Vermont lawmakers’ attempt this year to reform the centuries-old office of the sheriff has taken another step toward the finish line. On Wednesday morning, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a sheriff reform bill — with significant changes around compensation and transparency compared with the one that the Senate approved.
The House Government Operations and Military Affairs Committee had hammered out the latest version of S.17 with stakeholders, including the Vermont Sheriffs’ Association. The association unanimously supported the bill as currently written, unlike the previous Senate version.
The House version would maintain the sheriffs’ administration fees for managing their departments’ contracts but would add new guidelines. Sheriffs currently have the option of charging an overhead fee of up to 5% of a contract’s value, then adding the full amount or a fraction of it to their own salaries. Whatever’s left is rolled into their department’s budget.
S.17 originally proposed abolishing the administration fee, arguably the most controversial part of the legislation. The Senate Government Operations Committee added it back, but said the funds could not be used to compensate the sheriffs or their employees.
Finally, the Senate allowed the fee to be used for compensation this year and in 2024, under specific circumstances.
Under the House-approved version, if the money were used to compensate the sheriff or other department personnel, the agency would have to follow a forthcoming model policy that would dictate parameters. Willful failure to comply would be regarded as a type of misconduct among state law enforcement officers.
The model policy would be developed by the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs then approved by the Vermont Criminal Justice Council, according to the bill.
The policy could include the circumstances in which sheriffs are allowed to augment their statutory salaries. That might come in the form of pinning sheriffs’ compensation package to that of comparably ranked troopers within the Vermont State Police, who are paid relatively more, said Rep. Mike McCarthy, D-St. Albans City, chair of the House Government Operations and Military Affairs Committee.
“I think that giving them some flexibility with these overhead fees was important,” McCarthy said in an interview Wednesday, when asked how his committee was able to earn the sheriffs’ support for the bill.
To help sheriffs implement this model policy and support them in areas such as budgeting, training and office management, the bill would create the new position of director of sheriffs’ operations in the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs.
According to the House Appropriations Committee, the department currently has a vacant seat that can be converted to the new position so there will be no need for funding infusion.
McCarthy said his committee hopes the position would help professionalize and standardize how the state’s 14 county sheriffs’ offices function.
The bill comes in the wake of multiple scandals in Vermont sheriffs’ departments. Some legislators have described these as symptoms of a lack of oversight and accountability in an elected law enforcement office that can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars from contracts with public and private organizations.
The House version also proposes a new requirement for sheriffs: Every year, they would need to disclose to the state ethics commission their sources of income that exceeds $5,000 — though not the amount — as well as those of their spouses or domestic partners.
The disclosure information would include the name of state-funded boards or bodies where sheriffs serve and any state contract held by them, their spouses or domestic partners.
McCarthy said the Legislature is focusing on the importance of ethical conduct among public officials, as well as transparency with the public.
Windham County Sheriff Mark Anderson, president of the Vermont Sheriffs’ Association, said his group agreed to many concessions on S.17 to earn bipartisan support for the bill.
“As passed unanimously by the House, S.17 introduces new systems of transparency, meaningful reforms and acknowledges the need to study the complexities of the systems that sheriffs operate under,” Anderson said in an email Wednesday, adding that the sheriffs’ association unanimously supported the legislation.
When asked for comment on the House’s amendments to the bill, Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, chair of the Senate Government Operations Committee, said Wednesday she has not yet had time to fully digest the changes.
The legislation, which must go back to the Senate due to the House amendments, will again be taken up by Hardy’s committee on Thursday.
When asked for Gov. Phil Scott’s position on the latest version of S.17, his spokesperson, Jason Maulucci, said the governor has not had the opportunity to review the latest changes to the bill.