Bill headed to Senate floor today
Editor’s note: Today we’re launching “Digger Dirt” a news column on Vermont politics.
Video extra: Check out the clips at the bottom of this post — Senate Pro Tem Peter Shumlin and House Speaker Shap Smith rebut Gov. Jim Douglas’ assertion that the Legislature needs to sunset increases to estate and capital gains taxes.
Every day is busy under the Golden Bubble, but the Statehouse pace has started to reach a level of frenzied activity that heralds imminent adjournment. That date, fixed in the psyche of Statehouse mavens, is May 8, and the Legislature still has dozens of bills to pass – including the controversial Challenges for Change 2 bill in the Senate — not to mention conference committee work on the budget and finalizing the unemployment fund legislation.
It looks very likely that the session’s sticky wicket – the Challenges for Change 2 bill — will come out of the Senate Appropriations Committee today and make its way to the Senate floor today.
Shuttle diplomacy is in full swing, and the powers that be – House Speaker Shap Smith, Senate Pro Tem Peter Shumlin, Susan Bartlett, chair of Senate Appropriations, and Martha Heath, chair of House Appropriations — have been sighted heading into the Speaker’s office or the Pro Tem’s office for end-of-session confabs. And that, according to the many legislative hangers-on, is how the compromises are forged and the final deals are done – with a few people, behind closed doors.
It looks very likely that the session’s sticky wicket – the Challenges for Change 2 bill — will come out of the Senate Appropriations Committee today and make its way to the Senate floor today. At lunch time yesterday, Shumlin optimistically predicted the Senate would discuss the bill on the floor that evening, despite the fact that the Appropriations still had major issues to sort out, namely education and economic development. Evening came and went. No cigar — or Senate floor vote.
But there were spread sheets.
You can download them here:
Corrections Challenges spreadsheet
Senate Challenges spreadsheet
So far, it looks like the Senate has found $30.08 million in reductions – nearly $8 million more than the House version of Challenges 2. The difference? The Senate plans to wring the additional savings out of human services and the bulk of the money – $4.7 million — comes from the community mental health and developmental disabilities system. Senate Appropriations has also booked $2 million in “indirect” savings from the human services reorganization.
Plans for Corrections department savings are in flux. Option 1 reduces the state’s $140 million budget for prisons by $2.285 million and includes the release of 214 nonviolent offenders into Vermont communities. The plan includes a raft of new initiatives including beefed up investments in electronic monitoring, community justice programs, prison treatment programs, transitional housing and community support programs for inmates. Option 2 saves the state $7 million and includes closing one of the state’s prisons.
(In case you haven’t read about the Challenges yet, here is the SparkNote explainer: Challenges for Change is the government restructuring plan the Legislature and Gov. Jim Douglas enacted in February; the Challenges 2 bill is a compendium of changes to the state’s laws that will enable the Douglas administration to implement the reorganization. It’s also where the rubber meets the road – each of the statutory changes comes with a price tag. The new system is designed to produce $38 million in permanent savings; next year it’s meant to reduce expenditures by $72 million. The following areas of state government are part of the reorg: performance contracts, regulatory reform, economic development, human services, corrections and education.)
Play by play
At the end of Senate deliberations yesterday afternoon, Shumlin announced that he wanted the Appropriations committee in his office. Though it’s hard to say whether there was a quorum, one thing was for sure — the public wasn’t invited to attend.
Bartlett: “School districts will have to be resigned to the fact that there is less money and we have to trust in local control and let them do what’s right according to them.”
But maybe that’s why, after Bartlett returned to Appropriations hours later, toward the end of a long discussion of the language for education Challenges bill, she could pronounce, “we’re not doing any of that,” i.e., enacting the 21 pages of proposed policy changes the committee had painstakingly analyzed for two hours.
“It’s a lot of words that don’t need to be there,” Bartlett said. “School districts will have to be resigned to the fact that there is less money and we have to trust in local control and let them do what’s right according to them.”
This was, as one longtime Statehouse observer noted, “a Bartlett moment.”
The House version of the bill had asked districts to voluntarily reduce spending by 2 percent in fiscal year 2012 — with no guarantee of bookable savings in the state’s General and Education funds. Tom Evslin, the administration’s Chief Technology Officer, argued the language didn’t go far enough.
The solution, Bartlett said, is simple: “We could just take the money away.” Since the Challenge is to save $23 million in general school spending in fiscal year 2012, the Legislature, she said, could simply remove 2 percent of state funding for each supervisory union in the state. Then it’s up to the local unions to figure out how to find the savings and “the government isn’t telling them how to do it,” Bartlett said. Problem solved.
Most of the day was like that. Committee members – Hinda Miller, Jane Kitchel, Dick Sears and Diane Snelling — slogged through detailed policy matters, while Bartlett and Shumlin shuffled in and out of Appropriations. (Vince Illuzzi was reportedly in his committee room, hammering out the economic development Challenge.)
Toward the end of the day, Sen. John Campbell walked in bearing a tulip for Sears who teasingly complained that Senate leadership was making the big decisions outside the Statehouse. “Where do you want me to stick this?” Sears quipped, before the Committee shooed Campbell out of the room. (He stuck the pink tulip behind one ear.)
“I’m disappointed in the whole process for Challenges,” Sears said.
Sears was in a slightly better mood at that point. He seemed to have recovered from an earlier slight – the Office of Child Support had proposed new rules that would lead to the incarceration of parents who refuse to pay child support. Sears, the chair of Senate Judiciary, wasn’t made aware of the change until yesterday afternoon, and he was incensed that the office had proposed making child support nonpayment, after an extended period of time, a felony offense, without contacting him to discuss the impacts on the court and corrections systems.
He complained that protocol had been thrown out the window – because just three days before adjournment he was told about a major policy decision that should have been reviewed by his committee. “I’m disappointed in the whole process for Challenges,” Sears said. There was not enough time, in his view, to do it right.
But by the end of the day, the Challenges were virtually a fait accompli — Senate Appropriations had made significant progress on moving the legislation closer to passage out of committee – though Bartlett was still discussing how best to restructure the community mental health and developmental disabilities system with administration officials well into the evening.
Still to go: Economic development this morning, at 9 a.m. No plans have been made public yet, but the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, regional planning commissions and regional development corporations have been chewing over various – some would say painful — options for saving $3.4 million. If you haven’t kept up with this issue, read all about it here:
Vermont’s economic development programs under the knife
