St. Johnsbury

St. Johnsbury police Sgt. George Johnson was cited by Vermont State Police for allegedly using excessive force against a 35-year-old man he initially stopped for jaywalking.

“This is an event that we’ve never had before to this degree, so we’re venturing down a road that we haven’t been on, and it’s not a good road to be on,” said Lyndonville Fire Chief Jeff Corrow.

Up to 8 inches of rain fell in the Northeast Kingdom Tuesday, causing flash flooding in the early morning hours.

Through its zoning, St. Johnsbury has long restricted where shelters can be set up. But a provision of this year’s HOME Act makes it harder for municipalities to block new shelters.

The new policy says that asylum seekers without U.S. or Canadian citizenship who are caught within 14 days of crossing anywhere along the border will be sent back.

Across Vermont, lunch is served at dozens of senior centers and church basements nearly every day. People show up to get a free meal and warm up or just to socialize. In St. Johnsbury, several of these community lunches stopped during the pandemic. Some have only just started up again.

Over the past year, a pair of cousins bought two vacant industrial properties in Vermont. And they believe they have the right business to bring new life to the spaces: Processing industrial hemp. But to be successful, the cousins will need more farmers to grow the crop.

As the federal relief that propped up nutrition-assistance organizations during the pandemic begins to disappear, food security advocates say Vermont will need to increase public support for food shelves and other programs in order to avoid a surge in malnutrition.

The shortage of nurses in Vermont has reached a crisis point. Sen. Bernie Sanders says the state needs to add 9,000 nurses to the workforce over the next seven years. This hour, we talk with a nurse, a hospital administrator and a nursing school teacher about how they’re addressing the shortage. And we’ll look at how travel nurses are filling the gaps.

It’s a few days before Christmas, and independent producer Erica Heilman took her recorder along to Ocean State Job Lot in St. Johnsbury to record some…