[S]enate leader Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden, said he will not negotiate with Gov. Phil Scott behind closed doors in their attempts to resolve a $33 million gap in their education finance plans ahead of a special legislative session next week.
Ashe is open, however, to meeting to discuss the “logistics” of next week’s session.
In a letter to the governor on Wednesday, Ashe said talks should take place in House and Senate committees that are open to the public and the press, as opposed to behind closed doors as has been the norm for end-of-session negotiations.
On Tuesday, Scott sent legislative leaders a letter announcing his intention to call a special session next week, after he follows through on threats to veto the budget and a corresponding tax bill.
The governor has said he wants the session to focus exclusively on a $33 million gap in the education fund, which he resolves with the use of one-time money. The House and Senate did not use surplus and other funds to buy down property tax rates and instead used the money to fund reserves, mental health and disability services. The budget and tax bills received overwhelming support in both chambers of the Legislature from Republicans and Democrats on Saturday.
Scott said he hoped to meet with the Senate president pro tem, House Speaker Mitzi Johnson and Republican leaders from both legislative bodies ahead of the special session “to iron out an agreement” they could bring to the Legislature.
But in his Wednesday letter, Ashe told Scott that senators would not meet with him in private to hash out a deal.
“The Senate will conduct its business in a public setting, not behind closed doors,” he wrote. “The Senate is not interested in behind-closed-doors sessions with you and your staff to circumvent the Legislature’s normal processes. Whatever work needs to occur in the special session should be done in House and Senate committees, open to the public and the press.”
Scott told reporters Wednesday that the administration will accept whatever approach lawmakers take to hammering out an agreement.
“We’ll work through whatever process they initiate but my thought was if we could get together and negotiate some items that we could make this a lot easier on everyone,” Scott said. “But whatever process they decide to move forward with, we’ll adhere to.”
The governor has been resolute in his pledge not to raise taxes and fees. He pitched an education funding plan at the end of the session that would harness $58 million of one-time money to buy down property tax rates.
That plan includes special education reform and a statewide teacher health care benefit, which have both been drafted by lawmakers, along with a task force to work with districts to accelerate efforts to consolidate schools and decrease staff size.
Scott has said he believes this will lead to $300 millions in savings, though the Joint Fiscal Office has called these projections into doubt.
In their final money bills, legislative leaders lowered proposed property tax rates by directing almost $10 million in one-time money to the education fund, but not enough for Scott, who says he will only sign on when there is a deal that will keep tax rates perfectly level.
While Scott has said his administration and lawmakers are “very close” to an agreement, it’s still unclear how the parties might settle their differences.
The administration wants to scrap the Legislature’s proposed investment of $34 million to pay off state employee and teacher pension debt and instead use the money to lower tax rates.
But Ashe and House Speaker Mitzi Johnson, D-South Hero, say paying off the debt would lead to $100 million in savings down the road.
“Which represents sound fiscal management — your plan to use $33 million of one-time funds to artificially buy down education tax rates on a credit card, or to use the same amount to pay down our pension debt and save taxpayers $100 million? Your strategy saves $0, the Legislature’s saves $100 million,” Ashe said in his letter to the governor.
Scott said that in reaching an agreement, he’d be open to letting lawmakers use some of the savings accrued from his five-year plan to pay off the pension debts.
“You can utilize some of that to put back into teacher retirement if you want,” Scott said. “That can be part of the negotiation.”
In past years, legislative leaders have regularly met with the governor and his senior officials to work out the contours of money bills ahead of adjournment.
That didn’t happen this year. After Wednesday’s press conference, the governor’s chief of staff, Jason Gibbs told reporters that Ashe canceled “four straight weeks of meetings” with Scott at the end of the legislative session.
“Four weeks, we didn’t see him,” Gibbs said.
In an email, Ashe said Senate leadership canceled two meetings in the last weeks of the session. He said the meetings were not serious policy discussions but rather weekly check-ins, which he canceled because he was “swamped” with the task of finalizing legislation.
“We also initiated a few informal meetings with administration officials to better understand our respective views on education policy,” Ashe wrote. “These were not negotiations of any sort.”