Vermont Governor Phil Scott focused on activity in the state legislature during his weekly briefing Wednesday afternoon.
The Republican began his weekly press conference criticizing legislative committees for veering from what had been a tri-partisan bill to address the state’s housing crisis.
“On January 10th I stood here with a tri-partisan group of lawmakers and stakeholders to outline good, solid proposals that had wide support and I felt good about the odds of passing something meaningful,” recalled Scott. “But one month into the session, I’m not as confident. It appears in some committees they’re moving in the opposite direction. Instead of prioritizing how to produce more homes, which would address all kinds of issues like workforce, health care, property taxes, education and more, some are looking to add to the regulatory burden and put us further behind. I won’t accept a housing bill that fails to meet the moment. We can’t water this package down and expect to address our housing shortage.”
State economists expect school spending to increase over the next year, leading to a property tax increase of at least 18 percent. The House Ways and Means committee is considering eliminating a 5 percent cap and potentially extending the Town Meeting Day timeframe for school budget votes. The governor says some of the ideas are reasonable.
“As I understand it there’ll be three phases to this,” Scott said. “The first phase is making sure that they take away the 5 percent cap, which I think is a move in the right direction. They’re talking about extending Town Meeting Day. I don’t know if it’s just the vote on school budgets or whether it’s Town Meeting Day itself. It’s unclear to me. But I think that’s fine as well.”
If the legislature continues with that plan, Scott cautioned that it won’t solve the property tax problem.
“We’re not going to come up with $225-$250 million worth of savings with this provision,” asserted Scott. “At best I think we’re looking at maybe $15 or $20 million of savings. So there’s still a long ways to go in terms of the property tax increases we’re going to see. The other piece of this is if we extend this vote it’s going to cause a lot of confusion, understandably. I think this is a time when we should institute the mail-in ballots, especially if it’s not a set date, if it’s sometime between traditional Town Meeting Day and some other date. So I think mail-in ballots is going to be essential.”
Department for Children and Families Commissioner Chris Winters says efforts are ongoing to create a permanent secure 14-bed crisis stabilization facility for young people who may pose a risk to themselves or others.
“That permanent secure facility is probably a couple of years out still,” noted Winters. ”We’re in the RFP process right now looking at a few different sites and we’ll have a decision on that in the coming months.”
