Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire is moving away from a plan to create a two-state paid family leave program with Vermont, a proposal he announced with Gov. Phil Scott at the beginning of the year.
This week, Sununu put his support behind new legislation that would create a voluntary paid family leave insurance program in New Hampshire. But the drafted legislation does not include Vermont.
The two Republican governors pitched the “Twin State” program in January as an alternative to Democratic proposals that would be funded by a mandatory payroll tax.
The program would leverage both state’s combined 18,500 state employees to create an insurance pool that other businesses and employees could join voluntarily.
Scott said Thursday that he hasn’t recently spoken with Sununu about his plans for the joint paid leave plan.
But Scott said that even if New Hampshire doesn’t combine forces with Vermont, the state could still set up a voluntary paid leave program on its own.
Once each state has its own program up and running, he said, they could always bring them together.
“I believe that if they move forward with theirs and we move forward with ours we could merge the two very easily,” Scott said Thursday.
“We can do it on our own, they can do it on their own, but if we combine efforts it will be even more efficient, more economical for everyone.”
Sununu’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
At the time the program was announced, the governors said the cost of the paid leave insurance for state employees would be about $250 a year, and would vary slightly for other participating employers or employees depending on the plans they wanted to offer or enroll in.
Scott said that even if Vermont created a voluntary paid leave program on its own, the costs for participating employers and employees would be about the same as what was announced in January.
The governors only based calculations for the program using about 10,000 employees — the number of state employees in New Hampshire.
The administration says that costs would be comparable even using Vermont’s smaller pool of 8,500 state employees.
The two-state paid leave program received a cool reception from Democrats in Vermont and New Hampshire.
Democrats say that if it isn’t a requirement for all employers and workers to pay into the insurance program, it will see low participation rates.
“We considered the governor’s program in open hearings and we did the math,” said Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury, the chair of the House Military and General Affairs Committee, which wrote paid leave legislation this year.
“And we feel like the program that we put across and that is pretty much on the table right now is far more generous and far more inclusive of far more Vermonters.”
Democrats in the House and Senate could not agree on a paid leave proposal this year.
In April, the House passed a program funded by a mandatory payroll tax that covered employee wages for family and medical leave.
But the Senate changed the bill, making the program mandatory for family leave, but voluntary for medical leave.
While many House Democrats didn’t support the Senate’s bill in the spring, Stevens said he’s willing to work with it in the 2020 session.
“In my opinion what they passed is a bill that I can support,” Stevens said.
“It’s very important to get this legislation on the books so that we start the process of building a program that we can improve over time,” he said.
In 2018, Scott vetoed a paid family leave bill funded by a payroll tax, and has said signaled he would veto another mandatory program.
