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November 12, 2016

Rutland Town man found RUTLAND TOWN —On Oct. 21, the Vermont State Police received information regarding the possible location of Gregory Wallace of Rutland Town. Through the continued investigation, VSP detectives were able to make contact with Wallace that evening. Wallace is no longer considered a missing person.

Ferrisburgh woman flees crash scene MONKTON — On Oct. 23, the Vermont State Police responded to a report of single vehicle roll over crash on Monkton Road in Monkton. While en route to the crash, a bystander reported the operator had taken off into the woods. Vergennes Police responded to assist and provide a k9 track. The operator, Ian Nye, 36, of Ferrisburgh, was located walking on Hollow Road in Monkton approximately 2 hours later. The vehicle appeared to be a total loss. Nye was transported to Porter Medical Center for evaluation and processed for DUI. Nye provided a preliminary breath test at Porter with a result of 0.125 percent BAC. Nye was released on a citation to appear at Addison District Court to answer the charge of DUI 2 on Nov. 14.

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An Italian historian visits Middlebury By Lou Varricchio lou@addison-eagle.com

MIDDLEBURY — Investigating the tempestuous past—where bloody crusades, bad popes, heretics, plagues, and mountaintop fortresses were all part of a gloomy, everyday landscape—is what Professor Frederico Canaccini calls his life’s passion. The native-Italian scholar of Medieval Latin and Italian history was a recent guest lecturer at Associate Professor Stephano Mula’s Italian classes at Middlebury College this fall. A native of Tuscany, the 40-something Dr. Canaccini enjoyed a visit to Middlebury during the autumn semester; he arrived via a grant including Princeton University. His 2016 return visit to Middlebury was part of an Italian university grant to lecture at Princeton—as well as other American institutions—offering Italo history, literature and language programs. A graduate of Italy’s Florence University and Franciscan University,

Italian scholar: Dr. Frederico Canaccini, a scholar who teaches in Rome, stopped at Ilsley Public Library during his visit to Middlebury last month.

Continued on page 16

Photo by Lou Varricchio

‘Waiting for government’: lack of innovation in Vermont’s health care By Emma Lamberton elamberton@watchdog.org

RUTLAND — In 2013, the Obama administration brought in software experts from the private sector — including industry giants such as Google, Oracle and Red Hat — to fix the flawed federal health care exchange website designed by CGI Federal. If that name sounds familiar, it might be because CGI is the same contractor that built Vermont Health Connect and worked on the state exchange until its contract was terminated in 2014. Like the federal exchange created by the 2010 health care law, Vermont Health Connect has been riddled with problems since the launch of the program in 2013. The administration of Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin and various legislative committees have commissioned multiple studies, and all have

found unacceptable errors in the registration and billing processes, as well as the system’s security. Last month, VHC officials notified customers that a number of Social Security numbers had been posted online, unsecured. “The government needs someone with excellent technical knowledge working on the inside. They need someone with the technical knowledge to evaluate the authenticity of bidding companies, and the ability to evaluate if contractors are telling the truth,” said Jordan Morano, a software developer based in Burlington whose company, Icarus, eschews government contracts. “We would go out of business if we continued to bid on government contacts,” said fellow Icarus developer Patrick Berkeley. Morano and Berkeley have created health care applications for several private-sector clients, though, and point to CGI’s history of writing proprietary software, a practice that locks clients into a particular vendor because the source code

is kept secret. That’s a lack of innovation and imagination, they say, on the part of government officials who don’t know enough to make informed decisions about the stuff they’re buying. “They don’t actually know what they want,” Berkeley said. The solution as far as Vermont is concerned, according to Morano, is to start over, and not just with the tech. “I would recommend that we start from scratch. However, there’s no point in doing that unless we solve the underlying issue of government officials not having enough technical knowledge to make sound decisions. Without that, we’ll just get more of the same.” Aside from a lack of expertise, cronyism plays a part as well. It’s a familiar tale: Lobbyists from technology Continued on page 8


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