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February 4, 2017
Amazon to collect VT sales tax By Cassandra Loucy
cassandra@addison-eagle.com
MONTPELIER — Beginning this month, the nation’s largest online retailer, Amazon, will start collecting sales tax from customers in Vermont. This announcement came as a welcome surprise to Vermont legislators and business owners. Under the current laws regarding online retailers, a company is not required to collect sales tax unless they have a brick and mortar location in the state. The new policy will go into effect just five months before another law saying “non-collectors” must send consumers invoices at the end of the year telling them how much sales tax they owe the state. This new policy could bring in more than $5 million in revenue for the state in a full fiscal year. In recent years, more and more consumers are shopping online, particularly due to programs like “Amazon Prime,” in which consumers can pay a yearly membership fee and receive free two day shipping on all purchases, among other perks. This shift to exclusive online shopping is hurting brick and mortar stores, who feel that this new requirement to col Continued on page 14
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The search continues to find Lincoln The search continues for a Utah dog lost in Vermont By Cassandra Loucy
cassandra@addison-eagle.com
MIDDLEBURY — In January of last year, a Red Heeler dog wandered into the yard of Nick Gottlieb in Logan, Utah. Gottlieb was able to convince the dog to come inside, though he was clearly afraid. Gottlieb posted photos online to try and find the owner, and spoke to animal control who brought him to the local shelter. After about a week of being in the shelter, no one claimed him, so when he was put up for adoption, Gottlieb adopted the dog, who is now nearly two years old, and known as Lincoln. This past summer, Gottlieb and Lincoln were house sitting for a friend in Huntington, Vt. for a few days. While out mountain biking on trails unfamiliar to the pair, Lincoln ran off to chase a deer, and just didn’t come back. “I spent the next two days searching the immediate area and stayed in Vermont for three months, camping in areas where he’d been sighted, driving 6 to 8 hours a day slowly on the back roads looking for him, putting up posters, setting up game cameras,” said Gottlieb. Gottlieb is back home in Utah, but he is there without his beloved pet. There is a viral Facebook campaign to find the dog. The page updates members about sightings, and the most recent whereabouts of the dog. Around the holidays, there were several pieces of evidence Continued on page 15
A sheet of ice covered most of the state after last week’s storm. Photo by Cassandra Loucy
Millennials to the rescue in Vermont’s demographics crisis By Lou Varricchio vermontwatchdog.org
RUTLAND — Vermont’s dirty little secret is out in the open. The Green Mountain State is the victim of a demographic shift. The state needs more young people and middle-class families — that is, more people paying taxes and fees. The election of Gov. Phil Scott helped bring the secret out of the shadows. With the rise of news stories about Vermont’s young people leaving the state in search of better-paying jobs, so, too, has its middle class begun to shrink. For example, 64 percent of Vermont’s high school grads go out of state for college, and many never return. Continued on page 7