[N]ow that it’s all over, two questions occur: (1) Was this trip necessary? (2) Who won?
And the answers are: No. And nobody.
The trip being judged here began 37 days ago, when “in accordance with the call for a Special Session by His Excellency, the Governor,” the Legislature convened in special session.
Or five days earlier when Gov. Phil Scott issued a proclamation to “summon the members of the Senate and House of Representatives to meet in their respective chambers …”
Either way, it’s been several weeks of carping, waiting, complaining, waiting, huddling, waiting, plotting, waiting, and more waiting, all of it over … well, over not very much.
Or at least not much that couldn’t have been agreed to weeks ago. That would have saved some money for the taxpayers. It would have saved Scott and the legislative leaders time and energy.
Oh, and some embarrassment. No one, in these weeks of occasional legislative sessions and perpetual bickering, came out a clear winner.
Certainly not Scott. That proclamation called the lawmakers to a special session “for the purpose of providing Vermonters property tax relief through level statewide property tax rates (and) stabilizing the State’s system of education finance.”
What the governor ended up agreeing to was an increase in some statewide property tax rates and minimal changes to the system of education finance. With the old fiscal year waning, Scott appeared to decide that whatever price he had to pay for violating his “no tax increase” mantra, he would pay a bigger one if state government had to shut down Sunday because there would be no state budget at the start of fiscal year 2019.
He didn’t deny it. In a government shutdown, “the focal point would be on me,” he said at his Thursday press conference.
But Scott’s surrender on taxes does not add up to a victory for his Democratic antagonists – House Speaker Mitzi Johnson and Senate President Pro Tem Tim Ashe.
Not so much because they agreed to drop any increase in the residential property tax rate, meaning they may have given up more in raw dollars during the negotiations than Scott did. But more because for most of the special session both legislative houses spent more time in recess than in action.
It isn’t that nothing was done. Committees met and made decisions. The leaders met with their committee chairs and with each other. But taken as a whole, the entire process appeared to be ineffectual.
To the extent that it appeared. Politically, the state’s leaders caught a break; hardly anyone seemed to be paying attention. The Statehouse comings-and-goings were not very interesting and not the least bit entertaining. It’s summer, and to the extent that Vermonters are following public affairs, it was more likely to be the more outlandish (and more incompetent) behavior of the federal government.
The subjects under discussion were not those for which the masses man the barricades. Almost nobody likes higher taxes, but a tax increase that is likely to cost the typical owner of a small business or a vacation camp $100 a year or less is neither going to send anyone into bankruptcy nor agitate the average voter.
Especially because those tax increases were needed because of the school budgets so many of those average voters approved last March.
Even less is that average voter likely to get excited about the idea of paying off some of Vermont’s back debt to its teachers retirement fund. That’s what the Democrats wanted to do with most of the “one-time money” surplus in the state’s coffers. They said making those payments was more fiscally responsible than using most of the money to avoid any property tax increase. They may be right. Does anybody care?
One reason the stalemate lasted so long is that nobody negotiated, at least not until last week when Johnson and Scott worked out a tentative deal that Johnson then had to scuttle after the Senate would not go along.
“They made it known right off the bat that they weren’t going to negotiate with me,” Scott said.
They did, as Ashe acknowledged.
“After what they pulled in private meetings last year,” Ashe said (by email), “we announced at the beginning of the special session that all work would be done in open committee settings for the world to see. … I wanted the Administration to bring attempts at compromise before Senate committees which they never did — they just kept presenting the same thing with different wording. The Governor himself never attempted to draw me into a private negotiation during the special session. I would have declined had he done so.”
That’s not ineffectual. That’s a deliberate strategy. It may have worked. Ashe, though he often appeared recalcitrant, arguably got more of what he wanted out of the session than anyone else. Not just because the budget and tax package ended up close to the Senate’s preferences, but because the process largely followed his (and the Senate’s) way of doing things. The Senate Democratic caucus stayed united, often with support from the Republican minority, and while the final agreement is not identical to the Senate proposal, it comes close.
Whether it needed all those weeks to get done remains an open question.
