More on Markowitz's Muddled Message
As we reported in this week's Fair Game, Agency of Natural Resources Sec. Deb Markowitz made a bit of a whoopsie last week at a Norwich University panel on Tropical Storm Irene recovery efforts. The ANR secretary and former gubernatorial candidate apparently stepped on her boss' message, criticizing Gov. Peter Shumlin's handling of the state's waterways in the weeks and months afer the August flooding.
The episode was first reported by Vermont Public Radio's Steve Zind, who quoted Markowitz as saying, "[Shumlin] early on made some statements, some ‘dig-baby-dig' type statements, that inspired Vermonters to help out in ways that ultimately are very costly not just to the ecosystem but to the infrastructure."
After administration officials pushed back on her comments, Markowitz declined or ignored several requests for an interview (we suspected she might have been stuck in time out), but she did send us an e-mail saying her comments "were misinterpreted."
Well, VPR has now posted a two-and-a-half minute audio clip of Markowitz's remarks on its website, providing a little more context to the episode.
Did VPR get it wrong? Actually, the comments are even worse than we thought. Markowitz bemoans the fact that she and her agency "didn't have a chance to educate [Shumlin] in advance" and failed to "manage up" — i.e. get her boss on message.
The problem came about, she says, "because we didn't get in front of that leadership message. We didn't manage up right away to say, 'Hey, here are the important messages you can get out there.' And, you know, after we caught up with him, but it took, it took a little bit to get him on the right, the right course..."
Listen to the audio yourself — or read our transcription below. Do you think Markowitz's comments were "misinterpreted?"
“There were things that we learned along the way. One is that very early on you’ve got to manage up. You know, the governor’s all around the state talking. He’s played an incredibly important leadership role. He really brought this state together. He helped direct the resources in a way that was incredibly important to the state. But because we didn’t have a chance to educate him in advance about river dynamics and the approach of the agency in managing, in managing the river, he early on made some statements, some ‘dig-baby-dig' type statements, that inspired Vermonters to help out in ways that ultimately are very costly not just to the ecosystem but also to the infrastructure, because if you take, if you dig in the river and you do it without understanding fluvial geomorphology, which is the geology of the river, then what you’re going to do is cause more problems upstream and downstream. You might be saving the house that you're digging in front of, but at the expense of the properties above and below. One thing we know about Vermonters is that we’re very independent and very community minded, so it’s this freedom and unity — that’s our motto — freedom and unity. And not only are we independent and community-minded, but a lot of us have heavy equipment in the barn. And so there are a lot of Vermonters who are proud of their contributions, they took their equipment into the river and dug out trees. I mean we had people who were actually taking trees, pulling them out. They were still rooted. Clearing trees from the side of the rivers. Now that’s a problem because that’s a part of what stabilizes our banks. And in part it was because we didn’t get in front of that leadership message. We didn’t manage up right away to say, 'Hey here are the important messages you can get out there.' And, you know, after we caught up with him, but it took, it took a little bit to get him on the right, on the right course, and at that point it’s had an impact because of course when the governor speaks it has a ripple effect and, and it gets quoted over and over again in the press, so that was, that was an early lesson.”
