Vermont Governor Phil Scott provided several updates regarding home heating issues during his weekly briefing Wednesday. He was also questioned about public safety in the wake of a number of homicides across the state in October and a mass shooting in nearby Maine.
Vermont officials surveyed and subsequently sent out 267 names of residents with flood damaged heating systems to a team of utilities, Efficiency Vermont and the Vermont Fuel Dealers Association in order to get their systems fixed before winter. The Republican noted that so far 47 have been repaired and 33 are scheduled for repairs.
“By making these direct connections we’ve identified 20 people who need other structural work done in order to get their heat on. And we have a team of state employees who have volunteered to serve as temporary flood case managers who are helping these folks. And a few dozen more are identified through this survey to get the help they need.”
There were eight suspicious deaths or homicides across Vermont in October, an unprecedented number for the state. Scott believes there is a common thread linking most of them.
“This is something that’s a huge concern to our administration. I still believe that there’s some sort of connection, a thread. But the common thread I see is drug trafficking. And I think that we’ve seen that previously. We saw that in Brookfield and a number of other cases and I think that we’ll see when they get through the investigation that there may be a connection with some of these, not all of them, but some of these that we’ve seen.”
Vermont State Police Director Colonel Matthew Birmingham confirmed that a number of the homicides are drug related.
“I can’t get into specifics about which cases are connected but the governor is correct. The majority of the eight homicides that we’ve seen this month have a drug connection to them. But it’s too early in this process to definitively tell you that drugs were the driver behind it. We have teams out working diligently conducting interviews. We’re analyzing evidence and we’re doing a lot of technology work around these cases.”
In the wake of the mass shootings in Maine, Democratic state Senate Judiciary committee chair Dick Sears has said Vermont’s red flag laws should be revisited and ghost guns should be banned. While Governor Scott says he is amenable to such a conversation, he feels the discussion is needed at the national level.
“I think it’s time for this to be a national conversation with other states and our federal level to adopt some of the red flag laws that we’ve gone ahead with. I think seeing what happened in Maine confirms that we did the right thing in Vermont.”
The governor and administration officials were also asked for their response to a feature published in Seven Daysabout abuses at the former Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center. The governor said he had read portions of the article and called the facility, now closed, a black eye on the state.
