The Vermont House gave preliminary approval to an $8.1 billion state budget on Thursday, advancing a spending plan that invests the last of Vermont’s Covid-relief dollars on housing, climate change, clean water and broadband — and boosts spending in education and human services.
“Employers face inflation and can’t find workers. Price increases are pressing families, particularly those who’ve been on the margins. Fifteen hundred Vermonters, including 500 children, are living in hotels,” House Appropriations Committee Chair Mary Hooper, D-Montpelier, told her colleagues on the floor. “Our challenge is to balance the needs of Vermont and the opportunities created by strong state and federal revenues.”
The spending bill, H.740, was greenlit by lawmakers via voice vote with no discussion after a nearly two-hour presentation from appropriations committee members. It’s scheduled for a final vote in the House on Friday and would then head to the Senate.
In many ways, what’s in the budget reflects broad agreement with Gov. Phil Scott’s administration on major areas of policy. House lawmakers, for example, have basically accepted wholesale a more than $160 million climate action package that leans heavily on weatherization and electric vehicle infrastructure — likewise with a $95 million broadband expansion proposal. To a $72 million clean water plan, they’ve added $35 million.
With a higher baseline of revenues, lawmakers have also been able to make substantial investments in certain long-neglected areas of state government.
The state colleges, for example, would receive $10 million more in annual funding if the appropriations bill were to become law as written — the largest single-year increase seen by the system since it was founded. Vermont’s community-based mental health agencies and home health providers, meanwhile, would get an infusion of cash totaling $38 million.
But what isn’t in the 188-page spending plan sets the stage for a potential showdown with Scott over housing — and signals some areas of disagreement with the Senate.
The Republican governor and the Democrat-controlled House are in agreement over $50 million that would go to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board for mixed-income housing, manufactured homes and improved farmworker and refugee housing.
But Scott has also requested that a housing improvement program get $20 million in one-time funds to help landlords rehab vacant and code-violating properties. In an apparent negotiating tactic, Senate lawmakers have responded by attaching that money to S.210, a consumer protection bill that includes a rental registry — which Scott has vetoed in the past.
The House’s budget bill does not appropriate $20 million for the rental improvement program — doing so would eliminate the Senate’s leverage — but it leaves space on the bottom line for that program to be funded if S.210 makes it over the finish line.
The Senate has also attached a contractor registry — which the governor has also vetoed — to S.226, an omnibus housing bill that includes money Scott would like for a program subsidizing the development of homes for middle-income families.
During a press conference Tuesday, the governor accused lawmakers of playing “political games” and lambasted them for attaching “poison pills” to measures that otherwise enjoyed support from all parties.
In response, Democratic leaders in both chambers released a joint statement, arguing that the addition of the registries should not be construed as “poison pills” but “legitimate policy disagreements.”
“We believe renters and homeowners deserve additional protections, and we must provide those protections even as we seek to accelerate housing development,” wrote House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, and Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, D-Windham.
But while the two chambers appear to be working in lockstep on money for the rental improvement program, the House has set no money aside for the “missing middle” housing program pitched by Scott and backed so far by the Senate.
Also not funded in the House budget: some $100 million in economic development initiatives pitched by the governor.
Scott wants $50 million more for the state’s Capital Investment Program, which was created in 2021 with federal Covid relief money to pay for projects that would attract or retain new businesses and encourage capital investment in Vermont. He also wants $30 million for a similar program for towns with stagnant grand lists and $20 million to dole out forgivable loans to businesses that continue to be impacted by the pandemic.
The senators have advanced a bill that would give $40 million to the capital investment program and $20 million for the loans. The House’s spending plan sets zero aside for all three.
