by Rep. Rob North
And Vermonters win in double overtime! The end of the 2026 Vermont state legislative session, Friday May 29th at 8:00pm, was a last-second thriller.
As of Thursday afternoon the second week of session overtime (and over-budget), with just one more day to go, we still hadn’t seen the final Education Transformation bill that builds on the requirements in Act 73 that was agreed to just last year. We still didn’t have a Budget bill to look at, a Tax bill, or the “Yield bill” that determines our property tax rate. These bills run our state, address our most pressing problems, and are THE primary responsibility of the Legislature! Yet, after nearly 5 months, with just one day to go, they were still unresolved with backroom deals and negotiations ongoing.
The good news is, while waiting for these bills to arrive on the floor, we were able to amend several other interesting bills to make them beneficial for Vermonters:
- The bipartisan “forensic facility bill” that I discussed in last week’s newsletter, was passed as an amendment from Rep. Burtt et.al. to bill S.193.
- Bill S.313 that brings focus to our valuable Career Technical Education (CTE) schools in Vermont passed with a particularly good amendment by Rep. Bartley.
- With near unanimous support, the Transportation bill H.944, and Miscellaneous Tax bill H.933 simplified and extended our current annual vehicle inspections to every two years; swapped the current high annual registration fees on EV’s for a mileage-based user fee (MBUF); and shifted the split of the existing Rooms & Meals tax so that slightly more goes to our ailing Transportation fund and less to Education. These Transportation funds are leveraged, gaining as much as 6 times the funding from the federal government, for badly needed road and bridge repair in our state.
- An unusually hotly contested bill, S.64, was used in backroom deals to gain support to pass another disputed bill regarding a Stowe charter change, H.954, that allows an unprecedented 2% local option tax in that town. With a favorable amendment by Rep. Nugent, the S.64 passed in a roll-call vote giving Optometrists a broadened scope of practice in Vermont to match their recently broadened education certifications as allowed in many other states. This improves access, and thus will control costs, to critical eye care for Vermonters, especially in rural areas.
We also used amendments and some procedural maneuvers to minimize the impact or even prevent some bad bills from passing:
- The Cannabis bill, S.278, was heavily amended on the floor, including one by Rep Tagliavia, to minimize the expansion and impact of allowable cannabis-based events in Vermont.
- The Governor’s veto of the AI Data Center bill, H.727, was sustained. This bill was originally created in the House and passed with broad bipartisan support, but it was ruined by the Senate with exorbitantly excessive regulations and vague language that extended to other business types, thus, the veto by the Governor. Hopefully we can return to the original version next year.
- Lastly, two bills with last minute amendments were allowed to expire on the “Notice Calendar”. H.740 would have paved the way for a Clean Heat Standard 2.0 by instituting a registry for all fossil fuel dealers in preparation for a “cap and invest” program. S.208 was amended at the last minute by the Senate, over the objection of the House committee chair, with unconstitutional requirements on federal employees. These two were stopped by not suspending rules on the last day of the session, thus running out the clock of the legislative session.
In the “can’t win ‘em all” category:
- There was a bi-partisan effort to amend bill H.527 thereby forcing the Legislature to fix the cell tower siting process next year, rather than wait another 3 years. Many Vermonters are concerned that health effects of RF radiation from cell towers are not considered in their placement. That amendment by Rep. Pritchard failed, giving the Public Utilities Commission three years till the next required review of their process.
- An amendment to delay implementation of bill H.710 failed on the House floor. This amendment would have given the Legislature more opportunity to restrain the push in H.710 to consume more agricultural and forest land with solar arrays.
That brings us to the “big bills” which finally passed out of their combined House & Senate conference committees late Thursday night and whizzed through both the Senate and House with enthusiasm on Friday, the final day of the biennium.
- In the property tax yield bill, H.949, the Senate wisely overruled the original House version and took full advantage of the Governor’s buy-down offer of $101M this year to reduce the impending average property tax increase from over 7% to about 3.5%. The House ceded to this. Hooray!
- The state budget, H.951, passed with a modest 2.1% year over year increase. This is in alignment with the Governor’s proposed budget and fully covered by existing revenue sources. As the Governor promised in December, NO NEW TAXES! I had lobbied for a reduced budget this year, but that didn’t fly.
- Lastly, the Education Transformation bill, H.955 passed with broad bipartisan support. This bill does many things to continue the process started with last year’s Act 73, but I’ll address the most impactful here:
- Rather than dictate a redistricting to achieve scale and reduce costs, this bill requires that 18 facilitated Merger Committees, roughly corresponding to the desired merged districts, each provide a plan by Town Meeting day 2028 on how they can merge their existing districts/unions into a single district. Our local merger committee, designated as “Group 17” in the bill, includes the existing Addison NW, Addison Central, Mount Abe, and Lincoln school districts. NOTE: Merging districts does NOT equate to merging schools. Merging districts would only merge the administration of the schools, thus reducing administrative overhead.
- There are construction bonus incentives provided to those that merge and disincentives to those that don’t. There is also State help to enable merging for any towns or districts left orphaned in the process.
- Communications I’ve had with our local SD Administrators indicate they recognize the need and benefits of merging districts and are cautiously optimistic they can achieve it by the 2028 deadline.
- Another important aspect is the incentivized cost containment as we march toward the July 2029 foundation formula implementation, regardless of merging results. The bill will double tax any districts on portions of their budget above a declining per-pupil “excess spending threshold”. Our district is currently near but not exceeding that threshold.
- A hotly debated aspect of the bill is the introduction of a new “2nd home” non-homestead classification for property taxes. This could lead to higher property tax rates for year-round 2nd homes in VT, not camps or rentals or additional housing units on property used by family.
- Lastly, much ado was made of the creation of Cooperative Educational Service Areas (CESAs). I’m not sure if these renamed “BOCES”, initially created in 1988 by Act 153, really enable savings or just add another layer of governance. We’ll see.
In other news, many currently sitting Representatives have not filed petitions to appear on the ballot in the 2026 elections and therefore are not planning to return to office next year. This number includes many high-ranking members such as the chairs of the Environment, Education, Housing & General, and Government Operations committees as well as the Speaker of the House! It would be speculation to postulate the reasons for this mass exodus, but the House will certainly be a very different body next year — a perfect opportunity to bring more balance to Vermont. As my friend John McCormick from Bristol says: “This is a clear and important message that Vermonters need to hear repeatedly. A bi-partisan legislature is the pinnacle of Democracy. Competence and sanity generally lie toward the ideological center of politics.”
Stay tuned and stay engaged.