This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin and Vermont Public reporter Liam Elder-Connors, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
In February 2025, Steve Dolgin, a prominent Northeast Kingdom landlord, appeared on a large Zoom screen in a committee room at the Vermont Statehouse. He was there with a message: It takes too long to evict tenants when they fall behind on rent, and lawmakers should do something about it.
“We must drastically shorten the time it takes to evict the non-paying tenants from our apartments,” he told the members of the House Committee on General and Housing.
Among them was one particularly sympathetic legislator: his wife, Rep. Debbie Dolgin, R-St. Johnsbury, then in her first year of service. She is a joint owner of the family’s rental business, according to campaign financial disclosure filings, and keeps the company’s books. Steve is the property manager.
Rep. Dolgin acknowledged the connection. “Yes, this is my husband,” she told her fellow lawmakers at the start of Steve’s testimony, to chuckles.
Steve recounted to the committee a series of tenant horror stories. Renters facing eviction from his apartments have smashed cabinets and punched holes in doors, ripped up the floors, and kept piles of trash inside as their cases dragged on in court for months, he said. In the meantime, he must keep up with mortgage payments, taxes and utilities, and cover attorney’s fees, he said.
Rep. Dolgin mostly stayed quiet during Steve’s remarks that February day. But early this year, she introduced a bill that would do precisely as he asked. It would cut down the length of time a landlord needs to give a tenant notice before evicting them for nonpayment of rent from two weeks to three days, and would similarly shorten timeframes for evictions involving lease violations or criminal activity.
The bill Rep. Dolgin put forward has not advanced; many bills introduced by rank-and-file legislators never go anywhere. But the balance of landlord-tenant law has been a central focus for her committee this year, and she regularly offered her expertise in hearings as the committee crafted a separate bill that would shorten eviction proceedings – albeit less dramatically than what the Dolgins sought. That bill passed the House in March and is currently working its way through the Senate.
Rep. Dolgin’s involvement in shaping landlord-tenant laws illustrates how Vermont’s part-time legislators can influence policies that stand to benefit their lives outside the Statehouse.
At least 17 Vermont legislators or their spouses earn money by renting property, according to financial disclosures, or about 9% of all members.
Court records show that the Dolgins are persistent in their pursuit of unpaid rent and damages from tenants. For years, they brought cases before an assistant judge who issued arrest warrants for their tenants – until the judge resigned following accusations that the issuing of the warrants was unlawful.
After Rep. Dolgin won her seat, she specifically asked to work on housing policy, she said in a recent interview. She said she felt her committee dismissed Steve’s testimony last year, so she resolved to keep pressing her cause.
“What my husband and I wanted was to have someone in this committee to stick up for the landlord,” she said. “Our outdated landlord laws are unbalanced.”
Rep. Dolgin views her background as an asset and not a liability.
“I see it as a bonus to have real life experience,” she said.
Pursuing debtors
Imprisoning people for unpaid debts was outlawed in Vermont nearly 200 years ago. But in Caledonia County for more than two decades, former assistant judge Roy Vance issued hundreds of arrest warrants in small claims court for people who missed hearings or failed to make payments on their debt, Vermont Public reported in 2019.
Court records show the Dolgins would bring cases before Vance to pursue tenants who owed them back rent or to pay for repairs to alleged apartment damage. If a tenant didn’t pay up, Vance would issue an arrest warrant. Sometimes, Steve Dolgin, who represented himself in court, would ask Vance to issue a warrant, according to court records. The connection between Vance and the Dolgins has not been previously reported.
It’s unclear from the court records if any of the Dolgins’ tenants were ever arrested. The warrants included a “purge” fee a tenant could pay to cancel the order.
“It seemed like Steve Dolgin and Roy Vance really were working hand in glove,” said Jay Diaz, a former attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont who investigated Vance. Vance would issue the warrants without holding a contempt hearing or determining if debtors had the ability to pay, which are both required under court processes, Diaz said.
Vance, in support of Steve Dolgin, was “really just running roughshod over people who were none the wiser because they were low-income, people with no attorney and no way to push back,” Diaz said.
Vance resigned from the bench in 2019 after Vermont Legal Aid and the ACLU of Vermont raised their concerns to the Vermont Judiciary and an oversight panel determined he violated the judicial code of conduct. Vance, who died earlier this year, told Vermont Public in 2019 that he didn’t know what he was doing was wrong.
Steve Dolgin, in an interview, said he was surprised when Vance got into trouble for the arrest warrants.
“I don’t have any legal background, other than on the job training, if you will,” he said. “But I was shocked, as everybody. I had no clue.”
Steve said he used small claims court because it was the cheapest legal process to get money from tenants. He said that being a landlord is no different than being any kind of business owner who wants to protect their investment.
“If…you catch somebody, you know, damaging your property, what are you going to do about it?” Steve said. “If you don’t go after them … the message gets spread: ‘Hey, you can go to Smith real estate and live there for free.’ And you just don’t want to do that, especially when you’re in a small town.”
Taking risks
The Dolgins own about three dozen rental units in the Northeast Kingdom, most of them in St. Johnsbury. The couple also own a local boat dock company. Steve is a popular waterski instructor and Rep. Dolgin is an avid quilter, according to her legislative biography.
Steve describes himself as a “risk taker” when it comes to choosing tenants. He does not require credit checks as part of an application, he said, and regularly rents to people who have been homeless and had previous issues with landlords. He has even re-rented to tenants he has previously evicted, he said.
That risk-taking has exposed the business to tenants who use drugs and cause extensive damage to properties, he said.
“I don’t really know of that many landlords that have the level that I have for experience in dealing with the dark side,” he said.
In some cases, the behavior of the Dolgins’ tenants matches up with patterns Steve described to the housing committee last year. The Dolgins submitted evidence to court showing that tenants missed payments and caused damage to their apartments, and, in some instances, tenants have not denied those claims.
But in others, the court has found that the damages the landlords asked for weren’t fully backed up by evidence. Still, judges regularly issue judgments on the Dolgins’ former tenants totalling thousands of dollars. Those judgments can balloon over time: the state’s legal interest rate is 12%, almost twice the going rate for a 30-year mortgage.
At the same time that the Dolgins have attempted to recoup thousands of dollars from their tenants, prospective renters and prior tenants have sued them for holding onto their deposits.
In one such case, a maintenance employee at a local hotel told the court that Steve pressured her into paying a $750 deposit when she toured an apartment, which she ultimately decided not to rent because she wasn’t happy with the cleanliness of the place. She wrote in a court filing that Steve returned $250 but still owed her the remainder. The court ultimately dropped the case after the prospective renter failed to file additional paperwork. (Steve Dolgin said he always clearly communicates that deposits he takes to hold apartments for prospective tenants are nonrefundable.)
Meanwhile, health and safety issues have arisen at the Dolgins’ properties. Tenants have told the court that their units lacked proper heating in the middle of winter, were infested with bed bugs, and had persistent water leaks.
“Over more than two decades, Vermont Legal Aid has been contacted by tenants in 111 disputes involving Steve Dolgin, many of them involving serious repair problems and eviction proceedings,” said Legal Aid attorney Maryellen Griffin in a statement. Legal Aid declined to answer additional questions about the organization’s involvement with the Dolgins.
Steve described the upkeep of the family’s properties as “top shape.” Kresten Sterling, the code compliance officer for St. Johnsbury, said he has not encountered severe habitability issues in the Dolgins’ rentals, and the family has been quick to remediate problems he has flagged.
Several recent tenants of the Dolgins reached by Vermont Public/VTDigger declined to speak publicly.
Judges have not issued arrest warrants in recent cases involving the Dolgins, a review of 19 court cases since 2020 shows. But the Dolgins still pursue damages from tenants who have told the court they work low-wage jobs and are struggling to make ends meet – sometimes over the course of many years.
In Vermont, small claims judgments are good for eight years, but if the defendant hasn’t paid in full over that time period, the plaintiff can file to renew the judgment – something the Dolgins have occasionally done. Last month, they filed a complaint attempting to collect over $6,000 in damages and fees from tenants they had evicted in 2018 for not paying rent.
Steve Dolgin said that many other landlords walk away from pursuing damages from tenants, given the effort it takes to track cases over time. Rep. Dolgin said it’s impossible to know how tenants’ lives have changed in the intervening years.
“What if they win the lottery?” she said. “Then they could pay it off.”
Not a monolith
Rep. Marc Mihaly, D-Calais, chair of the housing committee that Rep. Dolgin serves on, said he did not know much about her family’s track record as landlords and declined to comment on specific aspects of their past actions.
He does not view Rep. Dolgin’s involvement in shaping landlord-tenant law as a conflict of interest. In Vermont’s citizen Legislature, lawmakers have a choice to either reveal their potential conflicts of interest or recuse themselves from decisions that might directly impact their lives outside the Statehouse, he said. The former option is the path most taken.
“Debbie was always very upfront with her experience, and in fact, would talk about her experience just as people who are on our committee who were tenants would talk about being tenants,” Mihaly said. She did not have outsized influence among committee members, he said.
The landlord-tenant bill the committee ultimately advanced, H.772, passed the full House last month and is currently winding through the Senate. While it contains benefits for tenants – like longer timeframes when a landlord ends a lease for no cause, plus limits on what landlords can charge for a security deposit and how often they can increase rents – advocates for renters have argued that its hastened eviction process for cases where tenants are at fault would increase homelessness.
Meanwhile, Vermont’s large nonprofit affordable housing providers have backed the bill, arguing that its provisions to expedite evictions for people who are threatening the safety of others on their properties would help them protect the bulk of their tenants from the harmful actions of a few.
Lawmakers with ties to landlords are not a political monolith on the bill. Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, serves as Senate majority leader, chairs the chamber’s ethics panel and sits on its housing committee. She is also married to Jacob Hinsdale, property manager for the large Chittenden County landlord Hinsdale Properties. She doesn’t favor the version of the bill that passed the House, which she thinks would hurt many renters.
“I almost can’t be silent, because the silence might say more than my words do,” Ram Hinsdale said in a recent interview, emphasizing how her childhood experiences with housing insecurity have shaped her views. “The silence would be to let a bill pass that I think is very punitive to tenants in Vermont.”
Ram Hinsdale thinks the bill would likely not solve the problems that both landlords and tenants are seeking to fix. She would rather see lawmakers explore a dedicated court docket or board for mediating landlord-tenant disputes on a case-by-case basis.
Rep. Dolgin, on the other hand, thinks the bill does not go far enough to rebalance Vermont’s rental laws towards landlords.
“It’s a little tiny baby step, and more work needs to be done,” she said. She vowed to run for reelection this fall to keep working on the issue.
