Vermont: Vermont Yankee

Many of you are headed to town meetings tonight and tomorrow. When you get there, you'll see the familiar Doyle town meeting survey.

Sen. Bill Doyle, who was first elected in the Buchanon administration (slight exaggeration acknowledged), asks Vermonters every year to weigh in with their opinions on the issues facing the state.

Some of the questions will look familiar.

- Should use of cell phones while driving be prohibited?
- Should the drinking age be lowered to 18?
- Should Vermont have a mandatory seat belt law for adults? (It's not a primary, pull-over-able offense now)
- Do you support same-sex marriage?
- Should the gas tax be increased to pay for road/bridge repairs?
- Should we reduce the Vermont prison population with alternatives for non-violent offenders?
- Are you satisfied with the public schools?
- Are you satisfied with your health insurance?
- Are statewide cell service and broadband important to the state's future?
- Is Vermont an affordable place to live?
- Should Vermont Yankee's license be renewed in 2012?
- Is the Legislature doing a good job?
- Is Gov.

Town meeting is just around the corner. Among the items of interest this year:

- Burlington will decide who is going to be mayor for the next three years. Instant runoff voting makes this one especially hard to predict.

- For the first time, some schools face the two-vote barometer. If they want to spend over a certain amount, they have to split it in two and let voters have at it twice. School officials avoided this like the plague if they could, but a few fell victim to bad timing on construction project payoffs and such. We'll get to see next Tuesday if voters are willing to say aye twice.

A he-said-she-said battle over a Vermont Yankee oversight ignited between the Green Mountain State's Democratic and Republican gubernatorial candidates Thursday and continued into Friday.

The controversy began Thursday afternoon when House Speaker Gaye Symington (D-Jericho) held a press conference attacking incumbent Gov. Jim Douglas (R-Middlebury) for what she claimed was inadequate monitoring of the facility.

With exactly four weeks left until the general election on Nov. 4, new ads from the gubernatorial candidates have hit the internet and the airwaves with a focus on everything from Wall Street and the national economic downturn to Vermont Yankee and the decommissioning fund.