Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[I]t wasn’t as bad as it looked.
The 2015 session of the Vermont General Assembly may have begun amidst humiliation, farce and chaos. It may have ended Saturday in a spirit of general dissatisfaction if not actual distaste, with lawmakers thankful only that it was over.
In between, though, it got some stuff done.
In fact, it got at least something done on almost all of the items confronting it when it convened in January – the proposals labeled “must-pass” or top priority by Gov. Peter Shumlin, the legislative leaders, or even the most influential (or at least the most vocal) lobbyists, editorialists and assorted advocates.
It raised some money designed to clean up Lake Champlain (or at least stop the federal government from seizing control of the cleanup effort).
It tinkered with the way public schools will be governed and financed in the future, a tinkering which might (or might not) mean that the costs of running those schools won’t keep going up as fast.
It changed the law on the state’s treatment of abused and neglected children, making the safety of those children a higher priority than reuniting them with birth parents, a policy considered at least partly responsible for the deaths of two toddlers last year.
It passed legislation designed to create more renewable energy and reduce the amount of oil and gas burned by Vermont homes and utilities, though here, too, whether the legislation will have its intended effect is open to debate.
The Legislature even got some stuff done on matters barely discussed last January. It passed one bill ending Vermont’s status as the only state in which the law did not match federal law against convicts possessing firearms, and another that will make it harder for parents to refuse to get their children vaccinated.
And it met its greatest challenge: the $113 million gap between fiscal year 2016’s expenses and the amount of revenue expected under the present tax structure.
Meeting challenges is usually cause for celebration. Not this time. The only way to meet this challenge was to cut government services and programs or change that tax structure by raising taxes.
Or – worst of all – both.
To no one’s surprise and no one’s satisfaction, “both” was the choice. Under the final agreement hashed out Saturday afternoon, taxes will go up by some $29.6 million, much of it through limiting income tax deductions.
That was more tax increase than Shumlin wanted, and as late as Friday night legislative leaders were not sure whether he would veto the tax bill they planned to pass.
The next day, the lawmakers agreed to trim just enough from their spending and revenue plans to provide the governor with the cover he needed to sign onto the plans.
It was one of Shumlin’s lesser setbacks of the session. He began the year a humiliated victor. First, he barely won re-election, the results widely interpreted more as a public distaste for him than support for his Republican opponent, Scott Milne. Then he had been forced to abandon his cherished goal of making Vermont the first state to create a universal health care system.
And because Milne refused to concede, Shumlin had to suffer the indignity of waiting for the Legislature to elect him, since he had won only a plurality of the vote, not a majority.
On top of all that, his inauguration was marred by demonstrators who invaded the House chamber itself and disrupted the ceremony. Altogether, it was an inauspicious start to his third term and his fifth legislative session as governor, a session ending with another gubernatorial retreat.
For all that, Shumlin had a reasonably successful session. With one exception, the Legislature passed at least a version of his major proposals – the Lake Champlain cleanup, the school governance alterations, the renewable energy bill, the child care law.
The water quality bill that passed was less extensive (and expensive) than the governor proposed, and financed differently than he had intended. The education bill was also weaker than the one he wanted.
But that’s democracy. He’s the governor, not the dictator. And if neither bill was as sweeping as he and some advocates (environmentalists, some educators and taxpayers) had hoped, neither one was inconsequential. They are likely to have some impact, and both can be strengthened in the future, if that’s what people choose to do.
“People,” of course, are always the key complicating factor. By all indications, Vermonters are genuinely conflicted about how – or even whether – they want to change the public school system. Consolidating districts and closing some tiny schools might save money. But many teachers, school board members, and rank-and-file voters prefer their smaller schools and districts. In this state, “local control” comes close to being a sacred value.
As to cleaning up the lake and the rivers that flow into it, that costs money, and while polls show most Vermonters – even those outside the Lake Champlain watershed – are willing to spend the money, there is far less agreement on who should be taxed, and how. The proposal Shumlin made in January would have spent almost $15 million to fight pollution. The bill he signed will spend about half as much.
Despite these partial successes, Shumlin ended the session politically weaker than he was a year ago. Lawmakers no longer have to look on him as someone who could probably be governor as long as he chooses. Right now, he appears to be potentially vulnerable to a Democratic primary opponent, should one arise, or to a strong Republican in the general election.
Fortunately for him and his party, except for Lt. Gov. Phil Scott, no strong Republican is in sight, and it is far from certain that Scott will run.
The governor’s biggest failure was in health care. In January, he proposed a payroll tax to raise $90 million a year, which would increase federal assistance by many millions more. The money would go to increase payments to doctors and hospitals for treating Medicaid patients.
The fees that health providers now get for such treatment is often lower than the cost of the treatment. This leads to a “cost shift” which increases almost everybody’s health insurance premiums. Shumlin called this a “hidden tax,” and he appears to be right, but the Legislature never considered his payroll tax. It ended up raising tobacco taxes to finance a mere $3.2 million in additional health care spending, just enough “to keep the lights on” for future changes, in the words of Sen. Claire Ayer, chair of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee.
As if the need to cut programs while raising taxes were not enough of a downer, the last days of the session were haunted by the distressing arrest of Sen. Norm McAllister, a Franklin County Republican, on charges of sexual assault.
No wonder the lawmakers were ready to go home.
Still, they got some stuff done.
Correction: This story originally indicated that a paid sick leave bill had been passed. Only the House passed such a bill; the Senate is expected to take it up in the next session.
