A short new section to a 22-page bill focused on retargeting energy efficiency goals has given Senate Republicans what they have been seeking — with increasing insistence — for weeks: the end of any mention of a clean heat standard in Vermont law.
“30 V.S.A. chapter 94 is repealed” was the key phrase added to S.65 that helped it advance with a bipartisan 4-1 vote in the Senate Natural Resources Committee Friday.
Before the addition, the bill’s focus was to reorient the goals of Efficiency Vermont toward reducing climate pollution as opposed to its current mandate, lowering electric demand.
Policy-wise, Sen. Anne Watson, D/P, chair of the committee, said repealing the clean heat standard is “not really a big deal.”
“We’re not moving forward with the clean heat standard at this time,” Watson said in an interview Friday.
The law currently on the books did not actually put a clean heat standard in motion. Rather, it required the state’s Public Utility Commission to flesh out its details and build a policy, like a car that lawmakers could decide to drive out of the parking lot this session.
The goal of the clean heat standard was to reduce carbon emissions that come from heating and cooling buildings in Vermont, which accounts for around 30% of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
But voters had affordability on their minds last November, and they showed it by breaking the Democrat-Progressive supermajority, making any road for the clean heat standard impassable. The car was doomed to remain in the parking lot.
Actually deconstructing the car — or repealing it — would grant Republicans a political win. Only one of its parts, a fuel dealer registry, remains in the bill.
But it also appears Watson has used the repeal language as leverage to advance S.65.
Sen. Scott Beck, R-Caledonia, the Senate minority leader, sits on the Senate Natural Resources Committee and voted yes Friday.
“I think it is a bit of a compromise,” he said. “And Republicans did very, very well in the November elections, but it doesn’t mean that Vermonters want one side or the other to have their way all the time.”
“This is maybe an example of a little more cooperation,” he said.
— Emma Cotton
In the know
Gov. Phil Scott delivered his first veto of the 2025 legislative session over a midyear spending package Friday morning.
The five-term Republican wrote in his veto message that he wants to hold off on increased state spending as state officials anticipate federal funding cuts to key programs. But beyond disagreements over dollar figures, Scott disapproves of the extension the annual budget adjustment bill gives to some unhoused Vermonters living in state-sponsored motel rooms.
The governor said the extension would reverse progress the state had made last year on reforming the program. “After nearly five years of experience, we know this approach is far too expensive and fails our constituents, communities and taxpayers,” Scott wrote.
In response, Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, wrote in a statement on Friday, “We will continue to fight for the unhoused — the most vulnerable, as Governor Scott generally refers to them.”
But Democrats no longer have a clear path to override Scott’s vetoes, after losing their supermajority in the Legislature during last fall’s elections.
Read more about the veto here.
— Carly Berlin
On the move
Lawmakers are trying to make it harder to dox Vermont’s public servants.
Members of the House Committee on Commerce and Economic Activity advanced a bill Friday that seeks to protect the personal information of Vermont judges, public defenders and law enforcement officers, among other public servants.
The bill, H.342, would allow those individuals to request that their personal information — including their home addresses and personal phone numbers — be removed from data broker websites like White Pages and Fastpeoplesearch. Data brokers who don’t comply with such requests within 10 days would be subject to civil penalties.
Advocates said Vermont judges, lawyers and cops receive a flood of personal threats from members of the public each year and argued the bill would help cut down on such incidents.
“We understand as public servants that the public has a certain amount of access to us,” Kim McManus, an attorney with the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs, told lawmakers this week. “We understand that they may be able to find us at our office or our court, but what we’d very much like is for them not to be able to come to our homes.”
— Habib Sabet
The Legislature’s health care committees each voted by wide margins Friday to advance bills that, if implemented in their current form, would bolster the Green Mountain Care Board, a health care regulator, and strengthen the body’s ability to oversee prices, obtain data and make changes to hospital governance.
Broadly speaking, the two bills represent an effort to rein in costs, increase financial transparency and shore up Vermont’s shaky health care institutions, Sen. Ginny Lyons, D-Chittenden Southeast, the chair of the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare, said in an interview Friday.
The bills also reflect what Vermont’s Chief Health Care Advocate Mike Fisher described as an increasing concern about the University of Vermont Health Network’s role in the state health care ecosystem. Read more about the bills here.
— Peter D’Auria
The state panel tasked with reviewing alleged violations of Vermont’s ethical standards for government officials has been at odds with lawmakers over a bill that would limit the panel’s role in reviewing potential misconduct by state leaders.
The House unanimously passed the bill, H.1, on Friday. It would, among other changes, exempt the panels and boards that investigate alleged misconduct by legislators, judges and attorneys from a legal requirement to “consult” with the state ethics commission.
The proposal has faced sharp opposition from the head of the state commission, though, who called it “dangerous to ethics accountability” in an interview this week. Read more about the issues in question here.
— Shaun Robinson
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