By Michael Bielawski

Some important bills saw action this week in various State House committees and chambers, including on Friday the Senate will look at approving private meetings for a public body. Another bill moving through the Senate would allow work visas for illegal immigrants and the House is progressing with gun serialization.

Secret meetings and testimonies for public policy?

The bill H. 649 concerns the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”  It is currently listed on the Senate Calendar as a “Favorable report by Committee on Appropriations” meaning it is making progress toward final approval by the Senate. Then it can go to the governor’s desk. The bill is sponsored by Rep. Elizabeth Burrows, D/P-West Windsor.

Among other initiatives, it is “to establish a panel with authority to fill vacancies on the Commission and to remove or reprimand commissioners for cause; to create certain exemptions from the Open Meeting Law for meetings of the Commission and to permit commissioners to confer with each other; and to create a duty of confidentiality for participants in affinity groups organized by the Commission.”

The group’s mission statement expressly states that they seek to influence public policy based on their views of historical and current events. It is currently against the law to use public funds to promote personal politics, and earlier this year Legislative Counsel Tucker Anderson told the House Committee on General & Housing on Jan. 26, “There are Constitutional implications specifically for the quasi-judicial aspects of reparations programs.”

Its language implies that interviews and the information they get from them could be kept from the public. It states, “The Commission shall permit any individual who is interviewed by the Commission to elect to have their interview conducted in a manner that protects the individual’s privacy and to have any recording of the interview kept confidential by the Commission.”

Work visas for illegal immigrants?

On Thursday the Senate passed H. 606 on to their Finance Committee, and it was previously passed out of the Senate’s Government Operations Committee.  This bill’s text implies that it could run up against federal law regarding its explicit intent to ignore immigration status when considering work visas.

It states, “This bill proposes to enable individuals who meet the requirements for professional licenses to be granted those licenses regardless of their immigration status or lack thereof.”

The bill is sponsored by Rep. Esme Cole, D-Hartford, and others.

According to Cornell Law School, federal law is clear about its stance on hiring undocumented immigrants for work. It states that 8 U.S. Code § 1324a means, “It is unlawful for a person or other entity—to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an alien knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien with respect to such employment.”

Gun serialization

The House on Friday voted to postpone a third reading concerning a gun serialization bill, S. 209, until next Tuesday. This bill would mean all guns must have serial numbers for tracking purposes. It’s sponsored by Sen. Richard Sears Jr., D-Bennington, and others.

Among other initiatives, it seeks to “prohibit the possession and transfer of unserialized firearms and unserialized firearms frames and receivers, also known as ghost guns. The bill establishes a process that permits Federal firearms dealers and licensees to print serial numbers on unserialized firearms and unserialized firearms frames and receivers.”

John Lott Jr., an economist, political commentator, and gun rights advocate, told lawmakers that gun serialization has been tried at departments across the nation with poor results.

In February he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “In theory, if criminals leave registered guns at a crime scene law enforcement can use the serial numbers to trace the guns back to the perpetrators, but in real life, guns are only left at the scene of the crime when the gunmen have been seriously injured or killed with both the criminal and the weapon present at the scene.”

He said the initiative is all cost and has no measurable benefit in preventing crimes. He also mentioned that one thing serialization might benefit is if there was a decision in the future to confiscate guns from Americans.

Money for damaged dams

The House on Friday voted out a bill, S. 213, meant to address the state’s aging dam infrastructure to the Ways and Means Committee. The bill also deals with managing wetlands and river corridor development. The bill is sponsored by Sen. Chris Bray, D-Addison, and others.

The American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2023 report card gave Vermont’s dams a ‘C’ rating. It noted that there are more than 1,100 of them and that “6% of Vermont dams are high hazard – if they fail loss of life is probable, as are damages to property and the environment.”

The bill would create an “Unsafe Dam Revolving Fund” to be used “for emergency and nonemergency funding of dam repair.”

It continues, “The bill also provides that the owner of a dam or the owner of land on which a dam is located shall be held strictly, jointly, and severally liable for harm caused by the breach of a dam, provided that the dam has been classified as a significant or high-hazard potential dam or the person who owns legal title to a dam or the owner of land on which a dam is located is not in full compliance with dam safety rules.”

The author is a writer for the Vermont Daily Chronicle