Since 1997, Andrew Mikell has advocated that Vermont modernize its land records system.
An attorney and state manager for Vermont Attorneys Title Corporation, Mikell believes the state should either create a centralized land records system or establish uniform standards for towns. Vermont is one of just three states that keeps deeds town by town, he said.
Over the past 25 years, the Vermont Legislature has commissioned nine reports on the issue. This year, in the bill H.512, lawmakers requested a tenth.
This practice of incessant studying is “the poster child of inefficiency,” Mikell told VTDigger. He has testified or served on the study committee for several of the nine previous government reports.
Delayed political action has real consequences for consumers, Mikell said. For someone seeking to buy property in Vermont, title searches take longer, increasing buyers’ legal fees. Delays during a title search — particularly if a town clerk has limited hours or closes the office unexpectedly — can prevent buyers from locking in a lower interest rate, increasing costs over the life of their mortgage, according to Mikell.
“I’m totally discouraged,” he said. “I think the system we have will be the system we have forever.”
The report on record-keeping is just one of nearly 100 new studies requested by the Vermont Legislature this session. Some of those will be performed by new study committees, and the rest will fall to state agencies or existing study committees.
VTDigger analyzed all 133 bills that passed the Legislature this session and created a list of all new reports and committees by searching for keywords, including “task force,” “working group,” “council” and “findings.” The Legislature commissioned 99 additional reports and created 31 new fact-finding panels.
Some bills have yet to reach Gov. Phil Scott’s desk and may not necessarily be enacted into law, and others Scott has already vetoed.
This list excludes requests for oral reports, interim findings or straightforward datasets.
Some bills call for multiple studies. This year’s omnibus economic development bill, for example, requests nine studies or reports. Topics range from how to regulate sports betting — another perennial study topic — to a “history of state efforts to cultivate the film and media industry.”
These studies will add to each state agency’s pile of recurring reports. Bills from this session will also expand Vermont’s roster of 243 existing boards, task forces and study committees, according to a 2021 tally by state archivist Tanya Marshall. Those boards collectively had more than 2,300 members.
Some, such as the Green Mountain Care Board or the State Board of Education, have muscular regulatory power. Others are narrower in focus, such as the Maple Advisory Board, the Groundwater Coordinating Committee, the Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, the Birth Information Network Advisory Committee and the Large Farm Operations Advisory Group. Panels created by the Legislature usually culminate in a report.
Vermont lawmakers even created a committee to quantify and manage the hundreds of study committees: the Sunset Advisory Commission.
Until a few years ago, no state entity kept a list of Vermont’s many boards and panels and commissions. Otto Trautz, who served as the state budget director for decades before his death in 2020, took it upon himself to list these fact-finding bodies in a spreadsheet, as a sort of passion project. The Sunset Advisory Commission, formed in 2018, based its work on Trautz’s list.
The number of study committees “was totally out of control,” said Rep. Rob LaClair, R-Barre Town, who serves on the body.
The commission reviews the list of committees each year and helps develop bills to close out, or “sunset,” those that have concluded their work.
But this pruning effort is quickly outpaced by the creation of new committees. This year, the Legislature dissolved six, but created 31 more.
“Based on legislative actions, we’ll actually be losing ground,” said Matthew Krauss of Stowe, who also serves on the Sunset Advisory Commission.
The Legislature’s website lists both annual and one-off reports submitted to lawmakers over the past few years. A VTDigger analysis shows that the number of reports rose sharply from 2011 to 2016, peaking at around 300.
Similar bill-by-bill analyses in recent years suggest this year’s load of new reports is hardly unusual. A 2013 VTDigger analysis found lawmakers asked for 133 new reports. And a 2017 Seven Days story found that the Legislature ordered 68 new reports.
Some of these study committees and subsequent reports lead to policy change, and landmark pieces of legislation are often preceded by a study or working group. Conor Kennedy, chief of staff to House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, said last year’s task force and report on state pensions was critical to this year’s pension reform bill, S.286, which became law last month.
But other reports are lost to the ether.
In another bill this year, the Legislature created a working group to study alternative governance models for the Burlington airport. The bill’s language acknowledges that the issue has been studied before and instructs the working group to review previous reports on the topic dating back to 1985.
Legislative leadership asked committee chairs to use requests for reports “judiciously” this session, said Carolyn Wesley, chief of staff to Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, D-Windham.
“Sen. Balint recognizes the value of legislative studies and task forces to expand the capacity and expertise of Vermont's citizen legislature. At their best, like last year's task force on pensions, they get all relevant stakeholders around a table to come up with solutions that result in stronger legislation,” Wesley said in an email. “They also take up legislative and staff time and resources in the off season.”
She added that several proposed reports were ultimately removed from bills throughout this session.
Unknown costs
Lawmakers commission reports for various reasons. Some reports require the executive branch to show how money was spent or how laws were implemented: For example, S.100, the bill that created a universal school meals program, also requires the Agency of Education to report back next year on how many students used the program.
These reports can be simple datasets, but they are important for legislators’ due diligence, said Sen. Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Once lawmakers appropriate public money, they want to see how that money is spent.
Other studies solicit specific policy proposals. For example, the Legislature set aside $50,000 to hire a private contractor to look at privatizing Vermont’s liquor market.
But others are a way to postpone decision-making on controversial issues.
The biggest law enforcement reform bills this session — ending qualified immunity, decriminalizing drugs — now just create working groups to study those proposals.
This year’s opioid response bill, H.728, created a working group to study the feasibility of opening overdose prevention sites, where people can use illicit drugs with medical supervision. The working group’s report will be the third major, public study on the issue in the past five years.
“Sometimes a study is a way of keeping an issue open for future deliberation if you can't make a decision at that particular time,” Kitchel said. “Sometimes a study is simply a way of kicking the can down the road.”
Nobody really knows how much these reports and study committees cost the state, said Krauss, the Sunset Advisory Committee member.
Most legislative panels include lawmakers, state agency employees and stakeholders from the general public. Lawmakers receive $155 per day, plus food costs and mileage, for their work on study committees. Members of the public get per diem stipends, usually $50 per day. Per diem expenses are not broken out in agency budgets, Krauss said, though he plans to push for that in the next budget cycle.
Krauss served two terms each in the Vermont House and Senate between 1988 and 1996. During that time he noticed potential for abuse: The people who create study committees can also serve on them, meaning they could create their own opportunities for additional work, paid for using public funds.
“In the past, in my time, some of [the committees] were created to provide a few extra dollars for legislators who weren’t fully employed, and would serve on a board or a panel to make a few extra dollars,” Krauss said.
Kennedy contested this characterization. He noted that lawmakers would probably earn more money returning to a job outside the Statehouse than the daily stipends provided for serving on study panels.
“Most legislative members had such a grueling session that not everyone is jumping up and down to be appointed to one of these committees,” Kennedy said.
But aside from the explicit per diem costs, there are the harder-to-calculate costs of state employees’ labor. State employees are not reimbursed separately for their time spent on legislative reports or study committees; it just comes out of their time they’d spend on other normal tasks.
“All of this — it is a significant burden on staff,” said Julie Moore, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. “And it directly competes with the time we have available to provide direct service to Vermonters.” Lawmakers tasked the agency with seven additional reports this year.
The Agency of Education requested — and received — an additional legislative affairs and communications position this year, mostly to manage study requests from the Legislature, said Ted Fisher, the agency’s director of communications and legislative affairs.
Moore and Fisher each estimated that their agencies are required to produce 10 to 15 annual reports, in addition to new requests in any given year.
Moore described it as a “death of a thousand cuts.” Nobody thinks their one request for information is a significant drain on state resources. But the cumulative impact is significant, Moore said.
The Agency of Natural Resources has asked lawmakers to lighten the demand for reports, with mixed results, according to Moore. In 2019, the agency consolidated several required reports and turned others into forms. The agency also retooled some required reports to make them readable for lay audiences — in hopes that they could serve double-duty as a public communications tool.
The reports “were not getting the utilization, generally, that would have been commensurate with the level of effort required to produce them,” Moore said. “I honestly think many of them aren't read.”
LaClair said some study committee members, after concluding their reports, have expressed frustration that their work was for naught.
“Quite often, I know I've heard people say, ‘well, that's kind of a waste of my time because you didn't take any of our suggestions,’” LaClair said. “‘You just went off and did whatever you wanted to do.’”
Kitchel joked that when she sees a request for a report in a bill, she wants to add a rule stating whoever asked for the study is required to read it.
“I think it's something that we need to be much more conscious of, and it's just like when we're doing appropriations: Is this where you put your first dollar? Is this where you want to use staffing resources?” Kitchel said. “It's not very sexy, but it's fundamental. It's priority setting.”
