Community residents and housing advocates are regrouping after an unsuccessful push for Fresno’s new city budget to include a rent control program. 

“Community members are disappointed, and there really is this feeling that their narratives, their testimony aren’t being taken seriously,” said Marisa Moraza, a campaign director with Power California Action.

That fight, advocates acknowledge, is an increasingly uphill battle in Fresno, where the mayor and city council have said solving the statewide housing crisis means incentivizing development and courting reinvestment.

Rent control, they argue, would be counterproductive to building new housing units.

“In terms of rent control, I can tell you I don’t support that because I’ve seen what has happened in other cities,” Mayor Jerry Dyer said during a news conference Thursday following the budget’s adoption. “When rent control is implemented, ultimately, you have landlords making fewer dollars, and so they’re not investing in their property. And as a result, we end up with a lot of slums within a city.”

Despite lingering frustrations, housing advocates say they aren’t backing down on their demands.

In May, a coalition of advocacy organizations sent a letter to Dyer and the Fresno City Council, listing a series of budget requests on everything from transportation and infrastructure to housing and, specifically, a new rent control program.

In the letter, advocates said the city should establish a board to enforce rent-control policies, which, they say, would stabilize rents in Fresno.

“We wanted to also wrap in the opportunity to actually allocate funding for something like a rent control program,” Moraza said. “It would be a very low funding allocation, but just having that allocation then opens the door to conversation of building up a policy.”

Mayor, council push to build more affordable housing, remain opposed to rent control

Just before the city council approved the 2024 fiscal year budget Thursday, a group of community residents and housing advocates, with signs in hand, rallied inside the Fresno Council Chambers.

“What do we want? Rent Control!” The group chanted. “When do we want it? Now!”

About 15 seconds into the chant, Council President Tyler Maxwell put the city council meeting into recess for five minutes, and the city’s live feed and audio cut out shortly after.

The chant capped about two months of Fresno residents and housing advocates showing up to public comment before a city council – which they have noted is composed of a majority of landlords – to voice their concerns about rising rents.

“This is really like our final attempt to be able to speak directly to council members because the in-person meetings (with them) weren’t making a shift,” Moraza said. “We’re now seeing that public comment is not making a shift.”

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Dyer said the rent control issue was a nonstarter.

Dyer said passing rent control would send a message to housing developers to leave Fresno, which he said could lead to a lack of housing production and actually drive rents up. Dyer has maintained that the city can resolve its housing crisis by building more units, and rent control does not fit his vision.

Since 2021, 400 new affordable housing units have been built and are currently occupied in Fresno, city spokesperson Sontaya Rose told Fresnoland in May. She said the city plans to add 2,493 more affordable housing units by the end of 2025.

But when new affordable housing developments open up, applications pour in.

One 60-unit affordable housing development in Clovis recently received over 10,000 applications, and another 57-unit development that opened up in Fresno’s Chinatown received 4,000 applications, said Michael Duarte, the chief real estate officer at the Fresno Housing Authority, at a June 15 Fresnoland/CalMatters panel on housing.

Duarte added that the Fresno Housing Authority received 10,000 applications in less than one day for its Section 8 housing voucher waitlist. 

Rent control isn’t the only way to help tenants, leaders say

In an interview with Fresnoland, Fresno City Council President Tyler Maxwell said he sees both sides of the issue but said he believes rent comes down to simple supply-and-demand economics.

He added the best way to bring rent down is to increase the housing supply, and that means construction.

“These last three years, I can tell you that we have set a record when it comes to either subsidizing or helping initiate affordable housing projects here in the city of Fresno,” Maxwell said. “It’s a priority for not just this council but the mayor and his administration to really try to expedite as many housing projects as possible.”

In lieu of rent control, Maxwell said the council in recent years has taken steps to beef up some protections for tenants.

He pointed to the city’s Eviction Protection Program, which Maxwell co-authored in 2021.

The program, which provides legal representation for tenants facing eviction, wasn’t included in the proposed budget that Dyer released in May. 

Maxwell, the only city councilmember who rents his home, pushed to save the program with a budget motion to put $2 million towards the program’s third year. He said he hopes the program wouldn’t require a budget motion to get funding in the future.

“Going forward, my hope is that it starts getting baked into the proposed budget,” Maxwell said. “Ether because it’s a priority for the mayor or a priority for the city attorney.”

Maxwell added that another piece of legislation he authored, the Tenant Relocation Assistance Program, helps renters avoid getting displaced due to unhealthy or unsafe living conditions. The ordinance requires landlords to assist with the expense of relocating tenants to complete needed renovations or face fines.

However, the city’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program, a key COVID-19-era effort that provided assistance with rent and utility bills to Fresno residents who met income requirements, is going away soon. The $54 million from federal and state governments that funded the program is almost depleted, and the remaining $2.5 million in funding remaining for the program will likely get spent in the next fiscal year.

With no city funding to keep the program around next year, it will likely end soon.

“There was a lot of community momentum and energy that really shows that folks care about this issue,” said Marisa Moraza, a campaign director with Power California Action. “We will continue to push for this rent control demand.”

The post Frustrated rent control advocates say Fresno leaders aren’t listening, but the fight isn’t over appeared first on Fresnoland.

For those who have been wondering about what was going on north of the Hollister Municipal Airport with all the blue tarps and 9,000 pilings driven 50 feet into the ground that will eventually support a 1-million-square-foot fulfillment facility, the wait is over.

Today, Amazon answered BenitoLink’s repeated requests to verify that the new building will be its latest venture in San Benito County. BenitoLink also requested the former city manager Brett Miller to reveal the tenant of the fulfillment center but never responded. A planning department staff member recently told this reporter the city was under a nondisclosure agreement for that project.

“We’re looking forward to opening a new facility in the city of Hollister, which has been a great partner on this project from the start,” responded Alisa Carroll, an Amazon public relations manager. “While we don’t have a specific launch date to share right now, once we have a better sense of timing, we’ll look to begin hiring for hundreds of good-paying jobs for the region.”

Driving by the location that has been mysteriously referred to as Project Almond located on 73 acres in the planned Clearist Industrial Park, the pace of construction has picked up recently as bulldozers and dump trucks are working on a road leading from the site where one wall was hoisted up a few days ago near San Felipe Road.

Carroll was not able to answer BenitoLink’s questions as to the actual function of the fulfillment center. According to Amazon, though, there are six distinct types of fulfillment centers:

Sortable fulfillment center
Around 800,000 square feet in size, sortable fulfillment centers can employ more than 1,500 full-time associates. In these buildings, Amazon employees pick, pack and ship customer orders such as books, toys and housewares. It adds robots associates often work alongside robots, allowing them to learn new skills and helping create a more efficient process to meet customer demand.

Non-sortable fulfillment center
Ranging in size from 600,000 to 1 million square feet, non-sortable fulfillment centers employ more than 1,000 full-time associates. In these centers, associates pick, pack and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment and rugs.

Sortation centers
At sortation centers, associates sort customer orders by final destination and consolidate them onto trucks for faster delivery. Amazon’s website states this sort center network provides full- and part-time career opportunities and is powering its ability to provide customers with everyday delivery, including Sunday delivery.

Receive centers
Amazon’s receive centers support customer fulfillment by taking in large orders of the types of inventory that it expects to quickly sell and allocating it to fulfillment centers within the network. Full- and part-time roles are available in these buildings, which are about 600,000 square feet in size.

Specialty
Amazon’s fulfillment network is also supported by additional types of buildings that handle specific categories of items or are pressed into service at peak times of the year such as the holiday season. Many of these buildings feature part-time opportunities with the option to convert to full-time.

Delivery stations
In these buildings, customer orders are prepared for last-mile delivery to customers. Amazon delivery providers enable every day shipping.

Amazon has been operating a delivery station in Hollister since September 2021.

Because of the square footage and the described use of distributing furniture and appliances, the new building will most likely fall into the non-sortable category.

The Planning Commission resolution that approved the project states it will provide an e-commerce fulfillment center and distribution facility. It will operate with approximately 449 employees, including 275 employees during the day shift and 174 employees during the night shift. During the day shift there would be 16 office workers, 169 warehouse workers, 10 security personnel and 80 drivers. During the night shift, there would be 15 office workers, 150 warehouse workers, and nine security personnel.

If Hollister’s newest facility follows similar Amazon facilities, robots will play an important role. According to Amazon, it has 175 fulfillment centers around the world; 26 have humans and robots working side by side.

“In addition, robotic animation benefits employees, as they take over performance of fulfillment centers’ less desirable, more tedious tasks,” the Amazon website states.

As described by Amazon, one type of robotics or bots are flat, wheeled, 300-pound machines that glide across facility floors, moving small bins and large pallets of products to associates. Other bots called palletizers “provide robotic muscle for the operation” as they identify and lift boxes from conveyor belts before stacking them on pallets for stowage or shipping. Then the six-ton robo-stows are used to lift even heavier items.

“Used to expedite the inbound process once truckloads of inventory reach the centers, the robo-stows that are currently employed lift pallets of inventory up to drive units on higher floors within fulfillment centers,” according to Amazon.

There are, though, some claims that robots and humans don’t always get along and there have been injuries.

According to a BBC report based on a study conducted by the Center for Investigative Reporting which claims to have acquired internal records for 150 warehouses over four years, “At the most common kind of Amazon ‘fulfillment center,’ serious injuries are 50% higher for those that have robots than those without.”

According to a Reveal News report, after Amazon debuted the robots in Tracy the serious injury rate there nearly quadrupled, going from 2.9 per 100 workers in 2015 to 11.3 in 2018, records show.

The report said Jonathan Meador watched the transition from his position loading boxes into big rig trailers. The article stated the robots at the Tracy warehouse were so efficient that humans could barely keep up and the pickers and packers were expected to move more products every minute, and more boxes shot down the conveyor belt toward Meador.

“Before robots, it was still tough, but it was manageable,” he said. Afterward, “we were in a fight that we just can’t win.”

As for replacing human workers, in a 2019 Reuters story, Scott Anderson, director of Amazon Robotics Fulfillment, said technology is at least 10 years away from fully automating the processing of a single order picked by a worker inside a warehouse. He also said the technology for a robot to pick a single product from a bin without damaging other products or picking multiple products at the same time in a way that could benefit the e-commerce retailer is years away.

Related BenitoLink stories

Amazon delivery hub opens in Hollister | BenitoLink

Amazon opening Hollister delivery facility Sept. 28 | BenitoLink

Hollister fast-tracked Amazon development without public input | BenitoLink

Tenant of jumbo fulfillment center still not revealed | BenitoLink

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The post Amazon confirms new fulfillment center in Hollister appeared first on BenitoLink.

On the very first day of summer, many of Vermont’s top politicos gathered on the Statehouse lawn for a cheeky kind of bill-signing ceremony. They were there to celebrate H.217, which will inject more than $120 million annually into Vermont’s child care system, getting enacted into law.

Gov. Phil Scott had vetoed the bill — he objected to the 0.44% payroll tax that will partially fund the measure — but lawmakers overrode him by comfortable margins the day before Wednesday’s photo op.

And so, since the governor would not sign it, the children would. A large-scale printout of the bill was propped up on a tripod, and, after the speeches wrapped up, Senate Majority Leader Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, stood at the ready, colored markers in hand.

“Anybody who is under four feet tall, please come forward,” her colleague, Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, instructed the small crowd of lawmakers, lobbyists, advocates and their children. “We have markers for you. You have to finish the job today.”

Advocates and Democratic lawmakers, who had made child care one of their banner priorities for the session, had reason to celebrate. Taking into account regular federal funding and the state money Vermont already spends on prekindergarten vouchers, the measure will roughly double the public dollars spent on early childhood education in the state. Just weeks before, the wonky online outlet Vox had declared the new law would make Vermont “a national leader on child care.” 

But in America, the bar is low. The U.S. is an outlier among rich, industrialized nations in how little it invests in early childhood education. And advocates and experts alike say that while Vermont’s new law will make significant progress, it will not, by itself, actually fix a broken child care system.

“This is a great downpayment on a child care system that works for parents and providers. It is not the full investment,” Elliot Haspel, a national expert who testified before lawmakers about the bill, told VTDigger.

“If all there ever is, is $120 million — maybe a little bit more — if we ask ourselves 10 years from now, ‘What’s the child care system in Vermont going to look like?’ It’s not going to look radically different than it does today. It’s going to be moderately more affordable. It’s going to be moderately better paid,” he said.

The problem of child care is simple math. Because it requires very low adult-to-children ratios, it is enormously labor-intensive to deliver. But because most families must pay out of pocket for the service, providers set their tuition far below the true cost of care. The result is prices that families still struggle to pay — and wages that leave child care workers unable to make ends meet. Basic benefits, like health insurance, remain out of reach for much of the workforce.

Vermont’s new child care measure is designed to mitigate that problem in two ways: by dramatically expanding which families are eligible for child care subsidies, and raising the rate (by 35%) at which the state reimburses providers who participate in the subsidy program.

The new subsidy system will be enacted in several phases, but by October 2024, families making up to 575% of the federal poverty level — that’s $172,000 for a family of four — will be eligible for partial subsidies. That will extend state aid to an estimated 80% of families, offering help to a greater share of the population than any other state in the country.

“The fact that Vermont has the subsidy going up to over 500% of the federal poverty level makes it very unique,” said Diane Schilder, a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population at the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

But how those new subsidies actually impact a family’s bottom line will depend on whether, or how much, a provider chooses to raise their tuition to match the state’s increased reimbursement rates. If providers increase their prices at the same rate as reimbursements, the new subsidies were designed to basically hold families harmless — not make out-of-pocket costs much cheaper.

And while Vermont will extend help to more families than anywhere else, one state has it beat when it comes to how many families will receive entirely free care. New Mexico, where voters in 2022 approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to child care, offers no-cost care to anyone making up to 400% of the federal poverty level (that’s $120,000 a year for a family of four). A family making that much in Vermont will still pay estimated co-pays of $1,000 a month. 

Advocates and, in a 2021 law, legislators themselves set the goal that families receiving state aid would not pay more than 10% of their household income on child care. This year’s measure “does not achieve that,” Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, the chair of the House Human Services Committee, matter-of-factly told VTDigger. 

“We are in fact raising the cost of child care in the state because we are addressing something that has gone unaddressed — which is payments of fair wages to people in the early care and learning sector,” Wood said.

But the new subsidy structure will nevertheless provide a dramatic improvement in affordability to one set of families: those with more than one child in care.

“The second child is free. If you have a second child, you don’t pay (another) copay. And I think that is something that is not widely understood,” Wood said. “That could make a huge difference.”

On the other side of the equation, Vermont’s latest measure may not necessarily raise workers’ wages as much as advocates had hoped. H.217 significantly raises reimbursement rates — but not by as much as was recommended in a study commissioned by lawmakers and completed this winter. That same report found that Vermont faced a funding gap of up to $279 million to meet its child care goals. This year’s bill invests a little less than half of that.

The new law also doesn’t require providers to raise wages, although it does state that lawmakers may do so in the future, and a report on child care worker wages is due back to the Legislature in January 2026. For Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, that’s a key part of this year’s unfinished business.

“I think the workforce question is another one that remains open,” she said. “Will this be enough infusion to really solve the workforce problems that we’re seeing in early childhood education or will we continue to struggle to find high quality people to take these jobs and stay at these jobs?”

Hardy also advocated strongly, at the outset of the session, to move Vermont to full-day pre-kindergarten. She was unsuccessful, but the bill does create an “implementation committee” tasked with setting out a plan for getting Vermont to full-day, publicly funded prekindergarten for 4-year-olds by July of 2026.

Most stakeholders agree that the 10 hour-a-week voucher Vermont currently offers to the families of 3- and 4-year-olds for prekindergarten isn’t enough. But setting aside the question of finding additional funding, changing the system might still be tricky politically. 

The vouchers have become a key source of revenue for private child care providers, who are anxious that expansions in public school-based prekindergarten programs could mean an exodus of staff to better-paid settings, and who argue that schools don’t offer the year-round care that families need. But further investments in a mixed-delivery system also make certain lawmakers nervous in light of recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings that complicate the guardrails states can impose on such vouchers.

As Vermont contemplates further work on early childhood education, Schilder said lawmakers need to think seriously about how to help providers navigate the complicated patchwork of state and federal programs that currently fund the sector, including by building out state-level capacity to smoothly administer such programs. And she also argued Vermont will have to think seriously about how to meet the needs of parents who work nights and weekends.

“If you have a fully funded system that provides full day care, it doesn’t necessarily meet the needs of the more than a third of young children who have parents who work non-traditional hours,” she said. 

Like Haspel, she’s also emphatic that while Vermont should celebrate what it has done, this measure invests only a fraction of what’s needed. To offer a child care system that looks like what’s generally offered elsewhere in industrialized nations, she said, a low-end estimate of the state’s total spend would have to approach $700 million.

“This is making a dent and not necessarily addressing the entire problem,” she said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s new child care law makes the state a national leader — but falls short of the movement’s goals.

Lives are being transformed in the building trades space at Northwest Career & Technical Center in St. Albans where Ross Lavoie and Steve Allard spend two hours every day teaching carpentry and more to 90 students. 

“These students are learning with their hands and with their brains,” Lavoie said. 

“The more ways you learn something by touching it, doing it, seeing it, feeling it, that’s how you’re really going to drive those points home, as opposed to sitting in a traditional classroom,” he said.

The students mainly come from three high schools: St. Albans’ own public high school, Bellows Free Academy; Missisquoi Valley Union Middle/High School in Swanton; and Bellows Free Academy Fairfax. Students also come from Project Soar Elementary/High School, an alternative school in St. Albans Bay.

Lavoie and Allard both graduated from the program where they now teach. But Lavoie said today’s students face social and economic challenges he did not have to face in high school, such as substance abuse and poverty.

Lavoie said he teaches accountability to students who have never been asked to be accountable. “They have to tell us where they are, dress appropriate,” he said. He talks with them about the importance of driving sober. 

Lavoie also tried to teach his students to become better citizens by getting involved in their communities, and he takes his students into the community to do work for nonprofit organizations.

“Our goal is to work for people that can use our help and our free labor the most, and make their money go further,” he said.

So, his students have built housing, remodeled the local soup kitchen, worked on projects at Hard’ack, the local nonprofit ski hill, and worked on blighted homes in the city of St. Albans, he said. 

Steve Wunsch, who taught both Lavoie and Allard when they were in high school, has come out of retirement to help them teach today’s future carpenters. The Covid-19 pandemic made a lot of parents and students reevaluate college educations, he said.

Lavoie said his graduates are in great demand.

Juniors and seniors can sign up for a co-op work-based learning program that lets them work on job sites part time, or even nearly full time, during the school day, provided they have met their academic requirements. 

“They already have a career before they graduate, and they’ve been getting paid to do that,” Lavoie said.

Vermont’s most promising jobs

Students are drawn to the carpentry program because they realize there is good money to be made in the building trades, Lavoie said. 

Carpentry is one of Vermont’s most promising jobs, according to the McClure Foundation and the Vermont Department of Labor — defined by them as jobs that pay more than the median Vermont wage of $22.50 an hour and have the greatest number of openings. 

To draw attention to the opportunities, the organizations are spotlighting the four occupations with the greatest number of projected openings through 2030: bookkeepers, carpenters, nurses and teachers. 

VTDigger’s Promising Jobs series is taking up the torch to look more closely at how people are getting into those four careers. Today, we look at carpentry. Yesterday, we covered teaching. And coming up, we’ll dive into bookkeeping and nursing. 

“In Vermont, there is a career and education pathway for you,” said Tom Cheney, executive director of Advance Vermont, a nonprofit that aims to connect Vermonters with careers in the state. There are promising jobs that are trained for through apprenticeship. “It doesn’t just require college,” he said.

Advance Vermont posts Vermont’s most promising jobs on its website, where people can find out about 500 careers in Vermont and can see what training they need to land a job in one of those careers. 

Through 2030, Vermont can expect 4,460 openings for carpenters, the report estimates. Over the course of their careers, carpenters can expect to make a median wage of $23 an hour, more than $47,000 a year.

The carpentry profession is a good fit for people who like to work with “your hands or with machines to make, fix or build things,” according to a brochure from the McClure Foundation.

A limited supply of carpenters

High school career centers are one avenue for learning carpentry. 

Mary Ann Sheahan, who runs the Vermont Talent Pipeline for the Vermont Business Roundtable, worked with general contractors to identify a credential of value in the trades that is now being taught at every career technical education center in Vermont. It is called the National Center for Construction Education and Research core credential. 

“It’s the first skill set for anybody who works in construction,” Sheahan said. “It includes things like basic safety, construction math, hand tools, power tools, blueprint reading.”

At some career centers, even though the programs are much smaller than the one in St. Albans, there is still plenty of room for interested students. In Rutland and Springfield, for instance, there are still a few openings for next fall’s classes.

But other programs, such as those at the Center for Technology in Essex, are oversubscribed. At the Cold Hollow Career Center in Enosburg Falls, there’s plenty of student interest in carpentry classes, but for several weeks, Nate Demar, director of the center, struggled to find someone to teach them next fall.

“We lost our amazing Construction Teacher because he can make a lot more money in the private sector,” Demar wrote in an email. By last week, Demar reported that he had finally found someone to teach the six students who have applied to enroll next fall.

If a candidate has a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent and no teaching experience, the starting salary for a carpentry teacher at Cold Hollow  is $45,000 a year, and if a candidate is certified to teach the national curriculum and has 20 years in the field, it is $64,000, Demar said.

Lavoie said it is hard to draw carpenters to teaching because they make so much more 

working in construction. “We have some students, even some students almost right out of this program, making what we make in a year,” he said.

But money is not everything, said Lavoie, who appreciates the school hours and summer vacation, which allows him to be home with his young children. 

The shortage of carpentry teachers restricts the supply of carpenters in Vermont, to the point where Ryan Ahern has to bring them in from out of state.

“We can’t find commercial framers to build large projects,” said Ahern, director of field operations at ReArch Company, a contractor in South Burlington. “We’re bringing people up from Boston to do this work.”

Other paths to carpentry

Someone who graduates from a career technical education center with a core construction credential could get hired by a contractor, but would not have all the skills to work as a carpenter, Sheahan said. 

So Vermont Talent Pipeline approached contractors to ask how people coming into the field with this credential could get more skills so they could become independent carpenters. 

Together, they put together an 18-month apprenticeship program; Sheahan said that experience boosts the average wage by about 50%. 

And, apprenticeships are one way that employers can attract employees.

Ahern hosts apprentices at his business through a program that recruits and trains carpenters over 18 months. The program teams up incoming apprentices with foremen and skilled carpenters in the field with pay starting at $19 an hour. 

“They start with basic tool skills, like keeping all the fingers on their hands,” Ahern joked. “They’re learning plan-reading. They’re learning framing. They’re learning some finish carpentry.”

Associated Builders and Contractors sponsors the apprenticeship program, which is taught by ReSOURCE Vermont. Young people starting out in the trades get Wednesday afternoons off to go to class at ReSOURCE Vermont, and a mentor on the job checks that they can actually do what they are supposed to be learning. Over 18 months, the apprentice graduates from laborer to carpenter’s helper to carpenter.

Here’s the pitch, Sheahan said: “We’re going to hire you even if you have just basic skills and we’re going to teach you how to become a carpenter over the course of 18 months. It could be that you’re starting at $20 an hour and when you’re finished, you’re going to be $30 an hour.”

A quicker route is the Construction 101 class at ReSOURCE. The six-week construction program is designed to get students jobs when they finish. 

Students spend four weeks in the woodshop, gaining credentials for working with power and hand tools. Then there’s a job fair, and the last two weeks are spent working with employers who came to the job fair. 

“At the end of the sixth week, ideally, you’re talking contracts,” said Maggie Robinson, program coordinator at the ReSOURCE Burlington site, running construction and weatherization programs. 

Ry-An White, who lives in Shelburne, took the class. He is now building basement doors and hatches, putting up drywall and reframing damaged sections of homes for the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity weatherization program. 

He started at $18 an hour. Now, after less than a year on the job, he makes $21.75 an hour. 

Someday, he hopes to be able to build his own home. 

Advice to young people

Ahern, at ReArch, said demand is high for people who are interested in getting into carpentry. “If you’re ambitious and you’re looking to get into this business, it’s an awesome time,” he said.

He offers some advice for high school students considering carpentry.

“You gotta like the physical aspect of it,” Ahern said. “There’s a certain hardship (to) this business, especially in Vermont, with the cold, and you have to actually like physical work.”

Ahern advises students interested to start out with internships while they are still in high school.

“I’d advise against going to work with the uncle down the street,” he said. “If I was 18 years old, I would spend six months with two or three of the best (employers) around, and then take a pick.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Promising Jobs: Tech centers and apprenticeships teach carpentry skills and more.

Police and private security for a Canadian mining company arrested an Indigenous protester and demolished a protest blockade erected by descendants of a survivor of the 1865 massacre at the site, according to land and water defenders who were there.

Say “Beetlejuice” three times, and you summon the man himself. 

But in East Corinth, where production on the movie Beetlejuice 2 has begun, locals are hesitant to say the word, bound to secrecy by non-disclosure agreements.

“It all kind of happens quietly,” Rick Cawley, chair of the Corinth selectboard, said of the film. “I’ve only heard about it on a need-to-know basis.”

In the late ’80s, a film crew descended on East Corinth to shoot the original Beetlejuice. The resulting cult classic depicted Barbara and Allen Maitland (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin), who die in a car crash and are left to inhabit their home as ghosts. The Deetz family — including Lydia, a goth teen played by Winona Ryder — buys the home, and the Maitlands attempt to haunt them out of the property. Along the way, the ghostly husband and wife solicit the not-so-helpful help of Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), ultimately finding peace with their erstwhile enemies the Deetzes.

Exterior shots in the movie were filmed in the rural Orange County town of about 1,500 residents. A now-shuttered general store, a white Masonic lodge, and a prop covered bridge all featured in the Tim Burton gothic comedy. 

The sequel will feature original cast members Ryder, Keaton and Catherine O’Hara, as well as new additions Justin Theroux, Jenna Ortega and Willem Defoe. Burton will again direct. Primarily filmed in England, the production will shoot in Corinth later this summer, according to Cawley.

On foot, this reporter trekked through the hills of Corinth, hunting for details about the new movie. But locals, roped into the production themselves, stayed mum. (A publicist for Warner Brothers declined to comment.) 

After a few knocks on the locked door of the East Corinth Congregational Church, a space the production has been using for storage, the Rev. KellyAnn Donahue poked her head out. She said she couldn’t talk about the film.

Some residents quietly pointed to the community-supported ski hill Northeast Slopes, suggesting a volunteer there may have some involvement in the new production. The barn-red covered bridge, built for the first Beetlejuice, even found a home at the ski area, where it houses part of hill’s T-bar. But the volunteer, muzzled by a legal “pinky swear,” politely declined to talk. 

No amount of shoe-leather reporting in 90-degree weather seemed enough to overcome the Hollywood gag order. Atop a green hillside on the way into town, the production team this week toiled away under the boiling sun, erecting what appeared to be a house — the house, in fact, of Beetlejuice fame. But “no trespassing” signs blocked the way up the hill, past the crew’s shiny cars with Massachusetts plates. 

Remnants of the original Beetlejuice reveal themselves in East Corinth, even if answers to a reporter’s inquiries do not. A still from the film — a car bursting through the side of a covered bridge — is tacked to a stop sign on Chicken Farm Road. A poster outside Corinth’s white Masonic lodge, transformed in the movie to Miss Shannon’s School for Girls, shows another frame. 

Beetlejuice tourists descend on Corinth from as far away as California to see the sights, according to Jennifer Spanier, library director at the town’s Blake Memorial Library. Superfans find their way into the library, looking for more lore. 

“I’ll be like, ‘I bet they’re a Beetlejuice person,’ because maybe they’re dressed a little goth, or they just look like they aren’t from here,” Spanier said. 

She, too, has been sworn to secrecy due to peripheral involvement in the sequel. 

“It’s called ‘Operation Blue Hawaii’ or something like that,” Spanier said of the production’s covert dealings. “It’s a code name.”

Finally, after all that marching up and down East Corinth’s humble main street, the story seemed destined to break open: a truck, idling outside the library, with a director’s clapboard stenciled to the door. The crew!

This intrepid gumshoe sidled up to the driver’s side window, gesturing inquisitively at the man eating french fries inside. He lowered the window. 

Sixteen years in the business, and the man had encountered few places as … quiet … as East Corinth. 

“This is like no man’s land,” he said. He’d parked beside the library to get some Wi-Fi — cell signal being finicky at best. “There’s nothing to do around here. At all.”

The man, from Massachusetts, declined to provide his name, explaining that he’d signed an NDA, and his union contract prevented him from talking to the press. But under the cloak of anonymity, he spoke with candor — not about the film, but about the sleepy hamlet it had brought him to.

“Unfortunately, it’s Corinth. That’s how you say it, right?” he said, emphasizing the second syllable. “There’s only one store in town.” 

Asked how he imagines the town will handle the hubbub when shooting finally begins, he chuckled. 

“It’ll be a circus.”

Rick Cawley, chair of the Corinth selectboard, recalled the first Beetlejuice back in the 80s.

“Everybody was interested to say the least,” he remembered of the East Corinth shoot. The production crew erected a faux house and manufactured a barn-red covered bridge. 

Early in the original film, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis fall through the bridge, dying and becoming the film’s central ghosts in the process. 

Strange as it may sound for a famous Tim Burton production to appear in the roughly 1,500 person Orange County town, Cawley said Beetlejuice wasn’t a total surprise. The frequently photographed East Corinth village epitomizes quaint Vermont town with its white-steepled church and Holsteins on the hillside. Plus, The Survivors, a 1983 comedy featuring Robin Williams and Walter Matthau, filmed in Corinth a few years prior, Cawley said. That production even enlisted the help of his husky-mix, though the dog didn’t feature in the final film.  

When Beetlejuice came to town, it was “just a little blip,” Cawley said, though the film struck a chord with a certain population in town. “A generation younger than me were kind of enthralled because it was this quirky, cool movie.”

More recently, Cawley got a call from a location scout for Warner Brothers, inquiring about shooting the sequel. The production has since gotten Corinth’s road crew, fire chief and constable involved in pre-production, assisting with traffic control and prop building. 

“We like getting on the map,” he said. “It’s kind of cool.”

In small towns, periods of time are marked ‘before’ and ‘after’ big events. In Corinth, one of those events was the filming of Beetlejuice, Amy Peberdy, a town resident, said. 

“Now all we have is, ‘Remember the Covid years,’ ” she joked. 

Peberdy moved to town the year after production on Beetlejuice wrapped. Locals had stories of famous actors walking into their kitchens to change into their costumes, she said. “It was that kind of production.”

Over the years, Beetlejuice-specific tours have come through town, Peberdy said, and posters around town labeled the various sights from the movie.

“People would go up to the signs and ‘Ahh,’ ” she recalled, “like they were some kind of religious relic.”

Recently, Peberdy has spotted action on the hilltop where the Beetlejuice house stood: big equipment, earth moving. She expects a forthcoming call for extras, though shooting has not begun. 

In the Tim Burton-directed film, Barbara and Allen Maitland (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin), die in a car accident, and are left to inhabit their home as ghosts. The Deetz family — including Lydia, a goth teen played by Winona Ryder — buys the home, and the Maitlands attempt to haunt them out of the property. Along the way, they solicit the not-so-helpful help of Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), ultimately finding peace with their erstwhile enemies the Deetzes.

Shot in characteristic Burton style, the movie is spooky-but-whimsical, often featuring gothic special effects that appear consciously low-budget. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Like a ghost cloaked in NDAs, Beetlejuice 2 quietly begins production in East Corinth.