Because last Friday’s post was about something real (mis-classification of workers on construction jobs), and because the account originally scheduled for today needs some more reporting, let’s do the usual Friday house-keeping and web site info bit today.

First, let’s correct a small error made last Friday. As a reader who reads more carefully than this writer writes pointed out, a Form 1099 is not “the Internal Revenue Service form that freelance workers fill out.” It is the form the IRS sends to free-lancers letting them know that they have received a certain amount of income (and had darned well better report it).

Considering that the writer himself receives a few of these forms every winter, youda thunk he woulda got that straight, wountcha? But no.

A reader writes, anonymously, that the Department of Public Service is getting $23 million in federal stimulus money for energy efficiency grants and is going to decide all by itself how to spend it, with little or no public input.

And on top of that the Department does not even have a director of its Energy Efficiency Division. The post, writes the reader,  is vacant.

Democratic State Chair Judy Bevans

It is, though some of its duties are being looked after by Steve Wark, until recently Gov. Jim Douglas’s press secretary, now moved over the DPS.

The federal money is – or, more accurately, will be, because it hasn’t yet arrived — $21.9 million, Wark said, and it will be apportioned in consultation with the Legislature through  a “very transparent” process.

In the final analysis, state agencies have the power to decide how much of the federal stimulus money is spent, with great or lesser amounts of transparency. How great and how little often depends not only on the agency but on how intently lawmakers and the public insist on it.

This seems to be a good opportunity to let readers know what has happened to some bills in the Legislature that have been mentioned in earlier posts, then left hanging.

One of them – H-166, providing $50 million in “moral obligation debt” to the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation, discussed here February 24 – was approved by the House last month, by the Senate last week, and sent to the governor yesterday.

Two other bills mentioned in recent posts apparently ain’t goin’ nowhere. H-117, allowing anglers to use lead sinkers in lakes and ponds, is in the House Natural Resources Committee. H-29, banning strikes by public school teachers, is in the House Education Committee. With only a few weeks to go in the Legislative session, neither is likely to get any further.

More successful, if perhaps only symbolically, was the resolution calling on the Health Department to conduct another study to replace the one suggesting that those who lived within a ten-mile radius of an abandoned asbestos mine in Eden were more likely to get asbestosis.

As recorded in two posts here, December 14 and 15, the study enraged many residents of the Northeast Kingdom, who insisted it was flawed. That explains why the Legislature passed the resolution. There is no indication, though, that the Health Department is planning to conduct another study.

And for those who did not see it elsewhere, Paul Millman,  the Windham County businessman who was mentioned on March 13 as planning to run against Judy Bevans to be Democratic State Committee chair, later decided not to bother. Bevans was elected at the State Committee meeting last Saturday.

Quite likely many of you did not see this elsewhere because once again almost nobody covered the Democratic State Committee meeting.

There was some coverage of the recent selection of Tim Donovan to be the new Chancellor of the Vermont State College System, though none of it speculating on whether he was the choice of Gov. Douglas. Such was the speculation of the post here on February 20 which noted that Douglas had attended the State College Trustees meeting in February and that some trustees thought he preferred Donovan to Karrin Wilks.

At any rate Donovan, the head of Vermont Technical College [Correction: No, of the Community College of Vermont] got the job. It will be interesting to see if he aligns himself with Douglas’s plan to merge the State College system with the University of Vermont.

Finally, though this is a New York State story, it was a Vermont television station that covered it with such outrageously irresponsible journalism that someone must call it to account.

On Tuesday, WCAX-TV (Channel 3), which was praised on this web site just the other day, broadcast a story about a drug bust in Clinton County, proclaiming at the outset that “there is evidence state lawmakers are undermining (law enforcement) efforts with weakened drug laws.”

The station did have a quote from Clinton County District Attorney Andrew Wiley that “The (state) Senate, the Assembly has actually passed legislation to try to do away with minimum mandatory sentences.”

But as a simple phone call could have let them know (they do have phones over at Channel 3, don’t they?), the law has not in fact been changed.

As Wilie’s muddled quote indicated, the Legislature is working on changing the “Rockefeller drug laws” enacted in 1973, and slightly altered in 2004 when George Pataki was governor. The law was exactly the same Tuesday as it was last week, last month, last year. It has not been “weakened,” and therefore could not possibly have “undermined” anything.

UPDATE: Late Wednesday, legislative leaders and Gov. David Paterson reached agreement on changes to the law. Meaning, of course, that the law had not yet been changed.

And finally finally, those so inclined are invited to click on “About Me” to the right and view the new picture of this site’s proprietor, in which he looks, if not handsomer (and certainly not younger), jollier than he did in the earlier picture. The new one was taken by a real photographer, who refuses payment, and who, considering the raw material with which he had to work, did a superb job.