Digger Dirt is a column on Vermont politics and government.
Yesterday, the Vermont Legislature was like the state’s weather: If you didn’t like it, all you had to do was wait 20 minutes for it to change.
It was a long day of temperamental meteorology under the Golden Bubble.
Committees from the House and Senate were rushing around to hear last-minute testimony from state officials on the complex government restructuring plan — Challenges for Change – and wherever possible to try to leverage their power to change the details.
Emotions were running high, and in one meeting, lawmakers grilled one of the Legislative Council staff as though she were responsible for the parts of the Challenges bill they didn’t like. Sharp words and tears ensued.
Order became tenuous, and lawmakers who were slogging through final legislation wanted to know: When were they going home?
The answer came late in the afternoon. Democratic House Speaker Shap Smith and Democratic Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin announced with certainty that adjournment was nigh, that in just 24 hours they would finish all of the major legislation still sitting on the table – the capital, budget, tax, judicial restructuring — on Saturday. The bugaboo of the session, Challenges for Change, the government restructuring plan that’s supposed to save $38 million, they asserted, would go to the Senate that evening.
They also announced plans for the big bills left to finish: They had $32 million in savings booked for the Challenges ($1 million more than the Douglas administration, they said); they would use up to $10 million from the rainy day fund next year if the Challenges savings failed to materialize fully; they would drop efforts to block a federal tax deduction pass-through for business known as the “domestic production deduction”; and they would move forward with a voluntary school merger plan.
Video extra: Please see the clips of the presser at the bottom of this post.
A ray of hope (for adjournment anyway) — that was soon dashed in a microclimate of stormy weather.
Lightning struck 10 minutes later when Republican Gov. Jim Douglas held out the threat of a second-time-ever budget veto. He announced he didn’t like Smith and Shumlin’s proposal (despite the elimination of the cap on the corporate tax break, a concession to the administration) and insisted that they “do something” to lower the property tax burden. He also demanded (again) that they roll back $21 million in capital gains and estate taxes.
Douglas said they were taking the easy way out by relying on $10 million in Rainy Day funds to cover any fiscal holes in the Challenges plan.
Video extra: Please see the clips of the presser at the bottom of this post.
Meanwhile, thunderclouds were forming downstairs in the Senate Appropriations Committee, where lawmakers were trying to clear the Challenges logjam. Sen. Susan Bartlett, D-Chittenden, and Sen. Dick
Sears, D-Bennington, were at odds over funding for community justice centers and court diversion programs, part of the Corrections section that of the seven government restructuring plans under the Challenges was supposedly ready to go.
Download the “Challenges for Change: Summary of Spending Reductions” spreadsheet here.
Clearly, there were a few details left to work out.
After an extended dinner break, the senators met long enough to have a floor fight over the plan to push for final passage of the Challenges that night. Sen. Doug Racine proposed that the Senate adjourn until the following Thursday. His proposal wasn’t taken up and another senator called for a recess. The disgruntled senators held a roll call vote — for the first time in memory on whether to caucus.
(They did recess for a half hour.)
Things in the other body weren’t going much better. At 9 p.m., Smith stood at the podium in the House and metaphorically threw up his hands.
“Clearly, we will not complete our work tomorrow,” Smith conceded.
So much for best-laid plans.
A few minutes later, the Senate assembled after recess to take up the Challenges bill, which after a week of handwringing had been voted out of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
But it was a no-go after all that rushing and hard work: The copier was out of ink, and drafts of the bill were unavailable.
When passage of major legislation hinges on a toner cartridge, you know you’re in trouble.
The copier snag was emblematic of the whole day. Everyone at the Statehouse was scrambling, but to what end? Hard to say. There was a sinking feeling among rank-and-file legislators, despite the Speaker and President Pro Tem’s statements to the contrary, that it just wasn’t possible to plow through the mountain of work in front of them by Saturday. (That didn’t deter Smith from cracking the whip, however: He told representatives they would be coming back on Saturday “to close all the bills we can tomorrow.”)
Give them a day, though, and as past sessions have often demonstrated, they can take another full week. The Challenges bill is being debated on the floor of the Senate as I write – and Shumlin told senators in caucus a little while ago that they would push for final passage of the bill today, after which it would be sent directly to the House. Even so, D-Day is looking more like May 15.
