The Douglas administration is bristling over the Lunderville-Fitzgerald incident, claiming that Transportation Secretary Neale Lunderville is being unfairly raked over the coals by allegations that he offered Rep. Jim Fitzgerald help with a road project in return for his vote to sustain the governor's veto on the budget adjustment bill. Lunderville said no such connection was made between the vote and the road.
I wish I'd been there for their conversation because I don't know how we'll ever know what was really said or implied.
The administration claims that a conversation that took place last month between Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin and Rep. Daryl Pillsbury, an independent from Brattleboro, amounts to the same sort of thing that Lunderville's being accused of.
Pillsbury called Shumlin at home on a Friday night and asked him to speak at a Brattleboro global warming event. Shumlin told him he couldn't because he was scheduled to speak at a Montpelier event at the same time. Shumlin asked Pillsbury how he was going to vote on the impending veto. Pillsbury said he wouldn't vote with the Democrats, and launched into a litany of complaints he has against them. One of those complaints was a lack of state money to pay for the Brattleboro Union High School construction project.
Shumlin said he offered to set up a meeting for Pillsbury with House Speaker Gaye Symington, Majority Leader Carolyn Partridge and Assistant Majority Leader Floyd Nease. "I told him I wasn't interested," Pillsbury told me.
Pillsbury said Shumlin offered him nothing more than to set up that meeting, but he speculated he would have been offered more if he'd gone through with the meeting. "I don't know what I could've gotten out of this, but I think I could have gotten something," Pillsbury said. "I can't prove it."
"How can you speculate about what would have happened?" Shumlin asked. "Daryl's expectations and mine are different."
Pillsbury said, however, he didn't think his conversation with Shumlin was on par with the Lunderville-Fitzgerald accusations. "I think there's a huge difference," he said. Legislators help each other out with support for issues all the time, he said, but not with a check.
The administration is angry that the Pillsbury-Shumlin conversation is not getting the media play that the Lunderville-Fitzgerald conversation did. Is it the same thing?
- Terri Hallenbeck
