Editor’s note: This commentary is by Rep. Linda Joy Sullivan, of Dorset, a Democrat who represents the Bennington-Rutland District in the Vermont House of Representatives and is a member of the House Committee on Corrections and Institutions.
[S]ome have suggested that the end of this year’s legislative session was marred by embarrassing tumult, intra-party bickering and failure. I have a completely different take.
Unlike last year, when more than a few of my colleagues seemed openly preoccupied with the prospect of advancing bills that would bait a governor’s veto (it being an election year, after all), this session we as a group seemed to focus more on fine tuning legislation introduced to advance important policy objectives. As I wrote several months ago, passing laws on complex subjects is really difficult work, and just “saying no” to pressures to pass feel-good legislation often serves to better the quality of our law-making. I found the floor debates on the legislation we considered, and sometimes passed, more often than not robust and productive, and I especially commend the very hard work of several House committees with which I worked this past year to improve bills so as to achieve not only consensus with the Senate but to actually avoid wasteful veto showdowns with Gov. Phil Scott.
Ultimately, the divisions evidenced at the end of the session, when the House speaker boldly declined to succumb to the Senate’s strategy of blocking passage of an entirely uncontroversial budget in order to force substantive policy concessions by the House, suggest to me not a sign of failure but a harbinger of a more mature Legislature, one whose leaders will likely come to next year’s session with resolve to make necessary concessions in order to achieve compromise and consensus, and with it real progress on issues important to Vermonters.
In an apparent effort at the end of the session to mitigate a public perception of failure, some of my colleagues touted a longish list of our legislative achievements in 2019. I actually found our “accomplishments” this year to be somewhat modest. But keeping with the theme that the task of legislating soundly is difficult work, that’s no condemnation of what we did this past session. Minimum wage will be back next year. So will paid family leave. I supported both in principle but I also saw the need seriously to improve both. I’m thinking that will actually happen in 2020 and we will be better for the six to nine month delay in passage.
If there was any reason to be disappointed it was – and at the risk of oversimplification — in our seeming hesitancy to take on harder projects (we must come up with a plan around our unfunded pension liability and our education financing system needs to be better tuned to avoid the yearly temptation of using the property-tax-sourced fund to meet general fund needs) and in our occasional embrace of illusory easy fixes to our most vexing problems (like setting out to address climate change not by fashioning comprehensive carbon emissions policies and programs – such as those suggested by the administration and by me and some of my colleagues who introduced much more visionary legislation — but by simply increasing taxes so as to increase funding of the Department for Children and Families’ low-income weatherization program).
There were clearly exceptions. We took on hard assignments. We commenced a long look at Act 250 and there are bundles of hard policy questions we will likely be asked to address next year. There was every reason not to try to rush through land use legislation this year. And reason likewise prevailed when we found existing funding sources to help finance the Lake Champlain cleanup over the taxes some advocated we impose on what is one of the most important segments of the Vermont’s future economy and borrowings from the education fund.
In other areas, we squarely and definitively addressed policy questions that needed attention: around securing statutory and constitutional protections of a woman’s reproductive rights; as to responsible gun ownership; as to the adoption of a correctional “good time” system that should better serve the rehabilitative goals of sentencing; around mitigating the catastrophe that has been creeping up on us over the prevalent uses of disposable plastics in the retail industry during the last 50-plus years.
All in, it wasn’t such a bad session after all. I’m looking forward to next year.
