The bag-soaking scandal that catapulted the Vermont House into national headlines last year — and put eyes on the chamber’s internal panel that investigated the incident — has prompted lawmakers to tweak the rules guiding inquiries into their colleagues’ alleged bad behavior.
The full House gave preliminary approval Tuesday to a set of rule changes that would give the highly secretive House Ethics Panel more leeway to describe its work to the public, and the press. It would also require the panel to issue public reports on each of its investigations.
Right now, panel members cannot confirm or deny they’re investigating a complaint, much less share any details about it, said Rep. John Bartholomew, D-Hartland, when he presented the changes included in H.R.6 on the floor Tuesday morning. Bartholomew sits on the House Rules Committee, which unanimously backed the proposal during a hearing late last week.
Those restrictions frustrated the ethics panel last year as news outlets began to cover the tote-dousing snafu, panel chair Rep. Martin LaLonde, D-South Burlington, told VTDigger earlier this year. That prompted LaLonde and his colleagues to consider changing their rules, he said, adding that he hopes they’ll make the panel, which meets in private, more transparent.
(For those who need a brief reminder: Rep. Mary Morrissey, R-Bennington, was caught on video repeatedly pouring water into the bag of her district-mate, now-former Rep. Jim Carroll. The two, it was revealed, had a yearslong feud. Carroll filed a formal complaint about Morrisey’s behavior, and the ethics panel later had both lawmakers undergo “a restorative justice process.”)
The changes in H.R.6 would allow the panel to issue “a brief statement” confirming that it is investigating a complaint or clarifying certain aspects of an ongoing investigation, in the event the matter at hand “is generally known to the public, through independent sources,” (such as the media,) “and the subject matter of the complaint is of broad public interest or speculation.”
The panel could also issue a statement if “public confidence” in the panel’s work “may be threatened because of a lack of information concerning the status of the investigation.”
Another change would require the panel to issue a public report after closing out each investigation that includes a summary of any allegations and how and why the case was disposed of in a given way. Notably, though, the report would not include any information identifying the parties in a case.
H.R.6 is slated for a final vote Wednesday, and its measures would take effect immediately. It only impacts the House Ethics Panel, not the Senate’s version of the same committee.
Senate Ethics Panel Chair Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden-Southeast, said in an interview Tuesday that she and her colleagues were not currently considering similar changes to their procedures — but added that she would be amenable to weighing them in the future.
— Shaun Robinson
In the know
“My crystal ball, I think, has gone to Mars.”
That’s how Kathleen Berk, executive director of the Vermont State Housing Authority, summed up her outlook on how anticipated federal funding cuts could impact the state’s housing programs. Her sentiments were echoed by leaders of other state and state-adjacent agencies who came to the House General and Housing Committee this afternoon to give lawmakers the latest on how the turbulence in Washington might affect Vermont’s acute housing crisis.
The view, they said, is murky. Berk shared that federal funding levels for Section 8 vouchers approved by Congress last month were higher than dire predictions made in January, but will still result in the state housing authority serving about 300 fewer households this year. Nate Formalerie, deputy commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development, shared that federal disaster recovery funding for housing still appears to be on its way here, and employees with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development have still been responsive to state officials in the face of staffing cuts.
But if federal funding streams for affordable housing and rental assistance get slashed in the months to come, the group said, fewer new homes will get built – and homelessness across Vermont will worsen.
“The nightmare is becoming clearer,” said Rep. Leonora Dodge, D-Essex Town.
— Carly Berlin
On the move
Democrats in the Vermont House put forward another key piece of their education reform proposal. A new portion of the House education reform bill approved Tuesday by the chamber’s Ways and Means Committee proposes myriad changes to Vermont’s education finance and property tax systems.
The House is expected to vote later this week on the Ways and Means Committee’s proposal, packaged with the House Education Committee’s work on school district governance.
While Democrats borrowed some concepts from the Scott administration, GOP representatives on the committee voted against the finance changes. And in a Tuesday press conference, House Republicans panned the entire plan for its drawn-out timeline and relative expense compared to Scott’s proposal.
“The longer we push off any kind of change, school districts are left uncertain, and they’re already making cuts,” Rep. Casey Toof, R-St. Albans Town, the House minority leader, said in an interview, questioning Democrats’ willingness to work quickly. “We have to make the tough decisions. We were elected to do that.”
Read more about the House education funding plan here.
— Ethan Weinstein
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And the winners are…
With this year’s NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments coming to an end Monday night, the winners of the annual Statehouse-wide March Madness bracket contests got their time in the spotlight — and some decent-looking trophies — on Tuesday.
In the men’s tournament contest, Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, took home the top prize. Wood had taken some heat in recent weeks after it was revealed that she used one of the online bracket-builder’s autofill options to make her picks, though she contended at Tuesday’s awards ceremony that leveraging the website’s “expert” advice was not against the rules.
On the women’s tournament side, first place went to Rep. Kristi Morris, D-Springfield. Morris told the crowd in the Cedar Creek Room after accepting his prize that he leaned not on professional prognosticators, but on his knowledge from years of coaching girls’ basketball, for his picks.
In the much-discussed group rankings, which were only calculated for the men’s pool, a team of Statehouse building staff, including from the Sergeant-at-Arms’ office, came out on top.
Proceeds from the entry fees for the contest, which tournament organizer Rep. Jim Harrison, R-Chittenden, said totaled more than $500 across both pools, are set to be donated to the nonprofits Jenna’s Promise as well as Prevent Child Abuse Vermont.
As for me, who wrote a newsletter “bragging about his leaderboard rank to the whole world last week,” as Harrison put it in one of his tournament update emails last week, I finished 21st in the men’s pool. I do owe an apology to NBC5’s Stephen Biddix, who ended up finishing above me in the rankings — even after I bemoaned, in said newsletter, that the rest of the press team was dragging me down.
In the end, it was really Duke who let me down!
— Shaun Robinson
