It’s not a secret that the Vermont Legislature has a penchant for ordering reports — they often get fastened onto bills as a means of culling information or defraying controversy. The 2013 session was no different — lawmakers asked for 133 of them.
But what’s easy to overlook is that this year’s batch falls on top of an older stack. Those 133 reports joined wizened ones from two decades earlier, bringing the tally up to 326.
The Legislature assigns research to its own ranks, and it also asks for a hefty amount from government agencies and stakeholder groups. Lawmakers get an allowance — $118 a day plus food and mileage reimbursements — for the work they do (including study committees), whereas the agencies are expected to absorb the costs in their budgets. Legislative study committees tend to last one year, government studies, however, err toward the perpetual.
Budget and management director Otto Trautz is in charge of compiling each year’s crop of reports and keeping tabs on ongoing reports that are leftover from years past.
“Some reports are critical. Some sit in the corner,” Trautz said. And some simply get overlooked. According to Trautz, agencies are dutiful about completing their reports — it is the law, after all — but some have been long-forgotten by government officials and lawmakers alike.
Trautz compares the recurring reports to kudzu, an invasive vine that’s consumed large tracts of land in the South.
“You hack away at them but they keep coming back.”
The Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) has an especially heavy workload. According to Trautz’s spreadsheet, the Legislature asks ANR for 34 annual reports, in addition to one-time reports that crop up from year to year. They run the gamut from reporting on the number of antlerless deer to the status of electronic waste recycling programs.
Justin Johnson, deputy secretary of ANR, described the task as “significant,” but he didn’t complain. “Whilst it creates work, it also show they are interested in what we are doing.”
Johnson did observe, however, that reports are sometimes borne from the whims of one or two lawmakers, which can make their relevance short-lived. “It’s less clear what all the reports are used for. Sometimes a report is of particular interest to one or two legislators or to legislators in a particular town or involved in a particular issue.”
The Agency of Transportation (AOT) has a lighter load, with 10 ongoing studies on its plate. Two years ago it had about twice that number, but AOT officials have successfully appealed to the Legislature to do away with most of them, according to Chris Cole, director of policy planning and intermodal development at AOT.
AOT’s assignments now only consist of the “bread and butter reports,” Cole said, which provide lawmakers with updates about key thing, such as the condition of culverts throughout the state.
The Legislature does have a procedure in place to prune back its collection of reports. The House and Senate Government Operations Committees usually talk with the other committees’ chairs and collate a list of reports they can live without, which then get repealed in one lump sum piece of legislation.
But the problem remains — lawmakers are inclined to ask for more rather than less, and this force of legislative inertia tends to prolong the lifespan of these reports.
The chair of the House Government Operations Committee, Rep. Donna Sweaney, D-Windsor, said the reports are important for the part-time Legislature because lawmakers can only cram so much into the five-month session.
Still, Sweaney says she sees “a lot of reports that are still on the books that nobody pays attention to.” And each subsequent year, reports surface “on things that are totally ridiculous.”
Next year, the flood of reports will likely dwindle somewhat. The Legislature passed a law in 2009 that establishes a five-year expiration date for all ongoing reports. It came with a five-year delay, so it doesn’t take effect until July 2014 but it’s retroactive, meaning that all reports from 2009 or earlier will be terminated. That puts the ball in the Legislature’s court — rather than taking action to end a study, lawmakers have to take an extra step to keep them in place.
Sweaney said she thinks the new approach is “worth a try,” but she’s not convinced it will weed out the superfluous reports. “There’s always a way we can get around our own laws.”
In this case, the loophole for lawmakers reluctant to relinquish a report is simple — they can simply preface a new report with the phrase “notwithstanding 2 V.S.A. Sec. 20(d) e,” and the five-year expiration date is nullified.
A memo sent by Secretary of Administration Jeb Spaulding to all secretaries and commissioners doesn’t explicitly offer a way out, but it hints at one. “We cannot advise you to ignore any of the current statutory requirements; at the same time, you may feel some old and obsolete reports, that have in fact not been done for many years, can be disregarded and will hopefully be deleted in the next round of legislative repeals.”
A list of the reports can be found here (for full-page view, click on view full-size workbook icon on far right of gray bar at bottom):
