Editor’s note: Anne Galloway interviewed House Speaker Shap Smith late in the afternoon on Tuesday.
Q. Are there proposals from the Douglas administration that the Legislature would be uncomfortable with that aren’t addressed by this bill? What happens if there’s something you’ve missed that the administration could move ahead on without statutory changes that people would feel uncomfortable with?
Smith: I’m unaware of any of those particulars. I haven’t had any people in the committees of jurisdiction come to me and say, Look, I’m really concerned the administration proposed this and we can’t block it. People haven’t come to me with those specific concerns, and, quite frankly, usually they do.
As I understand it – I haven’t had a chance to read the full bill yet because I started reading it at the podium, but I didn’t have time to get through it – there are, I believe, some constraints about what the administration can do in areas where it might not need legislative authority to make changes. We’ve put in constraints about any reductions-in-force and program reductions.
Q. So you would have a say over a reduction in any more than 70 employees, or 1 percent of the workforce?
Smith: Yes, we have tried to place some constraints around things within the parameters. I think people forget that to some degree when we pass a budget, we are always giving the administration some flexibility within which to work. What we are doing now is not that much different. We are asking them to come back and tell us how things worked out, which is different. It’s something that was established in the mid-1990s but was never followed through on.
I think it’s really important for us to acknowledge that people outside of government want to know their dollars are being well spent. They don’t mind spending the dollars, but they want to know what they’re getting for them. If we could internalize that habit in government, from my perspective that, above all, would be the most important thing that we did — to actually give people a handle on what they’re getting for the money that is spent. That’s not to say that money is not being well spent or that the programs that we have are bad. I just think that it’s really important for people to have transparency and to understand what they’re getting for the money that they’re spending. Democrat, Republican, Independent, Progressive — I think people feel that way.
Q. Are you disappointed with the administration’s proposals?
Smith: (laughs and shakes his head.) I think that there were some good ideas in there, and there were some ideas that didn’t help move us along in the right direction. So, there are some things that were put in there that probably didn’t need to be put in there and weren’t explained in a way that met any of the criteria that the Challenges was about. So that was a little disappointing. I thought the fact that mandatory consolidation was proposed, and yet they couldn’t explain how it would save any money or how it would improve the outcomes of kids, I thought that was extremely disappointing.
And in some of the other areas, it wasn’t clear how well thought through some of the regulatory reform was, and I was disappointed with that. It wasn’t clear to me that that had really been thought through well enough to really explain why it would improve what was happening and how things would be better.
But some of the ideas are really intriguing. Some of the ideas around making sure there’s more integrated services in the human services areas – that’s a pretty laudable goal, and if you can make it work, that would be really helpful. I think it was appropriate to really ask the question about how are we delivering economic development and planning services. I might not agree with what the administration proposed, but I think it was a legitimate question, and if it can focus us on better outcomes and how we can look at those, I think that’s really good.
Q. What do you say to criticism that the bill is too broad and that lawmakers are abdicating their responsibility?
Smith: What I would say is that like any legislative process, it has been a little bit messy, and that’s true in any bill that goes through this House and that goes through this Senate. I have real confidence in the committees of jurisdiction that have looked at this to make decisions that are consistent with their values and with the values of Vermonters. I am pleased with the way the committees of jurisdiction have taken their duties seriously and their responsibility seriously and have decided to make decisions about what can go and what can’t go.
I think while it has been an expedited process, I actually think that in the end it has worked out as well as one could expect under difficult circumstances. I also believe that there is always going to be room to criticize in situations where there are really difficult issues that have to be grappled with, and that’s always going to be the case. It’s fair for people to criticize, but we do have a problem we have to solve, and we’re doing it as well as we can.
Q. How do you think the remaining funds are going to be found?
Smith: The bill contemplates that there will be reports back with more ideas. We will continue to work on some of the things we didn’t put in the Challenges bill.
We’ll look at S.292 (a bill that allows the early release of nonviolent prisoners) a little bit more to see if there’s more we can do there, and we’ll move forward to see if we can get as close to $38 million as we possibly can.
