WVTK Local & State News March 22, 2011

After a $241,000 deficit emerged in the Mount Abraham Union High School books at the close of the 2010 fiscal year administrators are taking steps to ensure that such a large deficit doesn’t occur again. Addison Northeast Supervisory Union administrators hope to reduce future deficits by redistributing responsibilities, replacing personnel and bringing in outside consultants.

Middlebury College faculty member Kateri Carmola of Salisbury has been charged with one count of felony embezzlement for allegedly taking $4,500 from the Salisbury Historical Society over a three-month period last year. She is due in Addison County District Court on April 4th for a status conference on her case.

The Pittsford Select Board has voted to seek a planning loan from the Agency of Natural Resources for an engineering study to determine the options for approximately 70 customers who will no longer be provided water by the town of Proctor. Those customers receive water through a mainline attached to the Proctor water supply that comes from a surface water facility in a lake in Chittenden. The town’s water facility did not meet the state’s requirements because of disinfection byproducts in the water. The study will help determine what the options are for everyone affected, including drilling personal wells. The estimated cost for the study is about $22,000.

Poultney and West Rutland are two of five towns to get wireless Internet for their town center and downtown as part of the e-Vermont Community Broadband Project. Ludlow, Bristol and Newport will also get the services. These five towns are part of the first 12 towns chosen to participate in the two-year pilot project run by the Vermont Council on Rural Development. Other towns across Vermont who have taken the initiative to establish wireless access include Middlebury and Manchester.

A Sudbury woman charged with ramming her boyfriend with a van answered to a charge of aggravated domestic assault with a weapon last Thursday. Cassandra Keyes pleaded innocent on Friday in Rutland criminal court to the felony assault charge as well as a misdemeanor offense of leaving the scene of a crash. The judge set bail at $5,000 for Keyes, who posted the amount and was released.

An Addison County man has been cited into court stemming from a fatal car crash involving a school bus. Sixty-six year-old John Billard is expected to be charged with drunk driving with death resulting. Police say he was driving on a snowy Route 7 in Ferrisburgh in January when he collided with a bus carrying the MMU boy's hockey team.

The Vermont Attorney General's office says a state police trooper was justified when he shot and killed a man who had pulled a handgun while the trooper tried to arrest him following a traffic stop in Rutland. An investigation found that Trooper Christopher Lora's decision to use deadly force was reasonable and justified when he shot and killed James Lamont on Oct. 28, 2010.

Maple is a 32-million dollar industry in Vermont. It's the state's signature product. The success of the industry is helped by the UVM Proctor Maple Research Center. But that research is about to take a financial hit. Senator Patrick Leahy secured several years of funding for Proctor, but a new 165-thousand dollar earmark he wrote has been derailed in Congress, which means no Proctor funding for the 2011-2012 fiscal year.

Gas prices keep going up. A new survey shows the average price of gasoline has soared 7 cents in the past two weeks. California has some of the highest prices in the nation. The average price of a gallon of regular gas now stands at $3.53 a gallon. In Vermont, the prices are even higher with an average prices of $3.59 a gallon.

A trio of burglars wearing dark face masks smashed through the front door of the Small Dog Electronics retailer in Waitsfield Sunday night, stealing at least two garbage bags full of Apple iPads, iPods, and iPhones. This is the fourth break-in at Small Dog shops in Waitsfield and South Burlington in the last five months and none of the previous burglaries have resulted in arrests. Small Dog is offering a reward for information leading police to the arrest and prosecution of the three men involved.

Bruegger's Enterprises, a Burlington, Vt.-based bagel store chain, has been purchased by Le Duff America. The terms of the sale were not released. Bruegger's started in Burlington in 1983. It now has bagel stores in 26 states, the District of Columbia and several Canadian provinces.

The on-again, off-again idea of allowing all-terrain vehicles on Vermont state land is off again. As expected, Vermont's environmental agency has begun the process to repeal a 15-month-old rule allowing ATVs on state land. The Agency of Natural Resources on Monday issued the proposed repeal of the rule, which was put in place by the Douglas administration in 2009 over the objections of lawmakers and environmentalists, but to cheers from ATV users.

Federal regulators have given the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant a 20-year license renewal, despite calls for reconsideration following the nuclear disaster in Japan. Vermont Yankee also needs a state permit to continue operating after March of 2012. The state Senate and Gov. Peter Shumlin are opposed to the continued operation of the plant.

About 50 people from Essex County gathered to learn about employment opportunities that will result from the Laurentian Aerospace Corporation project. The workforce is expected to be about 200 people when the facility is completed, and grow to 900 within two years. The facility will make the latest in technology available to employees, such as iPads for every worker. The session was organized by the Essex County Industrial Development Agency.

Anyone who'd like a free lever-type voting machine can probably have one soon in Essex County. The County Board of Elections had used the old machines for the last few years to run elections in every town. But the general election last year was the first to go exclusively with new electronic voting machines. Now, some polling places where the old machines have been stored are calling about removing them. Schools and villages can use lever machines until the end of 2012. The machines could also be used for exhibits or sold for scrap.

A plan to build a $1.9 billion underground direct-current electricity transmission system in Lake Champlain and the Hudson River has received approval for the project's system reliability interconnection study. That application is one of the first steps the company took toward approval of the 350-mile transmission line that will serve the New York City market.

While Vermont is in the process of shutting down its only nuclear power plant, there is talk of building one in northern New York. Officials in Massena say it would provide hundreds of jobs and cheap, clean power but some residents are not so sure. Massena has taken a big hit in recent years. Manufacturers like General Motors have either closed or downsized, leaving hundreds without jobs. Now community leaders are looking to re-energize the economy.