Wild boars have come to Vermont.

No, this has nothing to do with the campaign for governor. These are the O-A-R boars – the four-footed, perhaps 500-pound rooters — not the O-R-E bores – the two-footed, 100-250-pound preeners.

In the interests of scientific precision, let’s acknowledge that these latest Vermont boars are possibly not even full-fledged boars (Sus scrofa in the official nomenclature) but some combination of boar and the regular old pig (sus domestica).

Boars are not native to Vermont. Neither, probably, are cattle (bos), of which there are many more, but there are at least two major differences between the two species: (1) Cows do less damage (although they do their share); (2) cows were brought to Vermont on purpose.

Wild pigs do a lot of damage to gardens, lawns, streams, fish, other wildlife and some tame life, primarily livestock and pets, though possibly also their human owners. As to the wild pigs now (apparently) resident in the state, they were not brought here on purpose.

They emigrated from New Hampshire, where they are not native, either, but where they (sort of, and no insult intended toward the fine citizens on the far side of the Connecticut) belong.

Details shortly, but first let’s make sure this post does not cause panic. Vermont is not being over-run by wild swine. According to the generally recognized authority on the subject, John J. (Jack) Mayer, Jr., there are not even enough wild hogs in Vermont to constitute a breeding population.

Yet.

And there may never be, said Mayer, who is a research scientist and manager at the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C., and co-author (with I. Lehr Brisban, Jr.) of Wild Pigs in the United States: Their History, Comparative Morphology, and Current Status (University of Georgia Press, 1991).

“The advantage Vermont will have is the weather,” Mayer said. “Piglets may not be able to survive a cold winter.”

The adult wild hogs, he said, rarely live for long, either, because they are so eagerly hunted.

“Word gets out (that there’s a wild pig in the area) and typically it doesn’t last very long. So far, Vermont really hasn’t had a sustaining population,” he said.

But Michigan, where it’s comparably cold,  does, Mayer said. So do four western Canadian provinces which are colder than Vermont and where the wild pigs, Mayer has been told, burrow into hay bales or make snow tunnels to survive a winter night.

But the animals are rapidly expanding their range, so much that the whole country faces what Mayer calls “a pig bomb.” As recently as mid-2008, wild pigs lived in 37 states. Now Mayer estimates 44, all but Connecticut, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Utah, and Wyoming.

Vermont’s boar population is low, fewer than 100, Mayer estimates, all of them in Windsor County, having swum across the river from their New Hampshire home.

No, wild hogs are not native to the Granite State, either. They were brought there, the first of them more than 100 years ago, to live and be hunted in the immense fenced “park” created in 1886 by Austin Corbin, the founder of the Long Island Rail Road.

After enclosing some 9,500 hectares (about 23,000 acres) with 58 kilometers (almost 35 miles) of fence, buried to make it “wild boar-proof,” Corbin bought 1,000 Black Forest wild boars from Germany.

The problem was that the fence was not people-proof, and then and now, according to Mayer, some of the locals, angry that all this land and all that game was available only to Corbin’s fellow-millionaires, kept tearing holes in the fence. Lately, he said, “vandals have been cutting holes you could drive a truck through.”

It is from those gaps in the fence, Mayer said, that according to his sources (whom he will not name; some of them may be among the fence-cutters) several wild hogs have swum across the Connecticut, probably making landfall somewhere between Windsor and Hartland.

Those travels illustrate how relentless and resilient these animals can be. The eastern edge of Corbin Park is about eight miles from the river, and while the area is not densely populated, it isn’t wilderness, either. Those hogs made their way to and across the Connecticut through human habitat.

Should they establish a breeding population here, the consequences would be consequential, and possibly catastrophic. It isn’t that boars are human-eating killers. There would be no need, Mayer said, “to keep the kids home from school.”

But they are voracious eaters who root into the ground everywhere—gardens and farm fields. They will eat, Mayer said, anything “ if they can get their mouth around it — fawns, goats, lambs.”

And pets. Mayer said wild hogs don’t like dogs, and some of the rare confrontations between the animals and humans have arisen when a hog attacked a dog being walked by its owner.

Boars are as ravenous about water as about food, Mayer said, and will root up a lawn’s underground sprinkling system.

They also damage trout fisheries. By rooting, eating, and excreting along riverbanks, they pollute the water and, by removing vegetation, cause erosion that covers trout redds (spawning areas) with silt.

Bears, bobcats, and coyotes eat wild hogs, but not enough “to have any impact on the population,” Mayer said. That’s why, once they establish a breeding population, they are almost impossible to eradicate.

“Hunters will take a certain numbers,” he said. “But hunting will only take 10-to-50 percent of a wild pig population. To control it, you need to take 70 percent out of the population ever year. Lethal removal just isn’t going to do it.”

Besides, not everyone wants to get rid of wild hogs. Hunters don’t, and hunters are a potent lobby in every state capital, including Vermont’s. The boars are “fun to hunt, good to eat and make a really impressive trophy on the wall,” Mayer said.

A wild pig population, then, creates a political problem as environmentalists, farmers, gardeners, and hikers favor extirpating them while hunters fight to keep enough of them around to hunt.

Well, that’s when happens when folks mess around with nature.

As everyone does and must. Agriculture is messing around with nature, and imposes some negative impacts on the natural world. But it’s necessary. Shipping wild animals far from their native habitat so that a few folks can pay big bucks to hunt them is not. There being no such thing as an indestructible fence, such shipments should perhaps be discouraged, or at least controlled.

Raising, of course, the matter of Pete the Moose (see the August 28 post, “The Moose is Not Loose”), about which a progress report. There has been no progress. Maj. Dennis Reinhardt of Fish and Wildlife’s enforcement division, said Fish and Wildlife officials are “continuing to meet Mr. (Doug) Nelson (on whose farm Pete is being illegally confined) and the Department of Agriculture “trying to resolve it amicably.” But Reinhardt made clear that the department is convinced that keeping the moose “absolutely is not legal.”

Correction: Terry Macaig represents Williston as a Democratic member of the House, not Burlington.

Forenote: There will be an extra News Guy posting tomorrow, Thursday (as well as the usual Friday posting), along with an announcement about some new developments at the web site which we trust will be received favorably.

Actually, it might be more accurate to consider today’s post the “extra” one. Tomorrow’s will have more news; what follows is a bit of musing on Vermont and consistency.

Back in the day, Sen. Russell Long, the Louisiana Democrat who chaired the Senate Finance Committee for a century or so, used to sum up the average person’s attitude toward taxation as follows: “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree.”

Bad poetry, but good political analysis.

As Vermonters are now learning (and proving), the same phenomenon applies to spending. From Gov. Jim Douglas on down, the attitude of the body politic is: “Cut the other guy to the bone, but leave my favorite program alone.”

Poetry no better. Perspicacity identical.

Exhibit A comes right from the top. For years, Vermont farmers and woodland owners have gotten a tax break thanks to the “current use” tax assessment. Nobody opposes this policy in principle; it’s kept thousands of acres open and green by removing an incentive for landowners to sell to developers.

But it’s also expensive.

According to whom?

According to the Douglas Administration, whose tax commissioner, Richard Westman, just a few weeks ago identified the Current Use policy as one reason everybody else’s property taxes keep rising.

As it happens, over the last year or so, the various “stakeholders” of Current Use – farmers, foresters, environmentalists, local officials – have been meeting to try to figure out a way to get a little more money for the state treasury without seriously diminishing the advantage to landowners.

And they succeeded. Or at least most of them thought they did, and they presented the Legislature with a plan that would bring in another $1.6 million in revenue.

Oh, no, said the Douglas Administration, represented in this case by Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Jonathan Wood. Yeah, we need money. We’re $150 million in the hole. But we don’t want money from these landowners because…well, because it’s a good program, Wood said.

Yeah, but they’re all good programs. Maybe what he really meant was—These are our friends.

Then there was the Governor’s major power play to get a special Legislative Board to approve spending several more million dollars for one of his pet programs even as he insists on cutting almost everything else. This was the cap-raising of the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive . (See VEGI Burgher,” the January 13 post)

Assume for the sake of discussion that this, too, is a valuable program. But it never seemed to have occurred to Douglas to apply the same standards to it that he wants imposed on other agencies—spend less than you have in your budget this year because we all have to tighten our belts.

Do not suppose, though, that this “cut everybody but me” attitude is limited to Douglas and his fellow Republicans. At a Democratic fund-raiser a couple of weeks ago, former Gov. Howard Dean scolded lawmakers who might be willing to consider reducing the budget of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.

“We need that program,” Dean said. “It is the perfect public-private partnership.”

It may be, and like Current Use, it has been useful as a conservation mechanism. But it couldn’t survive a year or two with a little less money?

The liberals are somewhat less inconsistent than the conservatives here, because some of them openly call for some targeted and temporary tax increases to help the state over its $150 million budget shortfall. But everybody agrees that programs will have to be cut.

Just not their favorites.

OK, some folks are willing to take less. State workers took a three percent pay cut. Yes, they did it under pressure and to avoid more layoffs, so it wasn’t just an act of noble sacrifice. But it was a sacrifice, as was the five percent pay cut taken by their bosses, the “exempt” state workers who earn more than $60,000 a year. The Stowe teachers agreed to give up the 5.5 percent pay hike they had negotiated for this year.

But these seem to be the exceptions. The default position for Vermont advocates left and right remains a firm and forthright conviction to cut spending. On everybody else’s programs.

Aftnote: Because the News Guy rarely misses an opportunity to ridicule or insult the Burlington Free Press when it deserves ridicule or insult, it’s only fair that the paper’s triumphs be recognized. Last Sunday alone it had three pieces of first-rate journalism: Sam Hemingway’s lead story about tritium contamination at nuclear plants nationwide, Nancy Remsen’s story about the potential impacts of state budget cuts, Candace Page’s fascinating account of niche marketing agriculture in Vermont.

OK, for the last time for a year if not forever, let’s get this fund-raising stuff out of the way.

The response to last month’s plea for donations has been encouraging. The News Guy will live for another year.

The clever ploy, of course, would be to state the opposite, that only you, by your contribution, can stave off the death of this site. But while effective marketing may call for…well, shall we say a touch of artfulness, good journalism – the goal here — requires transparency.

Which you have. Whether or not you contribute, the News Guy will live.

But he still needs a little more revenue. Hence this admittedly annoying reminder. The experience of the last few weeks is that reminders work; each new appeal for funds inspires more donations. Perhaps this explains why public radio station fund drives are so obnoxious. It works. Alas, the News Guy finds it impossible to be nearly as obnoxious as a public radio station. But he’s trying.

So once more: If you think this site brings Vermonters news and analysis they otherwise would not get, and contributes to the state’s public discussion, click on “donate” (Under “pages” in the upper right quarter of the page) and send as little (or, even better, as much) as you choose.

All right. Enough of that.

Now let’s peek into two items of the week’s news, starting with State Sen. Hinda Miller’s proposal to reverse this year’s repeal of the state’s capital gains tax preference.

In this case, a peek is all that’s required because, with the eternal caveat that one can never conclusively predict where proposed legislation will go, one can with some confidence predict that this one ain’t goin’ nowhere.

Still, there was something interesting about the evidence Sen. Miller, a Burlington Democrat, provided as she announced her proposal: there wasn’t much, if any.

Do not misunderstand. This is an observation, not a condemnation. There is nothing unusual in proposing legislation without providing much evidence for it. Better (or worse?) yet, one need not have evidence to be correct.

Miller said that doing away with the preference may have been “fair” because it mostly effected the wealthy, but it was not “smart” because it would discourage investments, which the state needs.

“If we don’t repeal these capital-gains tax increases then we are going to dissipate any consideration people might have to risk their own money in the future of Vermont businesses,” Miller told the Burlington Free Press.

Could be. Then again, the news has been full of late of people who have decided to risk somebody’s money, probably including their own, in Vermont businesses (a new Yogurt plant in Brattleboro; a new company planning to produce hydro power from old flood control dams; three stores moving to Shelburne Road Plaza). Obviously, the tax structure isn’t discouraging everybody.

Not to mention that Gov. Jim Douglas, that advocate of low taxes and investment incentives, once proposed ending that capital gains preference himself. True, Douglas would have, sort of, given the money back to the same people who “lost” it by reducing income tax rates on the wealthiest taxpayers. But the impact on investment would presumably have been identical to the impact from this year’s repeal.

In fairness to Sen. Miller, she might have some facts to back up her contention, but she was out of town yesterday and did not respond to phone and email messages.

But now comes word of an actual economic study arguing that under the present circumstances (high unemployment; effective zero short-term interest rates), cutting capital gains taxes would be exactly the wrong thing to do.

In a paper written for the New York Federal Reserve Bank, economist Gauti Eggertsson concluded that reducing capital gains taxes “deepens a recession” because it “gives people the incentive to save instead of spend, when precisely the opposite is needed.”

The other item worth a peek is yesterday’s unanimous decision by the Legislative Committee on Administrative Review (LCAR) to reject a proposed rule allowing all-terrain vehicles on state land.

Again, only a peek is needed because there’s no reason to think many Vermonters care much. This is a niche issue. Oh, there’s measurable public opinion on it; a rather substantial majority of the public seems to oppose allowing the ATVs on state land. But only the hardcore environmentalists are passionate opponents, just as only the ATV riders are passionate advocates.

This political perspective is appropriate because the Agency of Natural Resource’s case for changing the rule was entirely political. The scientific evidence – every iota of it – supports keeping the ATVs off public land (and perhaps imposing more restrictions elsewhere). That’s why the actual scientists in the agency opposed changing the rule.

Again, this is observation, not condemnation. In a democracy, political decisions are entirely proper. Top ANR officials might have reasonably concluded that the degradation of the natural resource caused by ATVs, while certain, would be minor, outweighed by the enhanced convenience bestowed on the ATV riders.

(And perhaps enhanced economic activity, though whether allowing ATVs on state land would attract more out-of-state riders to Vermont is conjecture, and would have to be considered against the possibility that the policy would deter some out-of-state visitors who prefer quiet hikes on state land).

Then there’s the management consideration. ANR Secretary Jonathan Wood, neither an ATV rider nor, by reliable report, a great fan of the ATV lobby, has pointed out that some ATVers are riding on state land anyway, legal or no, and that providing some legal access might reduce the trespassing.

Besides, the ATV riders are one of the constituencies to which Gov. Jim Douglas…well, after some reflection, let’s say, one which he likes to please.

Before the reflection, the impulse was to say a constituency to which Douglas panders. But that has an unnecessarily derogatory connotation. Pandering is unavoidable in a democracy, and all office-holders engage in it (See under: Vermont Yankee, Democratic candidates for governor, and). The favored constituency does not think of itself as being pandered to, only as having its needs recognized and its sensibilities honored.

That’s why the Douglas Administration might try to push ahead with the rule change anyway. Honoring the sensibilities of a loyal constituency, even a small one, can be politically appealing.

At last month’s meeting of the Current Use Advisory Board, William Johnson of the Tax Department noted that “there will be a lot of bickering” about the Current Use policy in the Legislature next year.

The reason, he said, is that the policy costs a lot of money. It reduces property tax revenue by some $35 million. If that money all went into the Education Fund, Johnson said, the statewide school property tax rate might be some four cents lower. With legislators eager to keep residential tax rates down, Johnson said, “the debate will be on.”

Actually, the debate will be on before the Legislature reconvenes in January. The Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee meets next month, and Current Use is likely to be on its agenda.

As Johnson indicated, the debate could get heated, and his remarks illustrated why. On the one hand, almost everyone (certainly including Johnson) favors the policy, under which farmers and woodlot owners pay property tax based on the revenue potential of their land, not its full market value. The policy is credited for keeping Vermont’s working farms and forests economically viable, with financial and environmental benefits for everybody.

On the other hand, there’s that cost to the other taxpayers that Johnson mentioned. Keeping farm and forest property taxes lower makes residential property taxes higher.

And in most states, surely including this one, anything that tends to make residential property taxes higher is political dynamite. In fact, as some see it, there has been an intertwined relationship between Current Use and residential property taxes for more than a decade, and today’s Current Use controversy stems from an effort to alter that relationship.

Among those who see it that way is Sen. Mark MacDonald, a Williamstown Democrat, a member of the Finance Committee, and identified by defenders of Current Use as one of the lawmakers who wants to get more money out of the farm and forest owners.

Not that MacDonald opposes Current Use. That would be hypocritical because he owns farm and forest land and benefits from it, as, he said, do many other members of the Legislature. (And many members of the Current Use Advisory Board, including Chairman John McClain. In some circles, that would be considered a conflict of interest. In Vermont, it’s just the way things are).

But to MacDonald, Current Use in its present form was part of a political agreement reached in 1997 when the Legislature passed Act 60 and created three tax breaks: Eliminating the machinery and equipment tax paid by businesses into the Education Fund; expanding and guaranteeing Current Use (as opposed to subjecting it to the annual appropriations process); and “income sensitivity” (though Macdonald doesn’t like the term), allowing most homeowners “the right to pay school taxes based on income,” rather than the full market value of their properties.

The problem, according to MacDonald and his allies, most of them Democrats in the Legislature, is that in the last few years Gov. Jim Douglas’s Administration has upset the balance by fiddling with the tax break that goes to the home-owners.

“What the Administration has done in last several years is to say that some homeowners are not paying enough in property taxes based on their income,” MacDonald said, “Then when the Senate Finance Committee suggested the Current Use people kicking back in to share the burden, they suddenly showed up and said, ‘how come we’re being picked on?’”

To Ed Larson of the Vermont Forest Products Association, MacDonald is “listening to a populist constituency that has this vision of rich landowners from outside getting a tax break, coming up here, driving up our property values and posting the land.”

Indicating that to some extent this dispute, like so many Vermont political battles, is tribal, each side assuming the worst of the other based on its own stereotypes.

But it’s more than that, in part because Current Use is likely to grow as the full market value of rural property continues to rise, creating an incentive for landowners to enroll in the program.

Whether today’s Current Use enrollees feel picked on, they certainly oppose any change that might raise their taxes. In fact, Larson told the Advisory Board that, if anything, taxes on forest land owners should be lower because, with prices so low, their taxes eat up half the revenue they are getting from the timber.

In a later interview, Larson acknowledged that he’d be happy with the status quo.

He’s not likely to get it because even many of Current Use’s champions acknowledge that some landowners are abusing the policy and that it now is being exploited by some property owners who are not what the original designers of the program had in mind.

To be eligible for Current Use, land has to be actively farmed or logged. At the Advisory Board meeting, members talked about multi-acre chunks of farmland that had been taken out of production but was still being taxed at its “use” rate. Furthermore, nobody disputed Deb Kingbsbury of Vershire, the self-appointed gadfly of the Current Use issue, when she said that some property-owners were “just using the program as a tax break.”

Deb Brighton, the natural resource economic policy analyst from Salisbury, who was once director of the Current Use program, said it was initially intended to benefit “real farmers,” (and by extension, “real loggers”) meaning those whose livelihoods depend on their income from agriculture or stumpage.

Now she said, a good deal of the land is owned by people whose “income comes from somewhere else. “ They are still providing the valuable service of keeping the land from being developed. But, Brighton said, “that person would do the same thing if you only paid him $25 an acre,” rather than providing the full benefits of Current Use.

Easier said than done, she acknowledged. Deciding which land is being preserved as “an amenity value” as opposed to a “production value” is somewhere between difficult and impossible.

That doesn’t mean nothing can be done. In fact, it’s quite likely that something will be done to get more revenue out of Current Use land. Some means of accomplishing that have to do with the technicalities of implementing the policy, as tentatively recommended in a draft proposal worked out by some environmentalists who support Current Use, and who will discuss their draft at a meeting in Randolph next week.

The danger, in the view of many, is that, in Deb Brighton’s words, simply raising the “use value” on which the land is taxed, “wouldn’t work for people really using the land.”

In other words, it might put small and medium-sized farms and woodlots out of business, a result nobody wants.

Expect, as Bill Johnson said, “a lot of bickering.”

NOTE: Reluctant though the News Guy still is to continue a story over the weekend, once again it seems necessary. Here, the first of two parts.

So your property taxes are going up. Aren’t everybody’s?

Actually, no. Some property owners in Vermont are paying less in property taxes this year than last year or the year before. Nor are these indigent owners of dilapidated shacks on weed-filled lots. Some are rich folks who own thousands of acres of productive land.

And who has made it possible for their tax bills to be lower?

You have. Or, to be more precise, the people of Vermont have over the last few decades, and that probably includes you. Furthermore, almost nobody thinks that the policy allowing these land-owners to pay less in taxes is a bad policy that ought to be abolished.

Which is not to say that there is no controversy here. There has been a great deal, and it may be about to boil over again as this year fades and the Legislature gets ready to resume in January.

The object of this controversy is the Current Use program, which is really not a program as much as a policy. Under this policy, established in 1978 but substantially revised in 1997, the taxes on farm and forest land are based not on the land’s market value, as are the taxes on most other properties, but on what one supporter called “the income-generating potential of the land.”

Which is less than full market value (or if it isn’t, the property owner doesn’t have to use Current Use), meaning the taxes will be lower.

In other words, though it’s considered unacceptable to say this in polite Vermont society, it’s a tax subsidy. Vermont’s other taxpayers – those who own mere houses, shops and the like – pay more so farmers and forest-land owners can pay less. Fiscally speaking, it’s a tax expenditure, no different from collecting the full market value property tax and then sending each farm and forest owner a check.

None of this means it’s a bad policy. It does render inconsistent the claims from farm and forest owners that they are devotees of the “free market.” But that makes them no different from other interest groups, all of whom love the “free market” when it benefits them and all the public subsidies they can get.

In fact, as mentioned, there is something close to universal agreement that Current Use is good policy, that it is one reason Vermont retains as much farm and forestland as it does. Good not only for agriculture and the forest products industry, but for tourism. And that’s just the economic benefit. Having farms and forest is also what makes Vermont the kind of place in which most Vermonters want to live.

So why the controversy?

First, because Current Use is expensive, and likely to get more expensive. According to the Tax Department’s William Johnson, it “cost the Education Fund (financed largely by the statewide education property tax) $35 million this year ($33,913,934 according to the official report, but that’s close enough), and will soon be $50 million a year.” The state also reimburses local governments for the money they lose because of Current Use. That now amounts to roughly $11 million.

So as this year’s Legislative session drew to an end, lawmakers scrounging around for revenue looked into getting more from the land-owners enrolled in Current Use. One idea was a cap on how much some landowners could benefit from the policy. The cap would have brought in an additional $1.6 million.

They didn’t get it, thanks to an unusual political coalition in which the Farm Bureau and the Vermont Forest Products Association were supported by the organized environmental community, with whom they are often at odds. After what both sides described as some rather heated discussions, the legislators agreed to wait.

But not forever. The burden is now on the producer/environmentalist coalition to come up with some ideas for raising something close to that $1.6 million without over-burdening the farmers and woodland owners. Meeting as the Forest Roundtable, some of them have come up with a draft “options report” they plan to discuss at a meeting in Randolph next week.

The other reason for the Current Use controversy is the belief, or at least the suspicion, that some landowners who benefit from it don’t really need it or deserve it. The draft report of the pro-Current Use Forest Roundtable acknowledges that the tax break for property owners enrolled in Current Use has steadily gone up, leading to a growing “perception of unfairness.”

Fortunately for Current Use supporters, this perception has not yet grown into anything like a political movement. Unfortunately for them, the (so far) lone public agitator for scaling back some of the tax breaks is a vivacious, persistent, energetic woman who is a property lister in the town of Vershire as well as a self-styled “Jane Q. Public” who keeps showing up at public meetings to point out what she considers the unfairness of the present system.

Not for the first time, Deb Kingsbury attended last month’s meeting of the Current Use Advisory Board to argue that some property owners are “using (Current Use) as a tax break,” and that too much of the benefit goes to out-of-staters.

Like almost everyone else, Kingsbury favors the basic idea behind Current Use to help farmers and foresters hold onto their land.

“But we’re giving such a big tax deduction while everybody else is still paying,” she told the Board, whose members set the per-acre value of the farm and forest land.

For forest land, that value is now $123 per acre, lower than it has been in years. The result is that even as tax rates have crept up, some tax bills have gone down. In the town of Bridgewater, for instance, where there are 83 properties enrolled in Current Use, the Town Clerk’s office reported that the tax rate had risen from 1.3324 last year to 1.6949. But a year ago forest land was taxed at $136 an acre. The tax for some property owners, then, has declined by some $10 an acre, a decline of hundreds if not thousands of dollars even as other property-owners are paying more.

“We’re giving an 88.4 percent tax break,” Kingsbury said, citing the latest report of the Division of Property Evaluation and Review. “Nobody would not take a 68 percent tax break.”

But as Ed Larson of the Forest Products Association pointed out, the land value has been set so low because the price forest owners are getting for their product has plummeted.

“We’d be happy to pay more taxes if we made more money,” Larson said, claiming that most forest owners are now paying in property taxes roughly half the revenue they get from selling their product.

Capping the current use benefit or altering the formula to eke more money out of it, threatens to destroy the “core premise, the established principle,” that the tax should be based on how much money could be made the land, not the development value of the land or the wealth of the land-owner, said Jamey Fidel, the forest program director for the Vermont Natural Resources Council.

For at least two reasons, though, there is more going on here. One is that the Current Use controversy does not stand alone. Instead, it is related to the larger state fiscal predicament. Second, while almost nobody wants to raise the taxes of hard-working Vermont farmers and loggers, driving them out of business and their land into suburban-style development, not everyone enrolled in current use is really in the farming or logging business (or, for that matter, Vermont).

Trying to distinguish who is really what, though, isn’t easy, as shall be explained Monday

white-tailed deer

STRIKE ONE: KVETCH KVETCH KVETCH

When the going gets tough, they say, the tough get going.

Not in Vermont, especially rural Vermont. There, when anything changes, the supposedly tough whimper.

The latest example of this phenomenon occurred last week when roughly 100 members of the Champion Land Leaseholders and Traditional Interests Association met in Ferdinand, in the core of the Northeast Kingdom, to talk to Mark Maghini, who is sort of their landlord.

Well, not really talk to him. At least as reported in Orleans County’s Chronicle, it was more like screech at him.

And why? Because…(steel yourself for the horror about to be expressed) everything is not the same.

Oh, and also because weeping and wailing have become the default position in the subculture of some segments of rural Vermont.

To elucidate, for those unfamiliar with the saga of what are still called the Former Champion Land, Maghini is the manager of the Nulhegan Basin Division of the Silvio Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, the owner of some 26,000 acres that once belonged to the Champion International Paper Company.

A few hundred people lease small plots of this land on which they have built camps, as they did when Champion owned it. As it happens, the terms of their leases are much more advantageous to them now than in the Champion days (largely because they moaned and groaned, and were immediately placated by a cowardly Vermont State Legislature, but let’s let bygone wails be bygone wails).

What ails them now?

First, under the new rules, they won’t be able to use or possess alcoholic beverages while hunting. What would happen, one of them asked, if he was bringing beer to his camp and a deer cross the road. Would getting out of the vehicle to go after the deer by a violation?

Of course not, Maghini said in a telephone interview.

“Get out of the truck. Go after the deer,” he said, as if any explanation were needed. Clearly this was a crowd looking for something about which to complain ever though there was nothing about which to complain.

Refuge visitors won’t be allowed to hunt from the road any more, either. Nor is anybody else, at least not in this state (see Page 17 of the most recent hunting regulations).

But the problem, as one of the meeting-goers put it, was that “we can’t do what we have been doing for a lifetime.”

Oh, please. There are two things these folks should do up. Grow and shut. The world changes. The land they lease is now owned by the Federal Government, which has designated it a Fish and Wildlife Refuge. The primary mission of the Refuges is “to conserve the abundance and diversity of native plants and animals.” But as a matter of law and policy – oh, and by the way, in the interest of the economy of northeastern Vermont – they also try to attract visitors.

Who are less likely to show up if they worry about getting shot.

Okay, federal regulations can always be dumb, and one of these seems to qualify. If motor vehicles are allowed on the roads, why should bicycles be banned?

Maybe they won’t be for long, Maghiri said, under a “comprehensive conservation plan” now in the works.

The Leaseholders are a small sliver of the body politic, but a somewhat larger sliver of the local cultural mythology. These are (at least so they want us to think) the traditional Vermonters of yore—self-reliant, rugged, adaptable.

Perhaps we’ll have to adapt to the reality; they’re a bunch of crybabies.

STRIKE TWO: SMILE, YOU’RE (MABYE) ON TV

More than any generation before us, we command the resources for self-realization…But do we want to be artists, philosophers, pioneers of the natural sciences? No, we want to be celebrities—Hilary Mantel

But does the Burlington Free Press have to lead the way.

The Freep routinely goes bananas any time a Vermonter even approaches celebrity, like appearing on a TV reality show. But Sunday, it outdid itself, devoting 50 square inches – 40 percent of the “news” (that is, not advertising) space on the front page to tell us that a guy who used to go to Middlebury would be playing against the New England Patriots that day.

Not that Steven Hauschka is really a celebrity. Or really a Vermonter. He grew up in Massachusetts. But he did start kicking footballs at Middlebury and he is the place-kicker for the Baltimore Ravens who would play (and lose to) the Pats Sunday afternoon.

Meaning he might be (oh, contain the excitement) on TV.

Not that it wasn’t a story. (Sort of) local kid (sort of) makes good. And it was nicely done. But it belonged on the sports page, not all over Page One.

Oh, and is it turned out, Hauschka kicked no field goals Sunday, or even (so it seemed after a quick look at the game account) attempted one. No TV time after all.

STRIKE THREE: LAW? WE DON’T WORRY ABOUT NO STINKIN’ LAW. WE’RE THE NEW YORK TIMES.

The paper of record came to Vermont last week, right up to the Northeast Kingdom, to write about that moose. You know, the one that’s being fed doughnuts in an impoundment in Irasburg.

Cute story by Katie Zezima of the Boston office. Mentioned the doughnuts. Quoted the old farmer who’d brought the moose to the impoundment and the guy who owns it. Got into the chronic wasting disease danger.

Just one little omission. Never mentioned that the rescue, transportation and confinement of the moose are all, undeniably, against the bleepety-blank law.

Actually, a not-so-little omission. Not, at least, in a serious newspaper, which The New York Times is.

Was?

First, a program note: Today’s post, next Monday’s, and maybe even the offerings on the next two Wednesdays, will be relatively short and…well, not insubstantial, but perhaps a little less weighty than usual.

That’s because the News Guy has been and will be spending the time and effort weightiness requires on: (a) reporting some complicated and especially weighty stories planned for the next two Fridays; and (b) responding to a higher authority.

For today, though, let’s spend a few minutes pondering the Vermont localvore (sometimes spelled ‘locavore’) scene, which is clearly becoming more mainstream, almost by the day. (Though not so mainstream that the spell-check program of this relatively new computer recognizes the word spelled either way; we’ll have to speak sternly to it).

Just last week, the celebrated TV chef Emeril Lagasse came to the Northeast Kingdom to cook with the locally grown cheese, soy, and vegetables, taping it for his show, Emeril Green, On the Planet Green Network, affiliated with the Discovery Channel.

At least so said the report on WCAX-TV (Channel 3), than which one can get no more mainstream in Vermont. Channel 3’s report quoted Legasse saying, “The abundance of incredible products here is so exciting, people should be really, really proud about what’s happening around here because it’s really a serious movement.”

How “serious,” (which no longer means “serious,” but “significant” or “long-lasting”) remains to be seen. That it is a movement is no longer debatable. And if it began, as movements often do, inside a small subculture (the “granola-heads” to be both brief and offensively stereotypical), it isn’t any longer. Not only have First Lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey signed on, but there are increasing signs that getting into the localvore dodge seems to be good business.

Just check the “Green Mountain” section of Sunday’s Burlington Free-Press (as mainstream as Channel 3), devoted largely to the “eat local” movement. It isn’t just the articles, either. Some of the ads urge customers to buy from stores and restaurants that sell locally grown food.

Sounds like a way to make money. In America, that’s mainstream.

Needless to say, not everyone is on board. Led by the chain restaurant industry and agri-business, a counter-movement has sprung up, largely among those who insist that most Americans don’t care where their food comes from and prefer the sweet, the fried, and the fatty.

And the inexpensive. According to the skeptics, locally-grown food, especially if it’s also organically-grown food (often but not always part of the package) costs more than mass-produced food grown with the help of herbicides, pesticides, and petroleum-based fertilizer. They say all this “buy local” stuff will turn out to be a fad. The businesses that rely on it will go broke while the chain and fast-food restaurants thrive and customers continue to flock to the processed foods sections of the supermarkets.

There’s even an anti-localvore book: Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, (Little, Brown) by James E. McWilliams.

Fortunately, we have an in-state experiment that may provide some hint of how this experiment will turn out. The pub on the first floor of the University of Vermont’s Davis Center, Brennan’s ,has transformed itself from a standard chain-food joint into a restaurant specializing in food grown organically, naturally, and locally.

The big attractions are probably still beer and (sometimes) live entertainment. But now instead of standardized fried chicken and Texas toast (whatever that may be) from World of Wings (WOW, but not to be confused with the homing pigeon association of the same name), a new Orleans-based franchise company, students can get, for instance, a breakfast of two cage-free eggs, organic scallions and sour cream, all produced in Vermont, and all for $5.75.

According to a front-page story in last week’s VermontCynic, the student newspaper, the impetus for the change came from the students. In response to an email, Pat Brown, the Director of Student Life, said, the “menu items and products now reflect  what  students asked for – a local sourcing of food products.”

As to the price, that $5.75 breakfast seems like a good bargain, but the Cynic story quoted one student who preferred last year’s “greasy college food,” and said this year’s fare “costs more.”

Brown said the menu was so “radically different” that comparing prices was difficult, but added that he thought, “the prices are in the same general range as last year  depending on  what one orders.”

But is the place making money? It seemed crowded enough one day last week, but Brown said it was “way too early to tell.” Like most UVM restaurants, Brennan’s is part of University Dining Services (UDS), which, Brown wrote, “provides food service to campus and is permitted by contract to  net a small amount, but the overall goal is to provide high  quality and reasonably priced food service to the campus.  The   traffic has seemed to reflect what we saw last year.”

But UDS is not autonomous. It is part of Sodexo, very much a profit-making corporation. As such, it isn’t likely to want to maintain an operation that doesn’t earn much. On the other hand, it doesn’t want the kind of bad publicity that would come from displeasing the student body. And Brown indicated that UDS, which he said “has been exceptional in working with local foods and many of the farms and orchards in the area,” appears to have a genuine commitment to buy as much Vermont product as possible.

Were it not for one little difficulty, we could end this post right here. Alas, UDS has decided to promote Brennan’s on its web site by proclaiming that the restaurant has “a new look with a sustainable menu that is literally ‘shaking’ up campus.”

Uh, folks, you work for a university. Meaning you really ought to speak English. An earthquake would “literally” “shake up” (or “’shake’ up”) campus. So might an artillery attack or a mortar barrage. Maybe even the entire student body jumping up and down at the same time.

But a menu? No, not “literally.”

(NOTE:

WHAT? THERE WAS SOME MAJOR POLITICAL NEWS YESTERDAY?

YUP. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT? IT WILL BE ABLY HANDLED TODAY BY OTHERS. THE NEWS GUY WILL LET IT PERK OVER THE WEEKEND, PONDERING IT (AS WELL AS THE WEEK’S OTHER IMPORTANT POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT) MONDAY.

Bull Moose (not

About that moose, the one they’re calling Pete: There’s more to this story than meets the eye, at least such eyes that have been reading Vermont’s newspapers and watching the local television news, or clicking onto the You Tube and Facebook entries about poor, put-upon Pete.

This isn’t just a cute story about a moose and the old farmer who has befriended him (if “befriending” a moose is possible).

This is about politics. Not as in Democrats versus Republicans, but as in who has power and how should it be exercised. It is also about the uses and misuses of science. It is about natural resource policy, the rule of law, when violating it is justified, ethics and the philosophy thereof.

Oh, and money. As usual, money seems to be involved.

To begin with, the old (“73-and-a-half,” in his own words) farmer didn’t just stumble upon this abandoned moose. Nor, despite his flowing white beard and Northeast Kingdom roots, is David Lawrence some country bumpkin. He is a rather articulate fellow who knows just what he’s doing, knows it’s against the law, but thinks it’s the right thing to do.

He is, in other words, engaged in civil disobedience.

He is also part of an apparently elaborate animal rescue network whose other members also do not hesitate to violate the law, as they are doing in connection with this moose.

The moose, according to Lawrence, was discovered in early June of 2008, meaning it would have been no more than a month old, by two people from Bethel who were hiking with their dogs when they came upon a female moose with twin calves. The adult (and apparently one of the twins) ran off, leaving one baby moose apparently abandoned.

The hikers, Lawrence said, called the Fish and Wildlife Department where officials told them to do nothing, to leave the baby moose alone.

That’s the law, in Vermont and most other states.

For at least two reasons, one scientific and one…well, a combination of historic and philosophical. The scientific reason is that the baby moose may not have been abandoned at all. Female cervids (deer, elk, moose), say the wildlife experts, are likely to return to their young once they perceive that the “predators” (hikers and dogs in this case) have left.

(The dogs, by the way, had wounded the calf; so this whole controversy might have been avoided had the hikers had better control of their pets).

The other reason, as John Buck, one of the Department’s wildlife biologists explained, stems from “the public trust doctrine that the state’s wildlife belong to the people and not the king. Wild animals can not be owned by any individual.”

That moose doesn’t really “belong” to anybody, even the state; no bill of sale comes with it. But if it is nobody’s property, it is part of the public sphere or province. It doesn’t belong to the hikers, to Lawrence, or to Doug Nelson, on whose Irasburg elk impoundment the moose now grazes when Lawrence is not there feeding him doughnuts.

When the mother did not return after four days, (perhaps because people kept checking on the calf), the hikers decided to intervene. Somehow they found out about “a wildlife rehabilitator,” as Lawrence called her, who was part of the dissident animal rescue effort, and who therefore was apparently on the radar screen of Fish and Wildlife law enforcers.

“She knew that (if she took the baby moose) the wardens would be there and would destroy it. She called me. I’ve been known to do these things before. We believe in saving all the babies we can.”

As he had done at least twice in the past, Lawrence, a retired farmer who lives in Albany, took the calf to Irasburg, where Nelson keeps some 500 elk in 600 fenced-in acres, charging several thousand dollars for the privilege of shooting one.

“This moose was illegally taken, illegally transported and is now illegally being possessed inside an enclosure,” said Wayne Laroche, the Fish and Wildlife Department Commissioner. “My position is I need to be able to enforce the laws. We can’t have people just picking those animals up. I can’t selectively enforce the law. I have to enforce it the same, from the child that wants to keep a baby raccoon to the richest guy in the state.”

Nelson, a major dairy farmer, could be one of the richest guys in the state.

Keeping wild animals as pets, Laroche said, poses disease risks for both people and animals. It can also be dangerous, a judgment confirmed by Joel Berger, a moose specialist for the Wildlife Conservation Society and a professor at the University of Montana.

“Why would you want a pet moose?” Berger said. “As males grow older, testosterone will kick in, and people will need to deal with his increasingly aggressive behavior.”

Berger said a moose can be safely and humanely confined if its human keepers “know what they’re doing. It’s no different from the Bronx Zoo, if they’re accredited for raising captive animals.”

Nelson and Lawrence are not.

But Laroche has another reason for insisting that the moose leave that elk compound. He worries that Pete, along with perhaps 12 other moose and more than 200 white-tail deer inside the compound endanger the state’s wild deer herd because the wild deer could catch chronic wasting disease from the elk.

CWD, always fatal to deer, has not yet appeared in Vermont, but it has been found in deer in nearby New York State. The disease “leaped the species barrier from sheep to cervids. “ Laroche said. “It makes me very nervous.”

Nelson called CWD fears “totally (nonsense)” (He used another word, but this is a proper web site). He said a brain sample is taken from every elk shot on his property and is tested at a laboratory. None have shown signs of CWD, he said.

Kelly Loftus of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture confirmed that a laboratory in Wisconsin had tested the samples from 73 elk shot at Nelson’s hunting compound in 2008 and 43 this year. No CWD was found. The tests are paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Despite these findings, wildlife biologists fear that whenever wild animals are contained, CWD is a legitimate concern.

“At this point, the literature suggests that artificially concentrating animals tends to exacerbate the danger of the disease,” said Bruce Smith, who spent 23 years as senior scientist at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “It creates more of an opportunity for disease transmission.”

This doesn’t mean that Nelson’s elk are likely to have the disease. Probably they don’t. But “probably” isn’t good enough for Fish and Wildlife. Because even a small chance of CWD getting into the Vermont deer herd could decimate it. The hunting community would be furious, as would the many hotels, restaurants, and shops that rely on the patronage of hunters. For the department, it would be a disaster.

But there’s more going on here. By January, Nelson needs a permit from Fish and Wildlife if he is to continue operating his elk-hunting operation. The Department insists that, because of the CWD danger, he first eliminate (essentially, shoot) all the wild white-tails and moose, including Pete.

“I would assume they’d be coming in with the strong arm of the law, Nelson said.

Will he comply?

“I don’t know,” he said “We’ve got an awful lot of public support.”

He does. Even Gov. Jim Douglas said he hoped some means could be found to save Pete.

It’s that kind of talk that leads many in the Department to suspect (though Laroche would not come out and say this) that Nelson is using the tumult over Pete as a political device to pressure Fish and Wildlife to grant him the permit without destroying any of the wild animals.

Nelson, on the other hand, thinks the Department would like to shut down his entire elk hunting operation. He’s probably right. Fish and Wildlife officials never liked “canned hunting.” Many don’t even consider it hunting, since it lacks, in their view, the element of “fair chase,” defined by the Boone and Crockett Club the “taking of any free-ranging wild, native North American big game animal in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper advantage over such animals.”

In fact, confined hunting is now illegal in Vermont, with Nelson’s and one other operation “grandfathered” into legality because they were operating before the law was passed.

Nelson does not deny that he has a financial interest in the status quo. Killing all the moose and white-tails would “cost a fortune,” he said, and he already has “a fortune” invested in the deer “because we’ve fed them for nine years.”

Nelson needs the permit, because hunting is the only money-making potential of captive elk. For years, elk owners sold the velvet from elk antlers to Asia, where it is used as medicine and (with more hope than scientific foundation) an aphrodisiac. But several years ago, U.S.-produced velvet in South Korea was found to be contaminated with CWD, and Asian countries banned imports from North America.

This by no means proves that Nelson is motivated only by money. He considers his right to do as he pleases on his land “a property rights issue,” and by all accounts he is a genuine animal lover. He does not hunt. He argues that having hunters shoot the elk is more humane than some kind of mass slaughter.

He also agrees with Lawrence and his guerrilla animal rescuers.

“You know, it’s kind of human nature to nurture and protect the young,” he said. “The game warden said, let’ em die, let ‘em die. I’m a farmer by nature tend to try to help things live.”

Even John Buck of Fish and Wildlife acknowledged that it is “human nature to try to rescue something, to save something, a beached whale or an injured bird.”

But, Buck said, wildlife management “is concerned with the entire population, as opposed to individuals,” and keeping wild animals in captivity “doesn’t serve the conservation purpose of allowing animals to live freely.”

Laroche said the Department was trying to relocate Pete to another state. If that fails, he said, “we need to have the authority to control possession of wildlife in the state.”

He seems determined to enforce the law. Nelson and his allies seem determined to keep the moose and deer. This business is not over.

Stuff happens.

Not always in Vermont, or even the U.S., and not always with the traditional “local angle” that attracts the casual eye, but perhaps relevant to life here anyway. No state is an island, and the rest of the world affects us whether or not we realize it.

For instance, from the Rural Blog, which describes itself as “a digest of events, trends, issues, ideas and journalism from and about rural America, from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based at the University of Kentucky,” comes news that could provide some economic hope for the Vermont countryside.

Turns out that the sluggish economy could be good news for agritourism, which is the fancy term for paying to visit (and maybe even stay overnight at) a farm. Down South, at least, the tourist farms are busy.

“I think the main reason for the boom is the economy,” Blake Brown, an extension agricultural economist at North Carolina State University, told a reporter for the Southeast Farm Press. ” People are finding that visiting farms provides a relatively cheap excursion close to home.”

It isn’t that Vermont has to be introduced to agritourism. Though the term doesn’t seem to be used much in the state (the Department of Agriculture, Food and Markets web site just calls it “tourism”) it may have started here. The Department’s web site lists 50 farms that welcome tourists.

That’s a tiny percentage of the 6,984 farms in the state (from the U.S. Department of Agriculture 2007 Census), so if the demand for agritourism increases, Vermont obviously has enough potential supply to meet it.

But for some farmers, switching from food production to tourism is a difficult adjustment. The typical farmer thinks or him or her self as the producer of a necessity, not the provider of a recreational amenity. And as Barbara Berst Adams, author of The New Agritourism: Hosting Community and Tourists on Your Farm, wrote, farmers who invite paying guests onto their property take some risks.

It seems that one of the new fads in agritourism is getting married on the farm. The happy couple and/or their families sometimes pay handsomely for the privilege, but Adams warned that “crowds can sometimes surprise farmers new to agritourism. People need bathrooms, first-aid kits and a place for trash. City kids don’t seem to know the goats aren’t video games – they can bite back. And liability coverage for both the bride and groom and the farmer really are issues that need to have been dealt with ahead of time.”

But according to that story in the Southeast Farm Press, agritourism is “the one segment of agriculture that seems to be flourishing right now.” Probably even the most traditional farmer would rather make money than not.

Right now, the farmers most obviously not making money are the milk producers. Only about a thousand dairy farms are left in Vermont, but they still account the vast majority of the value ($493,926,000 of the $673,713,000 in that same 2007 census) of farm products sold in the state.

Right now, though, the price of milk is down and dairy farms are losing money. Besides, improper though it may be to say so aloud in these parts, Vermont is not really the best state for producing milk. Dairy production is far more efficient in the West and Southwest than in rocky, hilly, cold Vermont. The real question is probably not whether dairy farming will survive, but what will replace it: other farms or commercial/residential development?

Maybe farms. That 2007 census actually showed an increase of 413 farms from the previous census in 2002. Most of these new farms were quite small, and few of them were dairy farms. Increasingly, Vermont farmers are growing fruits and vegetables, raising beef cattle, llamas, vicunas, yaks. And perhaps opening their farms to paying guests.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

From the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development comes a survey showing that the happiest people in the world live in Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands. They were the top three in “life satisfaction,” which seems to be OECD jargon for “happiness.”

The U.S. placed 11^th, also behind Sweden, Belgium, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland and Norway.

What’s their secret up there in northern Europe? Well, all of the top three countries are prosperous, offering their citizens ample opportunity to live comfortably and even opulently. But as Thomas Kostigen pointed out in his column in MarketWatch (a decidedly pro-business web site), the happy citizens of all three countries have something else in common: They are heavily taxed. Like their northern European neighbors, the Danes, the Finns, and the Dutch pay some of the highest taxes in the world. The Danes actually pay almost two-thirds of their income in taxes.

And they’re happy?

Apparently so.

And who among us will have the temerity so to inform Gov. Jim Douglas and his associates who think “tax” is a four-letter word?

Now, before anyone concludes that the path to happiness in America requires following this particular Nordic policy, a few caveats are in order, (starting with the acknowledgment that Holland is not really Nordic). First of all, surveys about relatively imprecise qualities such as “happiness” should be greeted with some skepticism. Asking someone whether she or he is happy is not like asking whether he or she is going to vote for Smith or Jones. The question is open to interpretation; the answer is subjective and debatable.

Besides, cultures are different, and what makes one people happy in one place would not necessarily make another people happy someplace else. Americans tend to be more aggressive, more mobile, less community-oriented and more ornery, perhaps more curious, and almost surely more materialistic than Europeans, especially the northern Europeans. Many Americans, it seems, would not be content to live comfortably or even opulently. They want it all. Now. No doubt the same is true of some Finns. But not, it seems, as many.

(Although the U.S. is not the richest country, either, but 15^th in per capita income according to the International Monetary Fund, behind many of the “happier” countries)

So what pleases the Helsinkians and the Copenhagenites  (that’s their city skyline by night above) might not please as many Burlingtonians or Rutlanders (not to mention Dallasites).

But these caveats are cautions, not dismissals. There might well be valuable lessons in the high tax-high happiness relationship worth emulating, at least to some extent. The great enemy of happiness is stress. We have it more than they do, largely because our tax bills are lower. Americans stress comes from worrying about paying medical bills, saving for retirement, wondering about being able to afford to send the kids to college.

There are no such worries in northern Europe. Health care is free, higher education is free or very cheap, a decent retirement is assured. Public transportation is extensive and comfortable, so far fewer people have to drive themselves through city traffic every day to go to work (and those who choose to drive anyway have less traffic to bother them).

They pay for this, of course. Higher taxes leave them with less discretionary income. This doesn’t seem to prevent most of them from living in comfortable (if slightly smaller) houses with all the modern conveniences, and having all the latest electronic gizmos (they invented some of them). Maybe they don’t eat out as much (perhaps a small sacrifice; when did you last hear anyone rave about Finnish cuisine?).

And maybe – just maybe – the Finns, Danes, and Dutch are happier because they know that all their fellow-citizens live in reasonably stress-free comfort. It is possible, in other words, that simply living in an equitable society leads to happiness.

Is that a subversive thought?

Oh, no, not the local angle.

Always be wary of the veteran newsie who can find the parochial aspect of the most universal story. Sometimes it’s a stretch. Were all life on earth in danger of ending tomorrow, the likely implications for Vermont would be indistinguishable from those in Botswana.

And so one might think about the two major news stories (so far) of the current week – the swine flue outbreak and Sen. Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democrats. There’s a “Vermont angle” to these developments?

Specter

Yeah, actually, there is. Or, more precisely, there are. The local applications are indirect, and less than earth-shaking. But that renders them no less real. The first connection is scientific, and a reminder to be prudent. The second is obviously political, and a reminder that the politics of the region is changing rapidly enough to shock the average Vermonter.

Not that it should. Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that another moderate Republican senator left the Republican Party. That was Vermont’s Jim Jeffords, in a prelude of sorts to what happened yesterday.

The flu outbreak has no direct Vermont connection. But it has a possible Vermont application if the virus first leaped from pigs to humans near the site of a massive pig-farming operation in Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz.

That’s not certain. The first cases were reported in Vera Cruz, but that falls short of proof that the big pig farm was the culprit. Still, that does seem to be the working hypothesis, because it is consistent with the connection between certain diseases and  human-caused dense concentrations of animals. For example, many fish biologists think the whirling disease that has decimated the rainbow trout populations in many Western rivers originated in hatcheries.

Vermont does not have any huge pig farms. It does have some fairly large dairy and chicken farms, and proposals to create more. It also has elk farms, and captive elk have been associated with chronic wasting disease (CWD), the always-fatal transmissible spongiform encephalopathy which can spread to wild deer.

That’s why the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department has a moratorium on any more captive elk hunting preserves, though the existing facilities in Irasburg and Fairlee have been “grandfathered in.”

Even these, though, will have to get permits by next January, according to David Englander of Fish and Wildlife, who said the permits will be granted only if the hunting preserves meet “very specific objective requirements” about the size and strength of the fences they put up to keep the captive elk in and the wild deer out. And if the fences don’t work, “if there are repeated intrusions or escapes,” the Department can order further steps.

In addition, there are several farms that raise elk (but do not allow hunting of them) in the state. These are under the jurisdiction of the Agriculture and Markets Department, which also imposes regulations designed to keep elk from mingling with wild deer. There have been no reports of CWD in Vermont, but at least one case was reported at an elk farm in nearby upstate New York.

So beware of artificial concentrations of swine, cervids, fish, fowl, and quite possibly, humans.

The political news also affects Vermont indirectly, but sweepingly. It illustrates a reality somewhat obscured within the state’s borders: the Republican Party is close to dead in the Northeastern corner of America.

The obscurer, of course, is Gov. Jim Douglas, who has won every election here since the Pleistocene (OK, it only seems that way) and looks like the early favorite, if by no means a cinch, to win a fifth term next year.

But look at the rest of the region. In the ten New England and Middle Atlantic States there are three surviving Republican senators. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire will not seek re-election next year, and is likely to be replaced by a Democrat. That leaves the two ladies from Maine, Olympia Snow and Susan Collins, now lonelier than ever as Republican moderates.

They know it.

“I’ve always been deeply concerned about the views of the Republican Party nationally in terms of their exclusionary policies and views towards moderate Republicans,” Snowe told a Huffington Post reporter yesterday. And to Politico, she said “Ultimately, we’re heading to having the smallest political tent in history, the way things are unfolding.”

Snowe said she would remain a Republican, but she sure didn’t seem enthusiastic about it. No one should be surprised if she or Collins or both do what Jeffords did in 2001, leave the GOP to become an independent. The Jeffords switch did not set off a general Republican exodus as some predicted. But that was largely because the September 11 attacks a few months later gave President George Bush the opportunity to rally the country behind him (and because the Democrats then entered some three years of befuddlement).

There is now not a single Republican member of Congress from New England, and only a handful from the entire Northeast, one less now that a Democrat just won a special election in an upstate New York Congressional district that was drawn to be overwhelmingly Republican.

Specter’s switch was an act of self-interest. Had he stayed a Republican he would probably have lost a primary to a candidate who would then have lost to any Democrat who could breathe and who had not been indicted.

But the political reality behind that likely outcome illustrates what Specter meant when he said that the Republican Party had moved too far to the right. Not long ago Pennsylvania was a swing state. It now appears reliably Democratic. It is also (unlike Vermont) a party registration state where only registered Republicans can vote in Republican primaries. Over the last few years, as Specter pointed out, some 200,000 Republicans have re-registered as Democrats or independents.

This leaves the Republicans – and not just in Pennsylvania – an increasingly conservative party in an increasingly not so conservative part of the country.

Douglas stays in office and retains fairly good (though slipping) approval ratings partly because he’s faced three straight weak Democrats, but also because he’s not all that conservative. But because he has been so successful, it’s easy to lose sight of how heavily (totally?) the Vermont Republican Party depends on him. After him, for the GOP, comes not the deluge, but the draught. It isn’t just that there seem to be few if any good candidates to replace him; there seems to be no spark, no energy, no pizzazz.

And not much in the way of ideas. Nor is it just the politicians. Take a look or listen to the Republican-leaning commentators, academics, or activists. It would be somewhat unfair to suggest that they have nothing to say. It would be reasonable to wonder whether what they say has much relation to reality.

Not that the Democratic-leaning commentators, etc, are always models of restraint and accuracy. But they are (usually) coherent and comprehensible. The Republicans often seem to be stuck in another world. Now that the real Alan Greenspan has conceded that market fundamentalism was a mistake, why can’t his one-time idolaters figure that out?

In a sense, the Recession has helped Douglas, and it could help the Vermont Republicans. With revenue so short, the state either has to cut deeply into its programs or raise taxes. The Democrats have opted for the latter, and being against tax increases is never without some political advantage.

But the advantage could prove fleeting. Or non-existent. It’s quite possible that a majority of Vermonters would rather cough up a few more bucks in taxes than see all those programs get slashed.

Besides, even Jim Douglas will not be governor forever. When he isn’t, his party in Vermont could be in even worse shape than the one Arlen Specter just left in Pennsylvania.