House of Cards in Flames
As cross-over day in the VT Legislature came and went on Friday and more electric buses burst into flames, so did many of our hopes for any real progress this legislative session toward solving Vermont’s affordability crisis. To make any significant change we need more legislators who are serious about addressing this crisis.
By my personal count, we’ve passed 37 bills on the floor of the house thus far this year. Very few of those carry any real impact that will actually help Vermonters and none of them address the affordability crisis. At half-way through the 2nd year of the biennium, the Governor has signed only 2 bills into law this year. I’m told this is an extraordinarily small number. One was the Budget Adjust Act, a simple annual accounting adjustment. The other, “An act relating to the use of synthetic media in elections” (think AI generated fakes). While good things, these certainly don’t even come close to addressing the real problems we Vermonters are facing. The only silver lining in this cloud is that with more than a superminority in both chambers, at least no more really bad bills were passed!
H.602 and S.267 along with a host of other land use, permit reform, and housing bills (see previous news letters) were assigned to Environmental committees in the House and Senate where they languished on the wall and now, post-crossover, are dead. The chair of our Environmental committee purposely wasted 2 1⁄2 months of our committee time taking testimony on topics completely unrelated to the affordability crises at hand while these critically important bills sat on our wall unaddressed. When confronted about when these bills assigned to our committee would be addressed, our chair flatly told me “They won’t.” Vermonters asked for a plan, the administration and Republicans delivered a plan, and the majority party ignores the plan.
Only one housing and land use related bill made it through crossover, S.325. It proposes to delay some elements of Act 181 such as the Tier 3 determination and the “Road Rule”, the impacts of which I’ve discussed in a previous newsletter. Anne Watson, chair of Senate Natural Resources committee, was nearly giddy over getting this bill out before crossover. While offering a desperately needed stalling of the Act 181 implementation dates, it falls short of what is really needed to aid housing and protect rural towns and rural Vermonters. We need more than a delay. We need repeal and reform. In an election year, this type of delay tactic, in the face of a real crisis, is just what we would expect. To borrow a quote from Rob Roper, some “would rather make a statement than a difference.”
Governor Phil Scott and his cabinet, in his weekly press conference this past Wednesday, brilliantly addressed the situation at hand. Listen HERE. Many laws were put into place over the past several years by overriding Governor Scott’s veto, thus bypassing a critical check-and-balance feature of our Constitution. Acts 181 (land use rules) and 59 (permanent conservation of 50% of Vermont), the Global Warming Solutions Act, and Affordable Heat Act (aka. Clean Heat Standard) are just a few examples. None of these extraordinarily costly laws would even be in place had Vermonters not put a supermajority in both chambers of the Legislature.
“The issues I outlined in my veto letter are coming to fruition and they’re just as pertinent today as they were then,” said the Governor. As Housing Commissioner Alex Farrel points out, we have decades of evidence of the negative impacts Act 250 has had on our housing and economy and we have evidence from the interim Act 250 exemptions that there are no unintended environmental consequences.
Julie Moore, Secretary of ANR clearly states “The administration and legislature have invested hundreds of millions of (Vermont tax) dollars into climate change mitigation activities,” not to mention the fees and higher electric rates Vermonters are paying. “The gap between the requirements of the Global Warming Solutions Act and where we are is evidence that people (legislators) really didn’t understand the costs of these when enacting them, and should have been better understood on the front end.”
On an interesting and maybe hopeful twist, crossover day ended on the House floor with a bill unrelated to these topics, H.542 “an act relating to termination of PCB testing in schools”, which passed with a wide majority in the house on Friday. You can listen for yourself HERE, starting at the 2:49 mark. The reasoning given for terminating the PCB testing in schools, by Peter Conlon (D-Cornwall), Chair of the House Education committee and presenter of the bill was astonishing. “This bill would remove the deadline and essentially end the air testing program for any untested school since there is no money to pay for it or for any remediation.” Wow! And after an hour of vehement debate over PCB contamination and the health of our children, amendments offered, and roll-call votes taken, this bill passed overwhelmingly with full support of the majority party leadership and its members. The bottom line was: we didn’t adequately assess the costs before we started, we don’t have the money to pay for it, we can’t afford it, so we’re cancelling it. There you have it folks! The precedent has been set. I can think of a number of other programs for which we didn’t adequately assess the costs, don’t have the money for, and can’t afford. I’m sure you can too. The house of cards that the majority party has built over the past couple decades is on fire and about to topple.
I remain honored to be your Representative,
Rob North
www.NorthForVTHouse.com
Addison, Ferrisburgh, New Haven, Panton, Vergennes, and Waltham
