As we reported in this week’s Fair Game, Agency of Natural Resources Sec. Deb Markowitz made a bit of a whoopsie last week at a Norwich University panel on Tropical Storm Irene recovery efforts. The ANR secretary and former gubernatorial candidate apparently stepped on her boss’ message, criticizing Gov. Peter Shumlin’s handling of the state’s waterways in the weeks and months afer the August flooding.
The episode was first reported by Vermont Public Radio’s Steve Zind, who quoted Markowitz as saying, “[Shumlin] early on made some statements, some ‘dig-baby-dig’ type statements, that inspired Vermonters to help out in ways that ultimately are very costly not just to the ecosystem but to the infrastructure.”
After administration officials pushed back on her comments, Markowitz declined or ignored several requests for an interview (we suspected she might have been stuck in time out), but she did send us an e-mail saying her comments “were misinterpreted.”
Well, VPR has now posted a two-and-a-half minute audio clip of Markowitz’s remarks on its website, providing a little more context to the episode.
Did VPR get it wrong? Actually, the comments are even worse than we thought. Markowitz bemoans the fact that she and her agency “didn’t have a chance to educate [Shumlin] in advance” and failed to “manage up” — i.e. get her boss on message.
This article appears in Jun 20-26, 2012.
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I get the titillation factor here. I understand the interest in the competing personalities, etc. But would it be possible to pull back from the politics for a moment and actually talk about something that matters? The point is that she’s right. I like Shumlin and think he did a great job in the aftermath of Irene, but he was wrong with respect to this issue. Who cares about a “muddled message”? Markowitz is right on the science. In many places around the state, we are now more vulnerable to catastrophic flooding than we were before, thanks to all that excessive, counterproductive work in the streams and rivers. Nature has a funny way of not really caring about politics and process stories like this one.
What Darren said and also: If Markowitz were a man would you have dared use such diminishing phrases as “whoopsie” and “in a time out”?
Markowitz is as much at fault as Gov. Shumlin, because she is in charge of the Agency and had the most direct line to the staff scientists and the Governor’s office. Did she talk to any of the Agency staff and then call the Governor and say “digging and digging “deep” (which hasn’t been reported yet but was quoted in a Randolph Herald article) is a really bad idea? If not, isn’t she the one who should be held accountable? And if she did call him and he ignored her report on the advice of staff scientists, what does that say about how our government is operating?
As I recall, immediately after Irene, ANR staff were told to stay home, so it’s unclear how much input they were able to have. Something failed, and while Sec. Markowitz may be saying the right things right now, I’d like to know what actually transpired that led to such a dramatic failure. A stream alterations expert said on a scale of one to ten, the damage to our rivers from the “dig and dig deep” message from Gov. Shumlin was an eleven. Off the charts damage. And until some information comes out to change it, it seems that it was a failure of both Gov. Shumlin and Sec. Markowitz.
“and the approach of the agency in managing, in managing the river, “
Actually, you can’t manage a river. You manage people. In this case the top manager told people to get out there and get to work. If instead Governor Shumlin had tried to educate them on the beautiful symmetries of fluvial geomorphology as they sat amongst the ruins of their homes and farms he’d have been laughed out of office.
What is wrong with her comments? Truth hurts too much? I knew when I heard the Governor’s “Just Dig It” message, when we heard about projects going really fast without all that pesky permitting, that there would be serious environmental damage. Did anyone really NOT know this intuitively? Now the science shows that it was really, really damaging to do that, and the facts are this will cost us a lot of money (remediation, lost business, etc..) and maybe make things worse next time there is flooding… if someone dies in a future flood because of river alterations made post-Irene, who is liable?
The Governor would impress more if he checked the facts and admitted there were some ramifications to his administration’s actions that he hadn’t realized before, put full support behind remediation plans, and then figured out how to handle this in the future, so when the next flood event occurs (sooner than you think, people), this willful ignorance is not repeated.
Two down votes, seriously? This guy’s talking about a grown, competent, professional as if she were a naughty girl and *I* get the down votes?