Covid-19, Town Meeting Day, housing, pensions, labor shortages and a constitutional amendment. These are the top priorities Vermont’s legislative leaders say they want to tackle when lawmakers return to Montpelier (or to their webcams) in January.
Covid-19
As it has been for nearly two years, Covid-19 remains at the forefront of everyone’s minds, especially as the Omicron variant drives a furious surge of cases across the country. The highly contagious variant could drive lawmakers to their third consecutive remote session, but regardless of whether they meet in Montpelier or online, the pressure is on to help relieve the pressure being felt by the health care system and all Vermonters.
Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, D-Windham, told VTDigger in an interview this week that legislators plan to vote on a statewide mask mandate for public indoor spaces. But she’s pessimistic about it becoming law, with Republican Gov. Phil Scott pledging several times to veto such a bill, and the Legislature, by Balint’s count, not having the votes to override Scott’s veto.
House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, told VTDigger in a separate interview that a mask mandate would be only one piece of the puzzle and that there are other tools with which to address this latest wave of the virus.
“You need strategies on all different fronts to tackle this,” she said. “Having a statewide mask policy is one thing we can do. Making sure, incentivizing people to get vaccinated… Access to testing… There’s not one thing we could do that’s going to solve this problem. It’s going to be a combination of many things.”
Town Meeting Day
With Town Meeting Day coming in March, Balint said one major priority for legislators to fast-track is a bill to give municipalities clarity on how to adjust the local decision-making process at this stage of the pandemic. The hope had been to hold Town Meeting Day in a somewhat normal fashion this year, but that optimistic plan could prove unsafe depending on how the virus spreads.
Housing
Besides the pandemic, lawmakers in the legislative and executive branches say that when they talk to Vermonters, the No. 1 concern they hear is the state’s housing shortage. Scott has pitched spending another $179 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding on building affordable housing units, and the governor likely will elaborate on the issue in his State of the State address the first week of January.
Krowinski said she hopes the Legislature will reconsider elements of a housing package passed by lawmakers in 2020 that Scott vetoed. Balint said that this year, she anticipates few major disagreements between the governor and Democratic legislative leaders on housing as they hammer out a deal.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of daylight between where the governor is and where we are on housing,” Balint said.
As it stands, the state’s motel program for Vermonters experiencing homelessness is set to expire March 1. Krowinski said she’s eager to see whether Scott will propose an extension of the program.
“I think March isn’t going to be long enough,” she said. “I have serious concerns because it is still very, very cold in March. And I hope we are out of the pandemic, but it doesn’t look quite like we can count on that happening in March.”
Pensions
Pension reform talks were going badly earlier this winter after a blowup on the pension task force revealed key lawmakers and union representatives were still far apart on a plan forward.
But Balint said Tuesday she was optimistic lawmakers might still arrive at an agreement with the Vermont State Employees’ Association and the Vermont-National Education Association this session. Balint said she and Krowinski, as well as other top legislators, including Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, have been meeting with representatives from the state employees’ and teachers’ unions to hash out a potential compromise.
The unions have thus far insisted that any deal include a source of dedicated, ongoing tax revenue — such as marijuana taxes or a wealth surcharge — to pay down the system’s debts year after year. Balint said lawmakers may be willing to go further than the $150 million in one-time money already set aside for pensions once a deal is brokered, potentially dedicating some of the state’s general or education funds on an ongoing basis. But she warned that any agreement that hinges on new tax revenues would face the wrath of Scott’s veto pen and therefore be dead in the water.
“What we’ve been doing in our conversations with the NEA and VSEA is to say, ‘Let us figure out the dedicated money,’” Balint said. “Give us the flexibility of the options.”
Staffing shortages
Even before the coronavirus made landfall, Vermont was staring down a shortage of nurses to care for its rural, aging population. But pandemic burnout has further depleted the ranks of health care workers in the state.
That means hospitals are relying more than ever on much pricier traveling nurses. And while traveling nurses can rake in several times the hourly pay of their peers who are on hospital staffs, Balint said staff nurses can feel burnt out and undervalued. And so the cycle continues.
One solution Balint proposed is for the state to provide more workforce incentives to bring new health care workers into the fold, including offering better pay to the nursing instructors who are also in short supply and are necessary to train the future of the workforce.
The state college system also asked for $10 million in this year’s mid-year budget adjustment to top off a widely popular free tuition program for degrees in critical shortage areas, nursing being one. Balint said she’s in favor of it, calling it “money well spent.”
Any major overhauls to child care are expected to wait until the start of the next biennium when a consultant is scheduled to report back on a proposal for funding reforms. But Balint said lawmakers nevertheless will seek to tackle workforce incentives in the interim.
Proposal 5
Proposal 5, or the Reproductive Liberty Amendment, faces one more legislative hurdle before it goes before Vermont voters in November. Years in the making (but seeing greater momentum than ever as attorneys argue to restrict abortion access before the U.S. Supreme Court), the proposal would amend Vermont’s state constitution to guarantee access to abortion and contraceptive care in the state.
Before the ballots are printed, the proposal has to be approved one more time by the Vermont House. Krowinski said it’s a top priority for the chamber, and she anticipates putting it to a vote in January or early February at the latest.
“This is one step in a very long strategy to ensure that we have reproductive justice in the state,” Krowinski said. “Once we pass Prop 5, it will go to the voters in November. So we have a lot of work to do to make sure that that happens. But now, more than ever, with what’s happening at the Supreme Court, it’s so critical that we keep this process moving.”
