Updated at 8:17 p.m.
Committees of the Vermont House will have nine new leaders this year, including in both of the chamber’s powerful money committees — and a panel that previously handled key environmental bills will no longer exist.
Announcing the new structure and membership Wednesday afternoon, second-term House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, ended a monthslong debate over who would lead in several key policy arenas, after 10 of the House’s 14 standing committee chairs retired last year.
Reps. Diane Lanpher, D-Vergennes, and Emilie Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, will helm the committees that craft Vermont’s most consequential, must-pass legislation, Krowinski announced. Lanpher will chair the House Committee on Appropriations, which helps to draft the state budget, while Kornheiser will chair the House Committee on Ways and Means, which has jurisdiction over tax policy.
Lanpher chaired the House Committee on Transportation during the last biennium and had previously served on Appropriations from 2015 through 2020. Kornheiser was previously vice chair of Ways and Means.
Kornheiser told VTDigger on Wednesday that she believed the pandemic showed the power of what government can do for people.
“I think there’s so many lessons that we learned then that have really upended some of what we previously thought was possible,” Kornheiser said, adding that she was proud of the passage last session of a child tax credit and that she hopes to continue last year’s efforts to rework the corporate tax code.
Kornheiser wants the state’s tax structure to reflect a commitment to equity, she said. “I think about equity in terms of taxation, both in terms of people paying according to their means and that people understand what their responsibilities are.”
In an interview, Lanpher listed her top priorities for Appropriations: “Balanced budget, using one-time funds for one-time uses, making sure our reserves are in good shape,” she said. “Paying attention to the curveballs that will come up, things that we don’t see coming.”
The conversations in money committees this year will be different than in recent sessions; the state has already appropriated funds from federal pandemic relief bills such as the American Rescue Plan Act and is no longer sitting on a multi-million-dollar pile of federal Covid cash.
However, lawmakers can — and will — still exercise oversight over that federal money, Lanpher said, because while it was all appropriated in past sessions, it hasn’t all been spent. She said she plans for the House Appropriations Committee to make adjustments as needed.
Structural changes
Krowinski also unveiled changes to how the committees are structured and what their jurisdictions will be. Military affairs have been moved from the General and Housing Committee to join Government Operations. And the Committee on Natural Resources, Fish and Wildlife, which has typically handled major environmental policies, has been dissolved.
Instead, the former Energy and Technology Committee will expand to include “conservation and development, climate change mitigation, energy, broadband, land resources, air, water, and wildlife, and other similar policies,” according to the House resolution describing the change.
The new committee, chaired by Rep. Amy Sheldon, D-Middlebury, is called the House Committee on Environment and Energy. Sheldon previously chaired Natural Resources.
On the energy side, the new committee plans to take up a bill that would update the Renewable Energy Standard to move the state closer to relying entirely on renewable energy by 2030. Lawmakers also will push forward on an “Affordable Heating Act” — called the clean heat standard last biennium — that would aim to reduce the amount of fossil fuels in Vermont’s heating and cooling sector.
Asked about her priorities, Sheldon named several bills that were discussed last session but didn’t pass — including updates to Act 250, the state’s landmark land use law; a bill that would update the state’s bottle redemption system; and a bill that would require Vermont to conserve 30% of its land by 2030 and 50% of its land by 2050.
Wildlife advocates are also hoping to see new energy around bills that relate to recreational trapping this session.
Rep. Laura Sibilia, I-Dover, who will serve as vice chair of the new Environment and Energy Committee, expressed concerns about the group’s vast jurisdiction. She cited the widespread power outages that occurred in the winter storm last month and said lawmakers have plenty of work to do to promote resilience and plan for climate change.
“Large change of any kind, good or bad, causes stress,” Sibilia said. “I think there’s probably 150 opinions about how it should have been done. I don’t think that this is the way that I would have structured it. However, I’m not speaker, and I’m not looking to be speaker. I appreciate that this was a tough balancing act.”
Sibilia said she’s looking forward to working with the new committee, and hopes that the “very big issues” in its jurisdiction will progress.
Sheldon said she was at ease with the changes to the committee structure.
“We’re really pretty well lined up now with the Senate committee,” she said, pointing to the fact that the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy has a similar jurisdiction. “To the extent that we will still be able to do a deep dive in those areas, more so than they can just because of the actual structure differences, I feel pretty comfortable that we’ll be okay.”
When the House took up the resolution to approve adjustments to its committee structure, Rep. Anne Donahue, R-Northfield, pushed back for more than 20 minutes, peppering House Majority Leader Emily Long, D-Newfane, with questions about committees’ jurisdictions and the language used to designate committee responsibilities.
In particular, Donahue protested a line that described the Health Care committee as responsible for “physical and mental health care.”
“Using this language, resegregating physical and mental health care, is a slap in the face to people with mental health disabilities who have struggled for a unified health system for years,” Donahue said on the floor. She criticized Krowinski for not notifying lawmakers of the changes earlier, nor seeking their input.
Here’s who will chair the House’s money and policy committees (newly named chairs are in bold):
- Agriculture, Food Resiliency and Forestry: Rep. David Durfee, D-Shaftsbury;
- Appropriations: Rep. Diane Lanpher, D-Vergennes;
- Commerce and Economic Development: Rep. Michael Marcotte, R-Coventry;
- Corrections and Institutions: Rep. Alice Emmons, D-Springfield;
- Education: Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall;
- Environment and Energy: Rep. Amy Sheldon, D-Middlebury;
- General and Housing: Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury;
- Government Operations and Military Affairs: Rep. Mike McCarthy, D-St. Albans City;
- Health Care: Rep. Lori Houghton, D-Essex Junction;
- Human Services: Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury;
- Judiciary: Rep. Martin LaLonde, D-South Burlington;
- Transportation: Rep. Sara Coffey, D-Guilford;
- Ways and Means: Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, D/P-Brattleboro.