Obviously, there are many, many lessons that can be drawn from the Burlington Telecom saga: One is the proper role of boards. In both the public and private sectors, too many individual board members go through the motions of providing responsible policy oversight while all the while giving great deference to the organization’s staff.

I don’t know if that is the case in Burlington, given its free-for-all culture, but I think the City Council and the city bureaucracy, led by the Mayor, should go back and read the history of Johnson and Johnson’s Tylenol episode, when tainted pills killed people. In case Burlingtonians need a refresher on crisis management, they can follow this link: http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Fall02/Susi/tylenol.htm. I hope Burlington can have a non-vitriolic, open examination of this issue. Municipal telecommunications systems, as you write, can, and do indeed, work, and the public can certainly use alternatives to the corporate behemoths that seem to have exercised regulatory capture over too many of their supposed governmental overseers.

With that in mind, as far as David O’Brien is concerned, his reputation will be forever tainted by encouraging Vermont to swallow Verizon’s poisoned pill regarding its landline sale to FairPoint — but he has plenty of accomplices. The deal had its toxic air from the beginning, and there were several “dead canaries in the cage” to suggest that the state should have been highly suspicious of the corporate spin.