The House is starting to get its due in the latest Power Lunch, a semi-regular edition of Final Reading where I go deep with Statehouse regulars about anything but politics. (Our inaugural Power Lunch was with Phil “Swiftie” Baruth, followed by crossword puzzler Irene Wrenner).
Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun, D-Westminster, is into mushrooms. Like, really into mushrooms.
No, not the psychedelic kind, she tells me over lunch in a crowded Statehouse cafeteria a few weeks ago. Bos-Lun has a passion for foraging, cultivating and photographing wild mushrooms. Over lunch, she giddily unsheaths a foot from her Dansko clog to reveal her colorful mushroom-patterned sock.
Bos-Lun’s passion for fungi took root during the Covid-19 pandemic. Like the rest of the world in early 2020, she was stuck at home, spending hours every day in the mind-numbing blue glow of Zoom meetings. When the weather softened, Bos-Lun took her dog on daily walks in the woods near her home.
“I just started to notice on this repeated walk on similar trails, that there were all these amazing things that were emerging from the ground,” Bos-Lun said. “Most of my walk is the same every day, or pretty close. There’s a lot of evergreens. There’s a lot of underbrush. But the mushrooms are new and different, and in like, a three-day period, they can change entirely.”
Some wild mushrooms look almost fantastical: “Very striking, very colorful,” Bos-Lun described. “Some of them are golden and sparkly. One day, they will look like an egg, and the next day, they’re red, and the third day, they’re decomposed.”
Bos-Lun began taking photos of her daily mushroom sightings, and posting them on social media pages dedicated to mycography, or mushroom photography. I ask if her phone’s camera roll is full of mushroom pictures and she admits she has “too many.”
“I don’t really know what I’m going to do with them. I thought one day, oh, maybe I’ll make a calendar. But that’s only 12 pictures,” she says. I suggest a collage of photos for every month. She replies, “Honestly, I’ve been a little busy with a few other things.” Fair enough.
Bos-Lun has brought her outdoor passion inside, beginning to cultivate her own mushrooms. She has three logs that are each growing colonies: shitake, lion’s mane and coral tooth.
They’re high-maintenance. Bos-Lun mists her “babies” twice daily. In order to do so during the legislative session — when she rents an apartment in Montpelier to save herself the hours-long daily commute from southern Vermont — she loads up “the kids” in her car, carting them back and forth every week.
Having introduced a bill to establish a Vermont state mushroom, Bos-Lun is publicly known as a mushroom lover, and she has thus connected with constituents and legislators she never would have otherwise. At our cafeteria table, she looks over her shoulder, leans in close and whispers to me the name of a lawmaker with whom she shares few policy opinions. But on mushrooms, they can relate.
“I actually had a legislator tell me that she thinks of the Statehouse as a mushroom,” Bos-Lun says. “The dome is the cap, and then the stem is kind of like the body… it’s the supportive piece. But a lot of the work is in the mycelium. It’s the networks and the connections that happen underneath the surface that really make it possible for everything else to happen.”
“That’s a little bit of a stretch,” Bos-Lun concludes. “But it’s kind of fun.”
— Sarah Mearhoff
Do you know someone you’d like to invite to Power Lunch to discuss their hyper-fixation? Or maybe you have one yourself? Let me know.
On the move
Lawmakers are fast-tracking a bill that would replace a controversial 5% cap on homestead property tax rates with a new tax “discount” on those rates for certain school districts.
The bill, H.850, would scrap the blanket 5% property tax cap originally included in Act 127 and instead give districts a 1 cent discount on homestead property for every percent decrease in their “tax capacity” resulting from Act 127. The discount, only available to districts whose tax rates are adversely affected by that law, would be phased out over five years.
Legislators in the House Ways and Means Committee, where the bill was written, voted unanimously on Friday to sponsor the measure, which now heads to the House Committee on Appropriations for review. An unusual Monday meeting is scheduled for a possible vote, so the bill may see a floor vote early next week.
— Habib Sabet
The Vermont Senate on Friday passed its version of this year’s Budget Adjustment Act, a fiscal plan slated to quickly disperse state aid to flooded municipalities and make a last-minute change to the handling of Vermont’s emergency motel housing program.
After an hourslong debate the day prior on an afterschool program provision in the bill, the upper chamber on Friday voted 25-3 to pass its version of H.839. As Senate lawmakers made substantial changes to the House-passed version, the bill will likely head into conference committee next week, where leaders from the two chambers will hash out their differences. From there, it will go to Gov. Phil Scott’s desk for his signature or veto.
This year’s budget adjustment is the Legislature’s first and fastest opportunity to appropriate meaningful state dollars to Vermont’s recovery efforts after this summer’s historic flooding.
And on Friday, senators scrambled to address the impending end of pandemic-era enhancements to the state’s motel program, with the Senate Appropriations Committee taking in testimony from the state Agency of Human Resources in the half-hour ahead of the upper chamber’s vote on the final version of the bill.
— Sarah Mearhoff
Visit our 2024 Bill tracker for the latest updates on major legislation we are following.
What we’re reading
With property purchase, Northeast Kingdom is one step closer to walk-in mental health urgent care, VTDigger
WRJ postal facility may see mail sorting shifted to Connecticut, Valley News
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified one of the types of mushrooms grown by Bos-Lun.
