Martin Harris
Editorial Writer
802-388-6397
Editorial writer Martin Harris writes about Vermont politics, taxes and education from afar at his new home in Tennessee. A former architect, Martin spent many years in Vermont and knows the state's many arcane building and zoning codes, rules and regulations. Always controversial, always entertaining, Martin provides readers with facts and figures ripe for endless discussion.
Recent Stories
Vermont: a road not taken
Rights and Privileges
In a quasi-historical rerun, the Green Mountain State now seems once again to have reached consensus on a long-range economic development objective, only to default before commitment.
Rights and Privileges: K-12 in Vermont
As reports go, it could have been a lot pricier and harder-to-read, but it was quite enough anyway. That’s the recently-published Picus Report, which was commissioned to reassure the Golden Dome folks in Montpelier that their statewide school property tax,starting with Act 60, and then son-of-60, Act 68, was equitable.
Martin Harris: Preventing crisis-waste
Once upon a time, Chicago was the hog butcher for the world and City of the Big Shoulders—now it’s the place where high-rise apartments are deemed adequate only for the Lakeshore Drive upper-income quintile but not for the lower (or no-) income quintile inland.
Rights and Privileges: Going bare while staying covered
At last count, 26 states had legislatively expressed their disapproval of the mandate-to-purchase-health-insurance in the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Rights and Privileges: Middlebury taxes and education
Recently a Middlebury reader of my weekly newspaper column emailed me to comment, in a sort of mini-analysis, about why his taxes, in such a small Vermont town, are so high.
What ever happened to the three-legged stool?
Rights and Privileges
In a now pretty much vanished Vermont, it was the practice of politicos to explain (slowly, of course, with an analogy even we could handle with some effort) that the state’s economy was like a three-legged milking stool,
Down the rabbit hole
In the pre-Lewis Carroll years a rabbit hole was just a rabbit hole, subterranean do-it-yourself housing excavated by members of the O. cuniculus species, but he gave it new meaning in his account of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”.
Rights & Privileges: The NEA quotes again
Fourth estaters, even “common taters” like your Humble Scribe, are forever—like Gallic hogs snuffling for truffles—in search of the next juicy and evocative quote for use in the next brilliantly incisive newspaper column.
I dream of Gini, but with flatter curves
Rights and Privileges
Thanks to entrepreneur Philo Farnsworth—whose invention of television made him wealthy
The bright man’s burden
Rights and Privileges
If you live in Vermont and use electricity (there’s a sector of the modern population which pretends to prefer not to) you pay—via an add-on to on your power bill—to support EfficiencyVermont, a quasi-public bureaucracy advocating for energy efficiency.
