A light at the end
By Maggie Lenz and Gwynn Zakov (on behalf of Atlas Government Affairs and Garnet Government Relations)
The path to school governance reform becomes clear
The amendment to H.955, the education transformation bill, has now been published in the Senate Calendar and is ready for action on Tuesday. The sponsors are bipartisan, and the language appears to reflect long negotiations behind the scenes among the Senate, House, and Governor’s office. If it passes the Senate, it could move very quickly through the remaining steps, potentially through both chambers on Tuesday or Wednesday, although a committee of conference is still possible. That makes adjournment likely late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning.
The amendment makes several major changes to the bill. But most notably, it does not appear to impose the kind of forced consolidation the Governor has been calling for publicly. That is politically significant. If the Governor does in fact support this amendment, which seems likely given that the Senate Minority Leader is one of the sponsors, it would represent a major concession from his earlier position that the bill needed forced consolidation.
What the amendment does is move the new funding system, the foundation formula, up by one year. Under the earlier version, the foundation formula wasn’t rolled out until 2030. Under this amendment, it would move to July 1, 2029, if the revised conditions are met.
And those conditions are rewritten in a significant way. The prior structure required merger study and vote certification, receipt of a foundation formula report, a Joint Fiscal Office district-by-district comparison using FY2027 data, and enacted legislation addressing detailed formula issues. The new structure removes the merger vote-certification trigger and the JFO comparison as main formula conditions. Instead, it requires receipt of the foundation formula report, receipt of the merger committee facilitator report (instead of the vote certification), and enacted legislation that expresses clear legislative intent to address listed formula issues. Those listed issues include CTE, special education funding, sparsity, empirically supported secondary student weighting, geographic cost differences, a pre-K funding mechanism, legacy collective bargaining agreements, and capital indebtedness held by school districts.
That “clear legislative intent” phrase is important. It is still enacted legislation, but it may not require the Legislature to fully create, fund, or implement each fix before the formula turns on. That distinction matters. The formula could move forward in 2029 even if some major implementation details are acknowledged but not fully resolved.
The past week it was anyone’s guess whether or not a deal could be reached between the legislature and the Scott Administration. But now that it appears there is agreement, this is expected to move quickly, and the path from here to adjournment could be short. If the deal holds, the earlier predictions for a spicy and contentious ending around the education bill may have just been proven wrong. And we may actually have a final education bill, negotiated in large part behind closed doors, that does not receive a veto.
The End of the Beginning of Act 250/181 reform
After months of intense, hard, and emotionally charged work, the legislature is moments away from passing S.325, this year’s highly anticipated Act 250 and Act 181 reform bill. The Committee of Conference adopted its final report on Thursday, and in some ways it was anticlimactic given how many components of each chamber’s version could have teed up a drawn-out conference. The report was quite narrow.
Two weeks ago we wrote about a House version of S.325 that took what arrived from the Senate as a deadline extension bill and turned it into a repeal of the “Road Rule” and Tier 3, with a rebuild of what Act 250 should look like once those pieces came out. The Senate did not accept the House version, and a Committee of Conference was appointed. The conferees met twice and agreed to a final report. The House has already accepted the final version, and the Senate will likely do the same Tuesday.
The conference report accepted the House amendments, with the conferees adopting ten additional negotiated amendments. The Act 181 architecture that the House struck stays struck. The “Road Rule” and Tier 3 are repealed, along with the Tier 3 rulemaking charge and the Tier 2 area report. Most of the ten further amendments are technical, but the on-farm business amendment is not, and it is worth working through because it shows something about the process that the rest of the report does not.
The House had taken the Burtt floor amendment, which removed the carve-out that excluded improvements for hosting events and farm stays from the accessory on-farm business exemption in Act 250, and carried it into S.325. It said accessory on-farm event and farm stay activity is exempt from Act 250 the same way the storage, sale, preparation, and processing categories already were. It let 24 V.S.A. § 4412(11), the section of statute that governs how municipalities can regulate accessory on-farm businesses through zoning, do the work it was designed to do.
The conferees took that and added two statewide conditions. First, noise cannot exceed 70 decibels at the property boundaries, and second, events cannot continue past 10:00 p.m. Those conditions are written into the Act 250 exemption itself, as conditions of qualifying for it.
This is where the underlying law gets blurry. The 70 decibel limit and the 10 p.m. cutoff are the kinds of standards Vermont’s framework already allocates to municipalities. State statute authorizes towns to regulate noise, hours, traffic, parking, and lighting, subject to the constraint that the regulation cannot prohibit the activity or impose unreasonable burdens. The state sets the floor, and the municipality sets the local conditions within the limits the statute places on them. The conference report writes specific numeric thresholds into the Act 250 exemption. A farm hosting an event with the unanimous blessing of the host town, at 71 decibels at the property line, may have moved itself out of the exemption regardless of what the municipality thinks.
That is what happens when conferees agree on the policy question, should farms be able to host events, without working through the structural question, which body sets the conditions. The Burtt amendment was the jurisdictional fix. The conference report kept the fix and put statewide conditions on top of it, which puts the Act 250 exemption in a venue the underlying framework has not historically placed it in.
This is not to say that 70 decibels or 10 p.m. are bad numbers. There might be towns that land on exactly those numbers if asked. The problem is that those numbers arguably now sit in the wrong statute. They sit in a jurisdictional exemption rather than in the zoning framework that has been the place this kind of local condition has lived since 2018, when the legislature gave municipalities the authority to regulate accessory on-farm businesses. The conferees were working a compromise, and the compromise produced statutory text that does not cleanly fit the framework underneath it.
None of this is a scandal. It is the ordinary work product of a Committee of Conference moving fast at the end of a session. But it is worth paying attention to because the next biennium is going to ask more of many of these same legislators on the same kinds of questions.
Act 181 itself is three years old now, and the legislature is still working out what it actually does. The conference report on S.325 finishes a piece of that work. It does not finish all of it. The Land Use Review Board (LURB) will continue its work. Tier 1A and Tier 1B status are still in the statute. Regional planning commissions are still producing future land use maps for LURB approval. The new Joint Legislative Environmental Oversight Committee will be in the room when the LURB and the Agency of Natural Resources answer for how the rest of Act 181 is working. That role may be appropriate, but it will require legislators to hold a careful conversation with two agencies about how a complicated framework is functioning on the ground.
That is the work for next biennium, and the harder lift has not started yet. Act 59 is still on the books with its 30×30 and 50×50 goals. Act 121 brings statewide river corridor permitting online January 1, 2028. Both raise the same questions Act 181 raised about the relationship between state goals and local authority, about who decides what private land is for, and about the cost of stewardship to the people doing it. Those conversations will be more useful if legislators arrive with a working command of the existing framework.
What this process has shown is that Vermont’s legislature is a citizen legislature, in the literal sense. The people in those seats are not professional regulators or career land use professionals. They are Vermonters learning the statutory framework as they go, working through complicated drafting questions in compressed timelines, and producing compromises that reflect the limits of what any group of part-time legislators can fully internalize in a single session. That is not a criticism. It is the design, and it has real strengths.
But it has implications. Trusting that your elected official has command of the underlying law on a topic as layered as Act 250, Act 181, Act 59, Act 121, and the municipal zoning framework is not a safe assumption. Not because legislators are not working hard. Because the material is dense, the time is short, and the learning curve is real. Vermonters who care about how their land is regulated, how their towns are planned, and how their working landscapes are treated need to stay in the room. They need to read the bills, show up at hearings, ask questions, and expect answers. The conference report on S.325 is a good result for the working lands coalition that pushed it. It is also a reminder that the good result happened because Vermonters were engaged. The next round will produce a good result on the same terms or not at all.
The rebuild started with Act 181. The conference report finished what the House started. The next conversation is the one that has not happened yet.