March 29, 2007

By ANDY KIRKALDY

VERGENNES — As the Vergennes City Council discussed on Tuesday how city police and Northlands Job Corps officials should work together, aldermen also turned to the simmering issue of compensation for Vergennes for hosting the 280-student federal job-training program.

From 1979 until 2004 Vergennes was paid an amount equal to about 10 percent of its operating budget for hosting Northlands on the state-owned campus that once housed the Weeks School. That funding was promised the city in the original agreement between state, federal and city officials in which Northlands was founded.

But in 1999 federal officials claimed such payments were illegal taxation. Although Congress passed a bill to cover continued payments for five more years, state and federal officials have since refused to pay any more, despite the city’s ability to produce the written promise of funding.

March 29, 2007

By CYRUS LEVESQUE

BRISTOL — At a selectboard meeting on Monday, Bristol’s Design Review Commission (DRC) recommended rejecting the plans for the veterans’ memorial proposed by the American Legion for the corner of the Bristol town green. In response, the selectboard approved some changes to the design but kept most of the plan unchanged.

The architects who developed the plan said that part of the negative response was because of a misunderstanding of how it would look. “Some of the points just needed some clarification … The notion of this embedded position which got included in the newspaper was not the idea at all,” said Tommy Thompson of Twenty 4D Architects, referring to a possible confusion about what the memorial would actually look like.

March 29, 2007

By MEGAN JAMES

MIDDLEBURY — There are a lot of things Randy Lizotte wishes he had known about sex before moving out of his parents’ house three years ago. The 26-year-old president of Speak Up Addison County, a self-advocacy group organized by area residents with developmental disabilities, said he was 20 years old when his father gave him “the talk.”

“My dad’s a man of few words, short and to the point,” he said. “It wasn’t scary, it was just kind of awkward that late in my life.”

Lizotte has developmental disabilities, but when he moved into an apartment in Middlebury, he was physically fully developed. It didn’t take him long to leap into his first serious romantic relationship.

Everything he knew about dating and his body, he had pieced together from things his friends told him. So he learned the basics on the fly and did the best he could. Now he wants to make sure others are more prepared than he was.

March 26, 2007

By JOHN FLOWERS

MIDDLEBURY — Middlebury residents on April 11 will vote on a proposed 2007-2008 Mary Hogan Elementary School spending plan that offers no new programs and reflects an inflationary increase in spending.

ID-4 school directors have OK’d a draft budget of $5,482,885, which represents a 2.73-percent increase compared to this year’s Mary Hogan Elementary spending plan of $5,337,045.

“It’s pretty much a maintenance budget,” said Principal Bonnie Bourne. “There are no new initiatives.”

It’s a spending plan that reflects roughly the same number of staff (around 65) delivering services to what officials believe will be a level — or slightly higher — number of students next year. Mary Hogan currently serves 389 children in grades kindergarten through 6.

“We worked hard to keep the increase (in spending) as low as possible,” Bourne said.