Please join our Facebook GET OUT THE VOTE campaign! "Friend" me and "share" with Vermont! On Nov. 2 - Elect Charlotte Dennett!

Who can we trust?
By Charlotte Dennett

(Continued)

Sorrell's questionable record as a cop on the Vermont Yankee Entergy beat extends to environmental issues. Although he says he has a strong record of enforcing Vermont's environmental laws, the Conservation Law Foundation says otherwise. In 2007 they released a report titled "Surveying the Weak Enforcement of Vermont's Environmental Laws." A graph in the report comparing the number of recorded complaints to the number of responses to those complaints tells the whole story in a nutshell. The number of responses are miniscule compared to the number of complaints.

Why has Sorrell been so incurious to so many requests? Meanwhile, his investigation into whether or not Entergy officials lied to Vermont legislators about the existence of tritium pipes has dragged on for months even though the fact they lied is common knowledge and their euphemistically titled "Independent Report" on the matter is a whitewash. I know, I've read it-several times. In Entergy's case, Sorrell's investigation is pre-empted by a whitewash report paid for by Entergy and done by a pro-nuclear law firm that has represented Entergy on re-licensing issues in the past. Entergy and the law firm even had the temerity to title their findings "Independent Report," which is the way everyone refers to it. I find this galling.

More recently, Sorrell's claim that he could not find sufficient evidence of the Republican Governor's Association illegally coordinating with or making illegal contributions to the Dubie Campaign in the form of a Dubie campaign ad strikes me as a literal act of willful blindness. Green Mountain Daily reporter John Odum lays out why in his article, "Brian Dubie is Breaking the Law-Why Haven't Vermonters Been Hearing More About It?" Odum writes in no uncertain terms that the RGA ad was coordinated with Dubie's campaign. "…it is obviously staged. Dubie is being directed in an ad produced by the RGA for upwards of $30,000," writes Odum. "Hence, a violation, and a significant one."

Now, after letting the horse out of the barn, so to speak, Sorrell has launched a new investigation into RGA/Dubie campaign wrongdoing. But like his "investigation" into Entergy, Sorrell's a day late and a dollar short. The RGA and Dubie have already gotten their ads out, and his new investigation into money paid for polling information for shaping those ads won't be done before the elections.

Finally, I find Sorrell's assertion of blanket confidentiality in cases involving misconduct by police and an administration official very troubling, from his exoneration of the police who shot Woodie Woodward in Brattleboro to his closing the case and refusing to hand over documents on police viewing of child pornography in the state police academy and his most recent effort, reversed by a court, to keep Auditor Tom Salmon's DUI arrest under wraps. Sorrell says that the records on these cases can never be released. I have to ask: if something is wrong in our law enforcement community, don't people have a right to now about it? Most of the members of our police force are professional public servants dedicated to protecting us. But don't we - and they - have the right to know who the bad cops are after an investigation is completed?

Reading all of this, one might ask the same question raised by Vermont's ACLU: "who's policing the police?" The bottom line answer to that is-We the People. Concerned citizens gave me much of the information I've revealed that was hidden from us by the Attorney General's office and other state regulators. These are people who love their state and fellow Vermonters and who took it upon themselves to do the right things that our government agencies should have but didn't.