[V]ermont’s House Republicans came through for Gov. Phil Scott on Wednesday, upholding his veto of bill aimed at protecting children from toxic chemicals.
Opponents of the bill came four votes short of overriding the veto. Before the vote, House members applauded the return of Rep. David Ainsworth, R-South Royalton, who has been absent from the Legislature this year as a result of ill health.
Ainsworth voted with 50 other Republicans and three independents against the 92 Democrats and Progressives who sought to overturn Scott’s veto. Two Republicans also voted for the bill.
At least 98 representatives would have needed to support S.103 in order to override Scott’s veto; 94 voted to overturn it, 53 voted to sustain the veto, and three were absent.
The Senate voted last week to override the veto by a 22-8 vote, which was again split largely by party, with all seven Senate Republicans joined by a single Democrat in supporting the governor’s position.
The sustained veto in the House led to unusually candid language from environmental advocates.
“The children of Vermont deserve better than what they got from 53 cowardly legislators today,” Paul Burns, director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said in a press release.
“By sustaining this veto, a bare one-third of the House made it harder to protect kids from poisons that might lurk in their toys or other products,” Burns said. “For families concerned about toxic exposures, the fight continues.”
Scott and officials in his administration have given various reasons for his opposition to the bill, including making Vermont less welcoming to manufacturers.
Although Scott supports “clear and robust regulations in this field,” he believed provisions in the bill would “nullify” a working group established in a separate legislation four years ago, Rebecca Kelley, the governor’s spokesperson, said earlier this month.
Scott has also said the bill would hurt the state’s economy, jeopardize jobs, violate the state Constitution and make Vermont “a less friendly place for the manufacturers to locate and sell their products here.”
Republicans knew beforehand that their vote would be construed as either for or against Scott himself, and not as a vote on the contents of the bill, House minority leader Rep. Don Turner, R-Milton, said last week.
Two Republicans did vote to put S.103 into law: Reps. Mary Morrissey and Brian Keefe, both of Bennington County.
Morrissey and Keefe were among the eight members of the Bennington delegation that sent Scott a letter urging him to sign the bill into law.
Bennington County is where hundreds of Vermonters have been poisoned by an industrial pollutant from former Teflon-products manufacturer Chemfab.
That poisoning, which the victims of are still grappling with through legal disputes with Chemfab parent company Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, spurred lawmakers to adopt Act 154 of 2016, which established a working group that made recommendations to prevent future incidents like the one in Bennington.
The provisions contained in S.103, the first piece of legislation put forward as a response to those recommendations, included a few of the 13 items contained in the findings.
S.103 required new residential wells to undergo testing for certain hazardous chemicals, and gave the state’s health commissioner authority to ban hazardous chemicals from children’s toys sold in Vermont when scientific evidence supports such a move.
Another bill, S.197, would put into effect another of that working group’s recommendations by making it easier for Vermonters harmed by toxic pollution to recover damages for their injuries from polluters.
That bill is also opposed by the Scott administration.
