back the odometer; and (b) they wouldn’t be sure it knew how to roll back the odometer without rolling it forward by mistake.

That explains why even a whole lot of pro-corporate establishment types are turning against Yankee relicensing. See Sunday’s Free Press editorial. See also the angry statements from top officials of Gov. Jim Douglas’s Administration, clearly expressing the governor’s views. If anyone has the right to be angry at Yankee, it is Douglas. He’s supported it all the way. Now it has sandbagged him.

To render this judgment, one needs no scientific expertise, and the company has only itself to blame.

Patricia Blair is pro-choice.

She didn’t put it exactly that way. Until recently, when she thought about abortion at all, it was not as a political issue, but as it related to her, and she couldn’t imagine ever wanting one.

“I wanted babies,” she said.

Now, though, she’s aware that “some women might need an abortion,” and thinks they should have the right to make the decision, “as a matter of womens rights,” which sums up the pro-choice position rather succinctly.

It’s somewhat ironic, then, that the 38-year-old Pownal mother of three, may have propelled Vermont into a debate about abortion, even as she and the two legislators who responded to her plea insist that what they’re doing has nothing to do with abortion.

More ironic because the lawmakers – Bennington Democratic Sen. Richard Sears, and Newport Republican Sen. Vincent Illuzzi – also favor abortion rights, a stance that has not stopped them from sponsoring bills that trouble the state’s pro-choice campaigners while offering the minority but dedicated anti-abortion faction in the state a rare opportunity to score points.

Segueing, as they say in the TV world, to yet another irony: the political consequences of this impending dispute might be just what the anti-abortion forces do not want.

Assuming, that is, that there are any political or legislative consequences at all. There’s a good chance that neither bill will get out of committee, that the issue will be overwhelmed by the state’s budget battles and other more urgent matters such as the relicensing of Vermont Yankee.

For one thing, the proposed legislation is not likely to have much if any impact on the real world. Both bills are statements of philosophy as much as likely remedies to actual problems. That makes them no less interesting, and perhaps more contentious. Abstract arguments can be fierce, even when, as in this case, all sides agree that last August 10, something terrible happened to Pat Blair.

That was the day of her auto accident on Route 7, an accident caused, according to authorities, by the driver of another car, a young woman from Pownal who was allegedly driving while impaired by taking prescription drugs. Blair was injured. Her husband was more seriously hurt, remains confined, and is unable to work.

But that was not the worst consequence. Blair was pregnant with twins. They were killed in the accident. To Blair, she did not lose two fetuses, but two babies. She wants them remembered that way, and she wants other pregnant women protected from similar losses in the future.

Context matters here. Not long ago, the Blairs lost a daughter who was born with umbilical cord prolapse, a rare but often fatal childbirth emergency.

“But that was from natural causes,” she said. “This time, someone else’s choice caused their death. I don’t see why Vermont can’t hold her accountable.”

It’s close to impossible not to understand Blair’s anguish, and to want to help her overcome it. On the other hand, a state does not typically pass legislation to assuage the feelings of one of its citizens, which is pretty much all these two bills would accomplish.

The Sears bill (S-273) ”proposes to enhance the penalty for assault of a pregnant woman” if she is attacked or the victim of grossly “negligent operation of a motor vehicle, or operating a vehicle under the influence of alcohol or drugs.”

As deterrence goes, this isn’t much. How many impaired people are going to decide that they’d better not get behind the wheel of a car because they might cause an accident involving a pregnant woman? Besides, it doesn’t satisfy Blair; it doesn’t mention the fetus, only the pregnant woman.

Blair prefers Illuzzi’s bill (S-175) which specifically “proposes to establish that a fetus be treated as a victim under state homicide law.” This could have some practical effect. If, for instance, a pregnant woman survived a physical attack but her fetus did not, the assailant in this case could be imprisoned for life, as if he had killed a born person.

To say the least, this is a rare circumstance. Usually, such a vicious attack on a pregnant woman ends up with her death, also, and her killer is sentenced to life in prison, or even execution. That’s what happened, for instance, to Scott Peterson, the Californian convicted of the 2002 murder of his wife and unborn child. He’s appealing his death sentence, which almost surely would have been imposed had his wife not been pregnant.

California is one of 37 states whose laws do recognize a fetus as a separate entity, effectively as a person. Like Vermont, California is a state with a strong pro-choice majority, lending some support to Blair’s claim that “fetal homicide laws can coexist with abortion rights.”

But Jill Krowinski, the communications director of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, said there were potential dangers to women in legally recognizing the personhood of the fetus.

“It’s the wrong approach,” she said. “It would separate the pregnant woman from her fetus in eyes of law. That could be the first step in threatening a woman’s right to control her own pregnancy.”

The first part of that statement is exactly what Blair wants to accomplish. Both are what the anti-abortion movement wants to accomplish, which helps explain why the Vermont Right to Life organization is supporting her, even tough she does not advocate their cause and says she “hasn’t had a whole lot of connection with them.”

Here’s where the political irony comes in. If the Legislature debates either of these bills, it will raise the saliency of the abortion issue, a development which might hurt Brian Dubie, the likely Republican candidate for governor, and an opponent of legal abortions.

Were politics entirely rational, this would make no difference. A woman’s right to choose an abortion is protected by the U.S. Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in the famous Roe v Wade decision of 1973. That decision is safe with the current Supreme Court, or any Court changes while Barack Obama is president, which will be at least to the end of the first term of whoever is elected governor this year.

But politics is not entirely rational, and just to complicate matters further, Alan Gilbert of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Committee points out that Vermont’s old abortion ban remains on the books. It’s 13 V.S.A. § 101, and should Roe ever be reversed, it would have to be repealed or abortions would be illegal here.

A repeal that would be more difficult with an abortion foe in the Second Floor Corner Office in Montpelier.

An unlikely scenario, perhaps, but that doesn’t rob it of all political oomph.

Gilbert brought up another point. In 1991, he wrote in a letter to Sears, the Legislature amended the law (23 VSA 1091) to deal more harshly with grossly negligent drivers who cause death or injury to a fetus. The law he said, had the effect of “broadening the (negligent motor vehicle operation) offense to cover pregnancies terminated by injury, because the mother is almost always the victim of serious bodily injury in such a crash.”

Gilbert said he through the driver who allegedly caused Blair’s accident could receive up to 45 years in prison, a sentence he called “quite punitive.”

So Vermont law already (if perhaps implicitly) recognizes the fetus. Not as a person, exactly, but as something to be protected.

This afternoon, a joint Executive-Legislative “Emergency Board” will be asked to consider whether to authorize spending another $15 million from the state’s General Fund.

That’s the largest of the several state funds that together face a $150 million deficit for the coming fiscal year (FY 2011, starting July 1), or $112 million if the state can really save $38 million via the government streamlining plan introduced with great fanfare last week.

Yes, that’s the same deficit that Gov. Jim Douglas says must be eliminated by spending less. The Democratic leaders of the legislature agree with the Republican governor here, but he’s the more resolute budget-cutter. When the Democrats said last week they hoped to “do more with less,” Douglas at one point interjected that he wanted the state government to do “less with less.”

So who wants to spend an additional 15 million smackeroos?

Yup, Mr. Budget-Cutter the Governor himself.

Meaning that the deficit would rise to $165 million (or $127 million if the state can….see above)?

Not a bit, says the Douglas Administration.

“It should reduce the deficit if the jobs are created, and that means an increase in income and payroll taxes, sales and use taxes, transportation taxes and fees, (all of which) results in more net revenue,” said David Mace, the Director of Communications of the Vermont Agency of Commerce & Community Development.

A plausible if debatable assertion, which will be considered in some detail below. Meanwhile, what is definite and not debatable is that if the Emergency Board (the Governor himself plus four legislators) does what Douglas asks, the State Treasury will pay up to $15 million to a bunch of companies which promise to expand their work force, or to move into the state from elsewhere, thereby employing more Vermonters, thereby culminating in the happy state of affairs described in the previous paragraph.

There’s nothing new about this. In one way or another, the state’s been doing it for years. It is now doing it through something known as VEGI, which even though it is pronounced (and sometimes spelled) “Veggie,” is not a pseudo-burger, but the acronym for the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive Program, which is in turn part of VEPC, the Vermont Economic Progress Council, which in turn is part of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development.

The Emergency Board meeting has been called because VEGI approved applications totaling $4.5 million late last year, but the “economic activity,” as Mace put it, by the subsidized companies didn’t begin until this year. So that $4.5 million counts against VEGI’s 2010 annual cap of $10 million.

But now VEGI has applications from four companies totaling $16 million. If they are all approved, the total will exceed the cap. So Douglas wants the Emergency Board to lift the cap from $10 million to $25 million. (And, later, he wants the Legislature to abolish the cap entirely)

And who are these four companies?

That’s a secret. The information is not being divulged, said Mace, citing an exemption to the State’s Open Records Law (From the statute establishing VEGI itself, he said. Title 2, Subtitle 2, Part 3, Chapter 151, Subchapter 11E, § 5930a (h)).

Even the legislators on the Emergency Board don’t know. One of them, Rep. Martha Heath, the Westford Democrat who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, said she understood that two of them were Vermont companies, two firms thinking of moving some or all of their operations into the state.

Heath said she thought the Board would put off its decision, recessing until a later date (but before January 28, when the VEGI board has to decide on the applications), “so we have time to get some information,” including “what (raising the cap) would do to revenues. We need to take a good look at it, and not take a chance about increasing the deficit.”

At this point, she said, she and the other lawmakers on the Emergency Board (the chairs of the four money committees, all Democrats) are not challenging the whole concept of pursuing “economic development” by offering subsidies to companies that agree to move in or expand. But she acknowledged that some in the Legislature have those questions.

As do many outside the Legislature, and outside Vermont. Paul O’Neill, President George W. Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, said that when he was head of ALCOA he never made a plant siting decision based on a state or local tax subsidy. He took the money, he said, because if someone is going to give you money, you take it. But he decided where to do business based on the quality of the work force, proximity to material and markets, and other traditional business considerations.

Not that VEGI and similar programs simply throw money willy-nilly at businesses which say they’re thinking of moving into the state or hiring more workers. On the contrary, VEGI has an elaborate set procedure that requires applicants to submit a great deal of statistical evidence to support their contention that they will add jobs. If they don’t, they don’t keep getting the money (these are usually multi-year obligations) or may even have to give some back.

According to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, “to approve a firm’s application, the state must determine that the firm’s project (a) would not have occurred without the incentive (the “but-for”test) [that means ‘but for’ the subsidy, the business would not expand or move]; (b) will provide a net fiscal benefit to the state…and (c) will meet “quality-control” guidelines, such as minimum compensation requirements for new jobs.”

The experts make that determination, Mace said, based on “an economic model.”

Very professional. But this model, Mace said, is the “proprietary,” property of a consulting firm called the Remi Company, apparently meaning that it isn’t reviewable by citizens, lawmakers, or state economists.

Besides, economic models are…well, models, useful, but not always precise. In this case, some of their findings have to be based on information that is not just subjective, but hypothetical. That whole “but-for” business, for instance, rests in part on the assertion of a business official that his or her company will act differently with the subsidy than without it.

Even pro-business state Auditor Tom Salmon, in a report about VEGI, noted that that “a critical decision to award incentives is difficult to audit,” and that “the awards are not based on a company’s financial need and…companies are not required to furnish financial statements, business plans or tax returns with applications.”

That report by the Boston Fed found that in VEGI’s first year, “the state authorized $9.7 million…and projected that the recipient companies would create 1,310 new jobs from 2007 to 2012. This implies an average gross cost of around $7,400 per job.”

If those jobs paid about $50,000, the worker wouldn’t pay more than about $1,500 in state income taxes (assuming he/she was married with children, a homeowner itemizing deductions). That worker would have to buy a lot, stay in a lot of hotels, eat lots of restaurant meals and drive many miles to pay another $6,000 or so in state taxes.

Martha Heath said state officials were not claiming the subsidies would pay for themselves in one year, but in nine.

Maybe they will. But how would anyone ever know?