Editor’s note: Don Peterson is a contractor and a self-described unpaid lobbyist for the natural world. He is a longtime resident of Lowell.
[A] long time ago in my grammar school the sixth-graders played a game at lunchtime. One kid would recruit two of his friends to follow him around the playground. They would each recruit two of their friends, and so on. By the end of recess, 30 or so kids would be flocking like starlings, led by the original leader, who controlled them with the same kind of hand signals I imagine Custer used to direct his battalion to the Little Big Horn. That was the whole game, as far as I ever figured out, since I never joined in. Just kids following one other kid around the playground.
Here in the Northeast Kingdom, Ariel Quiros was that first kid. He claimed Jim Douglas begged him to fleece the whole state of Vermont; Douglas, as I read it, archly denies he even knows how to spell Quiros. Peter Shumlin, for the record, is shocked and saddened that anyone would use state and federal resources for personal gain, and recently declined to dine at a new Vietnamese restaurant, claiming lemongrass gives him heartburn. Bill Stegner’s only defense to date is that he wasn’t smart enough to see the larceny going on around him. Possible I suppose. Sen. Patrick Leahy is just sorry his esteemed friends in the Senate didn’t listen to him about how mean EB-5 can be to foreign investors.
If pressed, I imagine the Newport City Renaissance Corp. will say that what transpired between Doug Spates and Ariel Quiros was between private parties and that they were powerless to prevent it. If somebody wants to demolish a whole city center, well, it’s their land. We’ll never know what would have happened if Bill Stegner had been able to write Tony Pomerleau a check for a measly $1 million on that fateful day in July. Maybe our man Anthony did Bill a favor by keeping him from leveling the rest of Newport. Who needs more money when you’re 98 anyway.
The thinking seems to be bring the rich folks, and we’ll all get jobs plowing their driveways and mowing their lawns.
The economic model that drives NEK development, and a lot of the rest of the state, might best summed up as “Let’s dress the place up so we can skin the flatlanders when they come up to ride the water slide.” I’m guessing that here in Lowell, more money is made selling land to tourists than any other economic activity, and that might include fees for sugar bushes being managed for hedge fund investors. The thinking seems to be bring the rich folks, and we’ll all get jobs plowing their driveways and mowing their lawns.
To be fair, an honest attempt at bringing something useful to Newport was the manufacturing facility that was to house a German window manufacturer. Real jobs, not seasonal ones. Cutting edge technology. But the Germans smelled the skunk before anybody, and located instead to Springfield Massachusetts. That left AnC Bio. Alas, it looks like there isn’t an AnC Bio after all, just a few Korean patents and a bankrupt corporate shell. I have to say, the only time I ever personally encountered a proposal involving a corporate shell, there was the stench of fraud about it that was unmistakable.
For some reason known best to Charles Ponzi, despite all the warning flags, no one in a position of oversight was sufficiently skeptical to wonder where all the money was going. Maybe it was the developers in white hardhats and their delusional promises about bringing 10,000 new jobs to a county with only 25,000 people that drove every bureaucrat in the state crazy. It’s been said that the Tulip Mania of Holland ended when a sailor ate a 1,000 guilder tulip bulb, thinking it was a 5 penny onion. Extraordinary delusions abound, especially in a culture dazed by wealth.
