The Vermont state legislature is preparing to reconvene after a break for Tuesday’s Town Meeting Day. School budgets were a key focus for Vermont voters amid concerns about rising costs.
WAMC’s North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley spoke with Democratic House Speaker Jill Krowinski at the watch party for Democrat Joan Shannon, who lost the Burlington mayoral race to Progressive Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, about those school budget concerns.
Krowinski: We want to make sure that we're doing everything we can to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, while also ensuring that Vermont is a place that people can afford to live in. And so we're going to be keeping a very close eye on the results coming in from town meeting day with school budgets, there are some other budgets that have been delayed. So we're not going to have the full scope of the story, of the scene, until a couple more weeks. But despite that, we are working on short-, medium- and long-term solutions to how we can deal with the rising costs of educating our students. And look, this is the perfect storm of events happening. We have health care costs increasing, we are losing the federal funds through COVID. Inflation has gone up. So we're doing what we can in Montpelier to shore up what we can do. And there's a lot of great ideas on the table. And so while we're waiting to hear back from towns on their school budgets, we'll be doing really thorough, inclusive work to ensure we're doing right by our kids in our communities.
WAMC: Some people are pointing to the 5% tax cap the legislature I guess eliminated, how much of a factor do you think that was? And is that going to be revisited?
We are waiting to see how that will play out with school budgets that have been delayed because of that. So if there are school districts that postpone their votes, and redo their budgets and lower costs, that will impact the rate on all of us across the state. Everyone votes on their school budgets thinking about their communities, but it does impact the entire state. And so we'll be again, keeping a close eye to see the impact of these budget votes, those who went ahead with their budgets and those who decided to pull it back, make adjustments and send it back out to the voters.
Is it getting harder to be the leader of the Vermont House these days?
It’s not hard. I get to work with incredible people from around the state who love and care about Vermont, and who just want to make it better in any way that they can. And so I'm really proud to represent Burlington in the legislature and to be the speaker, because we can do hard things, we do hard things. And we are making a difference when it comes to affordable housing, we've made huge investments in affordable housing, workforce development, on climate change, on health and public safety, we continue to really do good work together. And so it's great to have off for town meeting break. But we are organizing, and we'll be getting back to work shortly.
And do you ever get frustrated, every week the governor has a bully pulpit, he has a weekly briefing in front of the media. Do you ever get frustrated when he's calling on the legislature to do things and members of the legislature aren't necessarily there to counter and say, ‘Well, wait a minute, this is our position?’
It's true that the governor has a huge microphone and all of us we have 150 smaller microphones to work from. And I think it's also frustrating when I hear the governor say things that aren't necessarily true, or mischaracterized in what we are doing, and I just want to like reassure Vermonters that we are working so hard on the key issues that we heard about during the election cycle again, affordable housing, tackling climate change, what can we do around public safety? What can we do around health care? We are digging in and making tough decisions. And so I just hope that we can have a governor who's at the table working with us and instead of, you know, throwing shots from press conferences. Like we have to work together Vermonters want us to work together, and I'm committed to continue to do that.
Obviously, the biggest thing that comes out of the legislature every year is the budget. How's it coming?
We are in the thick of it. So at this point in time, all of our different House committees are sending their thoughts and their feedback to our House Appropriations Committee. And we're continuing to prioritize those issues that I keep on talking about from affordable housing to climate change to health care and public safety. We are starting the budget in the red, $15 million in the red. And we are we've been in the past couple of years working with this huge influx of COVID money and that is running out and so we're gonna have to make some tough decisions. I have a lot of faith in our appropriations committee and the work that we're gonna be doing together to figure out how we can fund our priorities, while also being thoughtful about revenue. In a couple of weeks we'll be having a budget vote in the House chamber.
Then it goes back to the Senate and then the Senate sends it back to you?
Most likely, there's there'll be a committee conference.
