by Austin Davis, Lake Champlain Chamber
Informal polling of anyone who has spent substantial time in the Vermont legislature will tell you this is the slowest session, with the least done, that’s been experienced in decades.
As we’ve previously covered, this has been an incredibly slow start to the legislative session due to the erosion of supermajorities in the House and Senate, electoral mandates shifting focus, staffing challenges, turnover, and a quirk in the calendar, which had the legislature meet later.
This shouldn’t necessarily be taken as criticism – the issues before them are daunting, and the number of times you hear “education reform is sucking the oxygen out of the room” in State House discussions is a clear indicator.
Despite this, the regularly scheduled dates still approach rapidly:
- February 28, the Legislature will leave for a week’s recess
- March 4 is Town Meeting Day, and Legislators will be going home with less to share with their constituents than they have in past years
- March 11, they return, and it will be a mad dash to finalize bills before crossover
- March 14 is crossover and is the date a bill must be voted out of a policy committee
- March 21 is the crossover for money bills
- All of these dates are so that they can constrain the flow of work to finalize all work to ensure a session that is about 18 weeks.
- May 17 would be close to the typical adjournment if this was a typical year, however, this may not be a typical year for all the reasons we’ve stated, and some legislators are predicting they go into June…
Zoom Out: One of those dates is also an essential date at the national legislative level – March 14 is the deadline for a government shutdown, and at that time, we will get a first glance at the political potential for proposed massive cuts in national spending.
- We covered last week that Vermont is very dependent on federal funding, with more than one-third of our state budget coming from the federal government and an unaccounted amount of municipal, non-profit, and university funding coming from them.
Bottom line: Legislators might feel as if they have the luxury of time, however, they might regret not making more progress on issues they can control now when they need to react to issues out of their control later.
The author is the Director of Government Affairs for the Lake Champlain Chamber.