Lawmakers are poised to adopt two new mandates requiring wide-scale testing for toxic chemicals in Vermont’s public and private K-12 schools.
The General Assembly created a lead testing program in the state’s schools in 2019, and spent months hashing out the details at length, including timelines, action levels and funding for remediation. But lawmakers barely discussed any testing regimen this session until Senate lawmakers decided two weeks ago to pitch a radon-testing mandate as an amendment to a bill, H.426, requiring a high-level survey of school facilities across the state.
The House countered that it would like to give schools until June 2023 — not January 2023 — to complete radon testing, and that independent schools should also be included. The Senate Education Committee voted on Tuesday to endorse that proposal, and the Senate is expected to vote on the amended bill Wednesday.
Meanwhile, until last week, there remained substantial confusion about the status of another testing program for polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, the manmade toxic chemicals widely found in construction materials. Both the House and Senate omnibus budget bills included $4.5 million for testing at public and private schools, but appeared silent on virtually all other details, including whether the testing would be required.
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Anticipating legislative action on PCBs, Gov. Phil Scott included $4.5 million for testing in the state budget proposal he unveiled in January. But while the House and Senate kept the money in the state budget bills they developed, they never elaborated on what a testing program should look like — including whether tests should be mandatory.
Asked by the media last week why the Senate was pitching a mandate to test for radon but not for PCBs, despite money being available for it, Senate Education chair Brian Campion, D-Bennington, said it appeared to be an oversight. And even though the Legislature was only a week or so away from adjournment, he vowed to find a way to add language making it clear that PCB testing was a requirement.
New language before the committee of conference hashing out a final budget deal between the two chambers now says PCB testing “should be completed by August 2024.” It adds that schools may participate in the program just next year on a voluntary basis.
But the quick-and-dirty work of the session’s last days means that lawmakers will need to return to the subject next year. The budget bill’s new proposed language also says that “additional guidance and authority shall be developed during the 2022 legislative session.”
Bureaucratic and programmatic details aside, legislators will have a much thornier problem to tackle: remediation costs. Regulators have said they expect that Burlington High School, which has been permanently shuttered by the discovery of high levels of PCBs, will be an outlier. But until results start to come in, it’s impossible to know how onerous or expensive remediation will be, whether for radon or PCBs.
“We have some hope that not all schools are going to potentially have concerns. But I mean, we could be talking into the tens of millions of dollars in remediation costs statewide — easily,” Peter Walke, commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, told the House Education Committee on Tuesday. “There are some real logistics challenges with what happens at the back end of this.”
Under the new proposed budget language, schools built or renovated before 1980 would be required to test for PCBs, which were phased out of construction materials at that time. There are about 450 public and private K-12 schools across Vermont, Walke said, and the state estimates two-thirds will be required to test.
The last-minute PCB testing proposal has annoyed Rep. Kate Webb, D-Shelburne, chair of the House Education committee, which spent weeks discussing a facilities bill earlier in this year.
“I’m struggling to find out why we are hearing about this in the last week of the session,” she told Walke on Tuesday. “We dig in in our committee, and I’m really disappointed that we didn’t have an opportunity to take a look at this.”
Campion, the Senate Education chair, acknowledged the proposal’s timing could have been better. But he also argued that what ultimately mattered is that it got done.
“Ideally, sure, we would get things done earlier. But the reality is: This is when it hit us, and we made it a priority and addressed it,” he said.
And, despite Webb’s obvious irritation, she said Tuesday her committee would likely not object to the new budget language.
“I believe it will go through — my current reading,” she said.
