See Howard Run

By Aziz P. -
The Boston Globe Magazine has an indepth article on Dean's candidacy. There are extensive new quotes by Dean, and the artiicle is a lot more caustic than previous coverage. Again, not much new in terms of policy statements, but more character insight and a lot of pessimism. But the overall message comes across, oddly, as positive. In addition to equal time for critics, it also goes into some background of his tenure in Vermont, including the following tidbit about school funding legislation (which until now hasn't received nearly as much attention as his civil unions stand) :

In Vermont, where state government is largely a part-time business, and where the Legislature meets for only about 16 weeks a year, Dean's volatile and energetic persona was in stark contrast to the overall temper of the government he'd been handed to lead. Nevertheless, for all his bombast, he hewed to the middle, alienating everyone a little but very few people a lot. Dean's fiscal stewardship placed the governor on such firm political ground that he could afford to be stubborn when the Vermont Supreme Court handed him not one live grenade but two.

The first was a 1997 decision, Brigham v. State of Vermont, in which the court declared that the system of funding the state's public schools through property taxes produced unconstitutional inequities. An ugly class war erupted between wealthy communities and poorer ones. Fault lines cracked open between longtime Vermonters and more recent arrivals. Dean left the problem to the Legislature, and the state's General Assembly produced Act 60 - the Equal Educational Opportunity Act - which assessed a statewide property tax of $1.10 per $100 of assessed value, which was then placed into an education fund, which the state then distributed in block grants. This guaranteed a threshold amount to be spent per student regardless of where the student lived. If a town wanted to spend more than the threshold, the money went into a pool shared by the richer towns with the poorer towns. The solution angered everyone a little, but Dean stood by Act 60 staunchly during his 1998 reelection campaign.

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