Buying time
House lawmakers began this legislative session intent on ending a controversial (and expensive) testing program for polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCB, in Vermont schools. Now, Senate lawmakers are thinking otherwise.
H.542, a bill sponsored by Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, would have ended Vermont’s PCB testing program altogether. The bill was voted out of the House in March.
But Senate lawmakers are now likely to reverse course, and have instead opted to extend by several years an original 2027 deadline to complete testing.
The program began in 2021, spurred by the discovery of airborne PCBs in Burlington High School, and required all schools built before 1980 to undergo testing for PCBs. The chemicals were once used in building materials but are now known to cause cancer.
More than 300 schools qualified for testing. So far, 46 of the 157 schools tested have shown elevated levels of airborne PCBs, and 171 schools remain untested.
The state quickly burned through the funding allocated to the testing and remediation program, but it was a fraction of the amount needed. Newport’s North Country Union High School, for example, has spent well over $7 million on its remediation efforts alone.
Conlon, chair of the House Education Committee, told lawmakers in March that the program has become “a huge unfunded mandate” that would be impossible to meet by the program’s 2027 deadline. And without state dollars, “the expense of testing and remediation would fall solely on property tax payers,” he said.
Senate lawmakers, however, found the House’s version of the bill concerning.
“I think now, the toothpaste is out of the tube,” Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast, told Senate Finance Committee members earlier this month.
The Senate Education Committee’s amendments pushed the testing deadline back to 2031 but left the question of funding unresolved. Hinsdale told lawmakers the committee was hopeful they could work with appropriations to come up with $10 million over the next four years.
“We, the state, (should) come up with the money to do the testing and not let individual districts have to make a very scary decision about, are they going to test, are they not going to test?” Hinsdale said.
Legislators on the Senate Finance Committee appeared sympathetic, and on Thursday moved to extend the deadline even further, to August 2036. The committee is expected to vote on that amendment Friday.
“We know the probability is there to just say, ‘Sorry, we don’t have the money to check and fix it,” Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, said in committee earlier this month. “I don’t think, as a state, we want to go to court when some child gets sick, and say, ‘Well, we didn’t have the money.'”
The question of funding may resolve itself in other ways. Litigation that Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark filed in 2023 against PCB manufacturer Monsanto remains in discovery, but officials are aiming for a March 2027 trial date, according to Lauren Jandl, Clark’s chief of staff.
The Burlington School District has filed a separate lawsuit against Monsanto that remains ongoing.
The Senate Education Committee, in its amendment, created a fund to hold money for continued PCB testing should the state receive any money through litigation.
It’s not an outlandish possibility. A number of states have successfully litigated and settled cases against Monsanto around similar allegations of PCB exposure, including neighboring New Hampshire, which in 2022 settled a similar suit for $25 million.
Ohio in 2022 also settled a lawsuit against Monsanto for $80 million, while Oregon that same year settled for $700 million.
Cummings cautioned against “pinning our hopes on pie in the sky” scenarios, but she noted there was plenty of legal precedent for a settlement.
“If we move this date out,” Cummings said, “we will probably know if we have money to continue the testing and remediation.”
— Corey McDonald
In the know
The conference committee tasked with working out the House and Senate’s differences over this year’s budget bill held its first substantive meeting Thursday. The six conferees agreed to approve some of the changes the Senate made to the “big bill,” H.951, after it passed the House — but are yet to discuss the vast majority of those changes, at least in public.
Those agreed to on Thursday include restoring full funding in the upcoming fiscal year for a program aimed at building up a workforce of primary care providers in rural areas, commonly known as AHEC, as well as directing more money to the Statehouse’s sergeant-at-arms to continue operating security screening at a single entry point.
Conferees also noted that they’ll have to decide what, if anything, to do with the money lawmakers had been planning to spend on S.218, a bill aimed at reducing road salt runoff into Vermont’s waterways and better training commercial salt applicators. Gov. Phil Scott vetoed the legislation last week, effectively sending it to the scrap heap.
The conference committee is slated to meet again first thing Tuesday morning.
— Shaun Robinson
Northeast Kingdom Human Services will pay the state of Vermont $65,335 as part of a settlement deal resolving accusations of overbilling Vermont Medicaid and alleged neglect of a person in the organization’s adult daycare.
The agreement also requires a series of reforms that the organization will make, focused on ways the organization supervises those with developmental disabilities in its care. Those include increased training for supervisors, better prepared plans for interventions and supervision and improved communication with those involved in the care of needy adults. NKHS also agreed to work with a consultant to prepare care plans for particularly sensitive and high-need adults.
The designated agency, based in Derby, is one of the 10 non-profit groups that contracts with the state to provide services for people with developmental disabilities, mental health conditions or substance use disorders.
An investigation by the state Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud and Residential Abuse Unit found that between June 2022 to August 2024, NKHS did not appropriately assess the risks of an adult Medicaid patient with developmental disabilities who lived in one of the community living arrangements the agency oversees.
Read the full story here.
— Olivia Gieger
