Editor’s note: This article is by John Gregg, of the Valley News, in which it was first published Thursday, May 21, 2015.
[T]he two top leaders of the Vermont Legislature are pleased with measures that passed this session.
House Speaker Shap Smith, D-Morrisville, said that resolving a budget gap with a mix of cuts and new revenue and passage of a clean water bill, renewable energy legislation and a school governance measure all set the stage for important improvements.
“I think those are pretty dramatic moves, and this session, from my perspective, was one that was less about the glamorous issues and more about just rolling up our sleeves and trying to address some of the long-term structural challenges that we have in a real way,” Smith said in a phone interview this week. “That made it a difficult session, because some of these issues are so deep and difficult.”
The education bill, which is intended to push many of the state’s 277 school districts to merge so that they have at least 900 students, will also lead to savings down the road, he said.
“You don’t ever want to over-promise on that, but there are going to be larger districts, and you won’t need necessarily as many superintendents and business officers and things like that, so I think there will be cost savings over time,” Smith said.
Senate President Pro Tempore John Campbell, D-Quechee, said the school governance bill will “bend the curve” on the growth in school budgets. Next year, Campbell said, he wants to tackle school spending and also consider whether some nonprofit organizations, such as Middlebury College, should remain tax exempt or should be required to pay substantial property taxes into the education fund.
One group that has criticized the education bill is the progressive, Montpelier-based Public Assets Institute, where analyst Jack Hoffman says about 150 school districts may have to keep their per-pupil spending growth under the inflation rate in fiscal year 2017 or face some new tax penalties.
“Nobody can predict what people are going to do with their school budgets next year, but my strong hunch is this is going to end up raising property taxes in many communities, and this is just a contradiction in terms,” Hoffman said.
For his part, Smith said changes were needed to protect Vermonters who are concerned about their tax burden, and that “doing nothing was not an option.”
“We were trying to put some restraints on the rate of growth,” Smith said. “You can’t get the tax rate under control unless you get the amount that is being spent under control.”
Campbell, who is now working on sexual assault and homicide cases as a part-time prosecutor in the Windsor County State’s Attorney’s Office, said he is especially proud of legislation he helped muscle through the Legislature to help keep guns away from many convicted felons and from people with a mental illness who are found to be a danger to themselves or others.
“It was a tough subject, but we got it through. There was a lot of political capital spent, but it was worth it,” said Campbell. He acknowledged he had felt slighted that Gov. Peter Shumlin, a fellow Democrat and former Senate colleague, had signed the gun bill in private, without even telling Campbell ahead of time.
“I was very cold to him for awhile, and he asked for a meeting, and we hashed it out, and got it on the table,” Campbell said.
