[A] key committee has advised the full Senate to vote down Gov. Phil Scott’s executive order that would place the Department of Labor into the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, which would then be renamed the Agency of Economic Opportunity.
The Senate Economic Development Committee voted 4 to 1 against the order Tuesday. Instead of approving the order, the panel passed a resolution asking the Scott administration to propose a bill that would “foster a more coherent workforce development system in Vermont.”
Scott signed the executive order Jan. 15, and either the House or Senate can block it by voting it down within 90 days. Lawmakers do not have the option of amending the order, and the committee says it received conflicting opinions on whether Scott could rescind it.
Vermont law allows a governor to propose changes to state government in the form of an executive order by Jan. 15. Scott issued a memo Jan. 13, telling his staff that three executive orders would be coming.
“It really was almost unfair for any administration to have to be put in the bind of meeting the statutory requirement of meeting Jan. 15 because it’s hard to vet anything in such a compressed time period,” said Sen. Kevin Mullin, R-Rutland, the chair of the committee.
Earlier Tuesday, Mike Schirling, the secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, said the governor wanted the committee to keep the executive order essentially pinned to the wall “as a placeholder” while a compromise was worked out in the form of legislation.
But Sen. Michael Sirotkin, D-Chittenden, a vocal opponent of the proposed merger, pushed for the vote to be held as soon as possible so the order would not go into effect before a replacement bill passed.
“The executive order, given that we’re all in agreement here, it’s going to have to be rejected,” Sirotkin said. “I think we’re dancing around the issue at this point.”
Mullin and Sen. Philip Baruth, D/P-Chittenden, agreed with Sirotkin.
Baruth told Schirling: “We’ve drafted a resolution that really bends over backwards to be collaborative. … But this would be the fourth time we’ve delayed the vote.”
The committee most recently postponed the vote from Friday to Tuesday, after Mullin spoke with administration officials and asked them to come back Tuesday with a new proposal.
Later in the day, Mullin, the only Republican on the committee, was also the only one who didn’t vote to reject the order. Before the vote, he stressed that the committee agrees with “90 percent of the thought process” that went into the executive order and that “we are united with the governor.”
Mullin said he has been working on a bill since Friday to reorganize the Department of Labor in a way different from the executive order. He said he voted the way he did because he would have preferred to hold the vote after he introduced the bill, which is in a processing stage.
Senate Majority Leader Becca Balint, D-Windham, sits on the committee. She said of the vote: “We felt like having the executive order hang out there, we would essentially be signaling to everybody that it was a possibility that it would pass.”
The alternative proposal
Schirling and Lindsay Kurrle, the labor commissioner, have proposed an alternative that would maintain a separate but reduced Department of Labor.
However, Schirling said the proposal should not be considered a “pitch” but “a starting point for work on a bill.”
Under their proposal, the Department of Labor’s chairlift safety programs would be moved to the Department of Public Safety, and the workforce development division would merge into the agency’s Department of Economic Development.
The Department of Labor would have about 200 employees, as opposed to the current 300, under the new proposal. About 90 would move over to the agency, and a handful would move to the Department of Public Safety.
Schirling said Vermont has at least 54 different workforce development programs across state government, and creating the new Department of Economic and Workforce Development would help merge several of them.
