This is an excerpt from the Final Reading of Wednesday, March 11. Grace Elletson is VTDigger’s Statehouse correspondent.
A lot was up in the air on Friday when the Vermont Legislature decided it would adjourn until at least March 24 due to growing concerns about the coronavirus.
Since then, a much shorter than usual committee schedule has been set for the Senate while the House has canceled all committee activity. That’s because the House chamber is continuing to work through IT challenges to allow remote committee access for its much larger body, said Katherine Levasseur, chief of staff for the House speaker.
The House will hold two all-member calls this Tuesday and Thursday at 1 p.m. Levasseur said it’s been a challenge to drum up the technical capacity needed to construct a conference call that allows for more than 100 users.
“There are some technology challenges with establishing a line that has capacity for 150 legislators + press & public that we are actively working through,” Levasseur wrote in an email.
Levasseur said she didn’t have an update on how the “big bills” like the budget and transportation bills would proceed forward. That plan will formulate as this week’s business gets worked out first, she said. Lawmakers suspended crossover rules last week so that high-priority legislation wouldn’t get held up by the adjournment.
Most Senate committees are meeting once or twice this week. All meetings have a public number people can dial in to if they want to listen in.
Pro Tem Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden, said that during these committee meetings, lawmakers will primarily be grappling with coronavirus-related concerns including the legislative package passed by the House last week. Some committees will also be taking up some business outside of coronavirus issues.
“It’ll be a combination of fact finding from agencies and determining what the federal government will do for support,” Ashe said, referring to what committees will focus on this week. “And then also what the nature of the executive orders issued by Governor Scott are because some of them are more general.”
By the end of the week, Ashe said leadership will reconvene to determine whether or not the adjournment will go beyond March 24. He said the situation is changing too rapidly to predict if there will be an extension. When the Legislature adjourned on Friday, there were two coronavirus cases confirmed in the state. Now, there are 12.
Ashe said this week will also serve as a test run for a longer period of adjournment, if it becomes necessary. This time will be used to work out kinks in technology so that business can proceed as almost usual.
“My guess is the first five or 10 minutes of almost every one of these calls there’s going to be typical conference call disorder as people figure out the systems,” Ashe said. “And we want to try to get through that if we have to operate this way on an extended basis.”
This is an excerpt of Final Reading. For the full rundown of bills in motion at the Statehouse, the daily legislative calendar and interviews with newsmakers, sign up here for the unabridged version delivered straight to your inbox Tuesday through Friday evenings.
