IN APRIL 22’S FINAL READING:
Much is still up in the air as the Legislature chugs forward with its work in a remote capacity during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Among those items is lawmaker pay — House and Senate leadership are trying to figure out whether representatives and senators will continue to get a paycheck if the session needs to continue past its typical closure in late May or early June.
If that is the case, “We likely will not be continuing with the current weekly pay through the end of June,” said Senate Pro Tem Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden. “But we haven’t yet made a decision about how that’s going to work.” He said payments might be cut down or paused completely.
As budgets tightened across the state due to Covid-19 impacts, the Legislature can’t afford to keep dishing out $700 a week in paychecks to lawmakers, even if work continues, Ashe said. Vermont lawmakers make about $14,000 a year.
In addition to salaries, lawmakers receive per diem funds they can claim weekly for daily meals, gas mileage or housing costs. Some lawmakers have raised eyebrows in the past for taking advantage of these allowances.
Ashe and House Speaker Chief of Staff Katherine Levasseur confirmed that both House and Senate lawmakers are not collecting per diem allowances — unless they have a lease on a home in Montpelier that they can’t break, but aren’t using, as they work from home. In that case, lawmakers are only being allowed two nights a week of per diem housing allowance to cover the lease.
While effects from the pandemic are rapidly changing the work of lawmakers, there is an agreed-upon plan between the House and the Senate about how the General Assembly will proceed for the months ahead, Ashe said.
The biggest roadblock is the budget. Because lawmakers are just getting a preliminary financial picture of how hard Covid-19 will hit the state’s finances, a fiscal year 2021 budget can’t be done in one big bill. Ashe said the first step is passing a budget in May to take care of the remaining fiscal year’s budget.
Then the body will likely pass a second budget to address the first three months of fiscal year 2021, which starts in July. The Legislature will hit pause until August, when it will reconvene to pass the full fiscal year 2021 budget, Ashe said.
The staggered legislative budget process outside of the normal session will likely continue, said Rep. Lucy Rogers, D-Waterville. She recommended that lawmakers on the money committees receive a per diem rate.
As for other Statehouse employees, the capitol cafeteria workers employed by food provider The Abbey Group have been laid off, confirmed Bob Hildebrand, Washington County food service director for The Abbey Group.
When the Statehouse shut down and daily business stopped flowing into the cafeteria, Hildebrand laid off six employees so they could collect unemployment. All have been offered employment elsewhere in the company.
Sergeant at Arms Janet Miller said the only people still working at the Statehouse are the janitorial staff, who come in for periodic shifts, and the capitol police. She’s been able to work from home.
Otherwise, Miller said, “It’s kind of eerie and quiet.”
– Grace Elletson
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.
