[T]he Vermont Senate passed a resolution Friday that strikes down Gov. Phil Scott’s executive order to merge the Department of Labor and the Agency of Commerce and Community Development.
The resolution, which passed out of committee Tuesday along party lines, passed in a voice vote by the full Senate. The vote was largely along party lines, with Senate Minority Leader Dustin Degree, R-Franklin, vocally challenging the resolution before it was approved.
Scott signed the executive order on Jan. 15 to merge the department and agency into a new Agency of Economic Opportunity. The order could not be amended and would have gone into effect within 90 days of that date if the Senate or House hadn’t voted it down.
Senate Majority Leader Becca Balint, D-Windham, read the resolution on the floor. She said senators agreed with Scott on some of the concepts contained in his executive order and said the Senate Economic Development Committee would work on those ideas in the form of a bill.
Balint said the major disagreement between senators and the governor was whether the same agency that promotes businesses throughout Vermont should also have enforcement powers or whether they should be kept separate.
“The executive order in its current form should not go into effect, however we have strongly articulated … that the committee is committed to taking up many of the proposals outlined in the executive order through the regular committee process,” Balint said.
Degree has been critical of Democrats in the past several weeks for opposing the executive order. He said Jan. 26 that opponents were implying that the Department of Labor did not intend to enforce labor laws the federal government requires them to enforce.
Degree echoed those comments on the Senate floor. “Did (Balint) stand upon the notion that by simply shifting one function in government to another agency, we would be weakening protections that we are statutorily required to administer?” he asked.
Degree challenged Balint to describe what firewall currently exists between the department and the agency. “What firewall exists now that prevents state government from not enforcing legal obligations that we are statutorily required to enforce?” he asked.
Balint said moving the department into the agency echoes the early years of the EB-5 immigrant investor program, in which the Agency of Commerce and Community Development both promoted the program to potential investors and regulated it too.
Degree then asked whether having the commissioner of labor answer to the agency instead of the governor would change anything. “How does that, again … encourage state workers or possibly encourage state workers not to follow the laws that we have to follow?” he asked.
Balint repeated herself: “We saw this within EB-5. It did not work out. It is not our intention to go down that road again.”
The Senate Economic Development Committee has created a committee bill that will contain compromises between Scott and the Senate on workforce development.
