Interview: bears and traffic
Steve Delaney talks with Chuck Wise of the Two Rivers Ottaquechee Planning Commission on the impact of roads on bear country. (Listen to the interview online.) (VPR)
Hinsdale large farm
There’s more legal wrangling over a large dairy operation planned for Chittenden County. Neighbors appealed the project last month. But now the farmer says their appeal was filed in the wrong place. The farmer wants the case moved to Superior Court, where he hopes to bring a counter-suit against the opponents. (Listen to the story online or read the transcript.) (VPR)
Estey Organ museum
For the past year, a group in Brattleboro has been working to launch a new museum to celebrate the legacy of the Estey Organ Company. The company made organs from 1846 to 1960 and is credited with putting Brattleboro, Vermont on the map. (Listen to the story online or read the transcript.) (VPR)
Nursing student enrollment
Vermont’s nursing shortage could be easing. In the last few years, the number of nursing students has tripled at Castleton State College. Enrollment rose 74% at the University of Vermont from last year to this year. (AP)
Dairy price meeting
The president of the National Farmers Organization met with Vermont farmers in Irasburg Sunday to talk about ways of raising the prices farmers are paid for milk. Paul Olson has been traveling the country rallying farmers to action. Right now, processors set the price paid per hundred weight of milk. Olson says farmers need to take control of their product and be the ones to set that price. (AP)
Superintendent openings
At least five supervisory unions in Vermont are looking for new superintendents right now. Two of them are in southwestern Vermont – one in Bennington, and one in Arlington. Winton Goodrich, a consultant with the Vermont School Boards Association, says he’s never seen so many vacancies for the job this early in the year. (AP)
Stowe resort expansion
Officials at the Stowe Mountain Resort are planning to apply this week for an Act 250 application for a $220 million expansion. The project includes nearly 400 condominiums, an 80-room hotel, a new base lodge and a combination of restaurants and retail stores. It will also have two giant snowmaking ponds, more snowmaking, an 18-hole mountainside golf course, ten new lifts, and about 135 acres of new ski trails. One of the new lifts will cross Route 108. (AP)
Affordable housing
The shortage of affordable housing Vermont is causing problems even in Norwich, one of Vermont’s most affluent communities. Norwich has created an affordable housing committee because town officials are worried that firefighters, teachers and police officers soon won’t be able to live in the town. (AP)
Methadone clinic opened Monday
Vermont’s first methadone clinic opened Monday in Burlington. Chittenden Center is in a ground-floor wing of the University Health Center. It’s being run by the Howard Center for Human Services. The clinic can take up to 100 adults. Priority is going to be given to heroin addicts who are pregnant, or who have been traveling out of state for treatment. (AP)
Newfane drunk driving arraignment
A Manchester doctor who is accused of driving drunk and killing a pedestrian is due to be arraigned Tuesday in Vermont District Court in Brattleboro. Thirty-six-year-old James Most allegedly hit Richard Hall as Hall was walking his dog at dusk in the village of Newfane. Hall, who was 65, was killed. Police say Most was on his way back from a New England Patriots game. (AP)
Drug retrial
The Vermont Supreme Court has overturned a Bennington man’s conviction on cocaine charges and ordered that his case be heard again. The court said in a decision released Friday that the U.S. District Court in Bennington was wrong when it allowed some testimony to be used during the trial of Samuel Maduro. (AP)
Lyndon town office break-in
Police say two men from West Virginia have admitted they broke into and vandalized the Lyndon town offices last week as they were looking for a warm place to sleep. Twenty-one-year-old Corby Smith and 20-year-old Isaac Howard were arrested yesterday in the parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant in Lyndonville. (AP)