The Vermont House on Friday offered its final blessing to this year’s Budget Adjustment Act, a bill which balances the state budget for the remaining four months of the 2024 fiscal year, ending June 30.
H.839 passed its final hurdle in the lower chamber by an overwhelming 129-9 vote on Friday despite weeks of hot debate over the bill’s flood recovery initiatives, handling of the state’s emergency motel housing program and language regarding who would be eligible for after-school program funding.
Now with both the Senate and House aligned, H.839 can head to Gov. Phil Scott’s desk for his anticipated signature.
A sizable chunk of the spending plan is dedicated to a one-time “life raft” for municipalities affected by last summer’s catastrophic flooding. H.839 includes $23.5 million in general funds dedicated to municipalities “impacted by the July 2023 flooding event.” Municipalities could use the block grant funding at their discretion to fund recovery projects that are otherwise non-reimbursable by the federal government. Plus, the bill also includes another $30 million in match funds required to leverage aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Before the House greenlit the bill Friday morning, Rep. Conor Casey, D-Montpelier, said the state’s capital is “breathing a sigh of relief” thanks to the package. Montpelier suffered more than $1 million in damages and lost revenues in July’s flood, Casey said, and the bill will “provide flexible and immediate relief to fill some of those holes in the aftermath of a disaster.”
“We have miles to go with mitigation, economic development, and helping individuals who have fallen through the cracks,” Casey said. “But today, this is tremendously important to us in helping keep us afloat. We need to keep the lights on in City Hall before we do any of those other things.”
The bill also would make changes to the state’s pandemic-era emergency motel housing program, including by instituting an $80-per-room-per-night rate cap on participating motel owners, whom the state government is paying to shelter Vermonters experiencing homelessness. The last-minute implementation of the rate cap raised alarm bells with housing advocates earlier this week, who worried that motels, dissatisfied with the caps, would opt out of the program entirely and kick out their vulnerable tenants.
But by Friday, after days of negotiations between Vermont’s Agency of Human Services and the motels themselves, House members appeared at ease. The program changes garnered almost no comments on the floor ahead of the final vote.
In a written statement following the House’s vote Friday, Scott said that the state is winding down “the pandemic-era approach” to the motel housing program, and the cap “is an important tool in our work to provide temporary, emergency shelter for our most vulnerable while moving to more permanent solutions.”
“This is going to continue to be a difficult transition, but we’re working to do it in a way that protects those with the greatest needs,” he said.
What did generate some last-minute debate in the House, however, was controversial language in the bill regarding after-school program funding.
A small pot of money in the bill came under fire as lawmakers debated whether $3.5 million in state funds dedicated to after-school programming should flow through public school districts, or whether private and nonprofit programs should be able to directly receive the funding.
Pointing to the aftershock felt in Vermont after a 2022 Supreme Court ruling about private religious schools in Maine, Rep. Laura Sibilia, I-Dover, was one of nine representatives who voted no on the bill Friday. She noted Vermont’s historic reputation for passing first-in-the-nation anti-discrimination legislation, and warned that the Budget Adjustment Act’s language threatened to open the doors to discrimination in after-school programs.
“I’m really sad to say, I believe that we are making a historic mistake in this budget adjustment,” she told her colleagues before casting her vote.
“We have not taken the time for the policy committees to dig in and see how we might fix this,” Sibilia said of the after-school funding concerns. “Instead, we are now linking this exacerbation of this unresolved issue to disaster funding in our BAA.”
