Vermont House Speaker Jill Krowinski is pushing back on Republican Governor Phil Scott’s claim that bills to address the state’s housing crisis have stalled in the Democratically-controlled legislature and criticized a plan to remove hundreds of individuals from a hotel-motel shelter program.
During his weekly briefing Wednesday Governor Scott recalled standing with a tri-partisan group of legislators to introduce legislation to address the state’s housing shortage. But he said since then there has been no action on that bill and another bill in the Senate has languished.
“If we truly have a housing crisis, we need to start treating it like one,” Scott said. ”So I'm asking the legislature to send me a real housing bill, one that has tools to fix our housing problem.”
During her own briefing on Thursday, Democratic Speaker Krowinski countered that there are three bills actively moving through the House.
“Creating affordable housing is a top priority for us,” asserted Krowinski. ”House Bill 829 creates a ten-year road map for affordable housing. House Bill 629 sets housing goals and House Bill 687 is our Act 250 land use modernization bill. The Governor has stated that the bill focuses too much on conservation. This bill is pro-environment and pro-business. And I’m disappointed that the administration has stopped coming to the table.”
The three bills are expected to be ready for floor votes by next week. During his briefing Governor Scott invited Fairfax House Republican Ashley Bartley to talk about the status of the tri-partisan bill, H.719.
“Since mid-January when it was introduced, H.719 remains untouched in the House Committee on Environment and Energy and has subsequently died on the committee wall despite being sponsored by over 30% of the House.”
Krowinski retorted that elements of that bill have been moved into other legislation.
“Just because H.17 is not moving doesn’t mean components of that bill are not,” Speaker Krowinski said. “So there are pieces of that bill that I understand are part of 829 and I will have to see with the Environment and Energy Committee’s work on 687 what components were dropped into that bill as well.”
She also took the governor to task for plans to evict about 500 individuals from the hotel-motel housing program and divert them to shelters in communities across the state.
“An hour ago the Town of Bennington sent out an email to community partners stating that they were just made aware of the effort to put an emergency shelter in their community for tomorrow,” related Krowinski. “The Mayor of Rutland released a statement earlier today saying that they were only informed of the plan to stand up an emergency shelter yesterday. Lives are at risk. Communities are completely in the dark. This has to stop.”
Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger organized an online meeting mid-afternoon on Thursday with service providers, community agencies and leaders and state agency heads to discuss the situation. He said he was shocked when he learned about the state’s plan.
“This is happening extremely quickly and I think it seems completely avoidable to me and really wrong that Vermont cities, shelter guests, schools, businesses are really being given hours to react to the state standing up really a wholly new program, something that’s never been done this way before.”
The state recently renegotiated new rates with hotels and motels participating in the emergency housing program lowering the cost to $80 per night.
