Last Wednesday, Gov. Phil Scott vetoed S.18, a bill that would ban the sale of flavored e-liquids and nicotine products in Vermont.
Since then, the bill has spent a week on the Senate’s action calendar with no movement from senators, raising the question: Did lawmakers have the votes to overturn that veto and pass the bill into law?
On Thursday, the Senate appeared to provide an answer.
In the afternoon, Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth, D-Chittenden Central, announced that the bill would not move forward for an override vote.
“Senators will see on the calendar, as they have for the last few days, S.18, an act relating to banning flavored tobacco products and e-liquids, which was vetoed of course by the governor,” Baruth said on the Senate floor. “It is not our intention to bring that up for an override vote.”
Senate lawmakers passed S.18 last year, and an amended version advanced out of the House last month by a 83-53 vote. The Senate voted 18-11 to approve those amendments a week later.
But overriding a veto requires a two-thirds majority in both chambers. On Thursday, Baruth seemed to admit that those votes had not materialized in the Senate.
All seven Senate Republicans voted against the bill, as did Sens. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, Bobby Starr, D-Orleans, Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, and Tanya Vyhovsky P/D-Chittenden Central. Former Grand Isle Senator Dick Mazza, who resigned Monday, was absent.
The bill was instead sent back to the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare on Thursday, where it was first approved. According to the rules of the Senate, it cannot be further changed there.
The move is a blow to a years-long legislative effort to restrict the sale of flavored vapes and nicotine, with the goal of keeping addictive products out of the hands of children and youth.
Sen. Ginny Lyons, D-Chittenden Southeast, the chair of Senate Health and Welfare Committee and a longtime advocate for restricting flavored tobacco products, expressed disappointment with the move but said she was still assessing her options.
“It doesn’t mean that the concept and some of the important provisions that are in the bill can’t be taken up and put in another bill,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m still sorting out what’s possible.”
— Peter D’Auria
In the know
Members of the House Committee on Ways and Means continued tinkering with legislation on Thursday that would significantly transform education finance over the next three years.
The idea they are considering would transition Vermont to a system in which the state education fund provides districts with a base payment per student. Districts would then be able to raise additional money beyond that if local voters agree to increase homestead property taxes, a process that would still use a statewide grand list.
One development from today: The quickly moving legislation lacks support from four key associations representing school leaders and school board members.
Written testimony submitted by leaders of the Vermont Principals’ Association, Vermont Superintendents Association, Vermont School Boards Association, and Vermont Association of School Business Officials said that their groups “have presented well-informed, expert testimony” on the delivery and cost of education.
“At every turn, we have urged a collaborative, thoughtful and substantive policy approach to addressing the costs of the education system. We don’t believe that the yield bill honors that approach,” they wrote.
The associations predicted that the proposal would lead voters to shoot down more school budgets in the future, a dire possibility for the organizations on the back of this year’s wave of school budget failures.
After a full day of testimony, it also seems less likely the legislation will include any significant cost containment measures for the next fiscal year, which begins in July. Committee members had considered clawing back money from school budgets earmarked for local capital reserve funds, or requiring a return of budget surpluses back to the education fund.
Still on the table: a surcharge on short-term rentals that would be sent to the education fund, at least in the short term.
Ways and Means heard from Austin Davis, a lobbyist for the Lake Champlain Chamber, who said he didn’t expect his organization would “push too hard” against a small surcharge. Legislators are considering a new tax, likely between 1.5% and 3%, with rough revenue estimates anywhere from $6 million to $15 million.
— Ethan Weinstein
A bill moving through the Vermont Legislature this year would create dozens of new positions across the state’s judicial system — and fund them with higher corporate taxes and fees.
The bill, H.880, would support some 70 total positions, many of them new, from prosecutors to IT specialists. It’s meant to give the courts additional resources to tackle a stubborn backlog of thousands of unresolved cases.
But a proposed funding mechanism for those positions — raising taxes on corporate income and increasing the annual fees due on many types of securities offered for sale in the state — has drawn criticism from Republican lawmakers and Gov. Phil Scott.
H.880 is one of three separate bills that the House passed in recent weeks that contain significant policy proposals with new tax revenue attached to cover their multi-million-dollar price tags. But their future in the Senate is unclear.
— Shaun Robinson
It was a big week for tourism in Vermont — maybe the biggest ever, if the state’s preliminary traffic estimates are anything to go by. (Something happened to the sun? Idk.)
State tourism industry leaders leveraged the hype to drum up support for their businesses — hotels, restaurants, theaters and ski areas among them — at the Statehouse on Thursday. Vermont’s tourism sector employs more than 11% of the state’s total workforce and brought in an estimated $3 billion in visitor spending last year, according to data they shared at a press conference.
“The celestial event happened on its own,” said Heather Pelham, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing, drawing laughs from the crowd, but “the success of the day — and I think we can all agree that it was an amazing success of a day for the state — could not have happened (without) all the hard work of all of our partners in tourism and hospitality.”
Industry leaders such as Hans van Wees, general manager of Hotel Vermont in Burlington, urged lawmakers to pass legislation that creates more housing for workers, and to support career and technical education programs to encourage more young people to take jobs in Vermont.
“I’m concerned, together with a lot of my colleagues, about who’s going to follow me and others to take leadership positions in our industry,” van Wees said, pointing to Vermont’s status as one of the oldest states in the country, and how the state’s population is aging rapidly.
The House also read a resolution on the floor Thursday highlighting the importance of tourism to the state. Later in the day, lawmakers made their way to the cafeteria to be wined and dined — literally — by members of the Vermont Specialty Food Association.
According to the association’s website, this “legislative tasting” is “THE MOST highly anticipated event for legislators each year,” and offers “a chance for producers to highlight the importance of grants and funding for their industry.”
— Shaun Robinson
Visit our 2024 Bill tracker for the latest updates on major legislation we are following.
What we’re reading
Vermont Flannel buys Vermont Teddy Bear, fusing 2 prominent companies, VTDigger
Recent catastrophes prompt new thinking about ways to manage Vermont’s flood-prone landscape, Seven Days
$10 billion long Covid ‘moonshot’ is being floated by Bernie Sanders, STAT
