Lawmakers struggle to provide more services with less money

Woodin told the five-lawmaker forum at Smugglers’ Notch Resort he was less interested in hearing their thoughts on health care legislation and more on what he thinks ought to be the Legislature’s “North Star,” building the state economy. He said that, with the departure of his youngest child for Colorado, all his children have moved out of Vermont because of jobs and other opportunities.

Sen. Rich Westman, R-Cambridge, a veteran legislator who has spent four decades under the golden dome of the Statehouse, reiterated his oft-stated theme of reining in spending, especially after the influx of federal COVID-19 relief funds that helped bolster the Vermont government for the past few years.

“We’re in a very difficult time because we very much got addicted to all the federal money that came down during COVID. We built spending levels here that, now that that money has gone away, we can’t maintain,” Westman said.

He said Gov. Phil Scott’s proposed budget already level funds what Westman says are the core services so important to Lamoille County residents — mental health and home health providers, nursing homes, Meals on Wheels, adult day programs, to name some. He said this is all while Lamoille Health Partners is operating under a $1.3 million deficit, Copley Hospital just got approved for a 7-percent rate increase because its own financial difficulties, and The Manor nursing home in Morristown cut 20 beds.

Westman said while the House is proposing to implement new income taxes on the wealthiest Vermonters, a tax on property sales over $600,000 and a “highest in the nation” corporate tax to help pay for its prioritized initiatives, the Senate is in belt-tightening mode.

“What we need to do is hunker down and look at what we offer for programs and what are the things we absolutely need, particularly with a population that is aging and needs services,” he said, noting the alternative is more people moving out of state and fewer moving in.

“It’s pretty easy for somebody to live six months and a day in Florida and sever their residency here and we lose their income tax,” he said.

Rep. Lucy Boyden, D-Cambridge, said she has seen “a lot of really good policies” coming out of House and Senate committees, so those higher-than-average taxes would fund quality initiatives. However, she acknowledged that fully one third of the Legislature are new lawmakers — including three of the five Lamoille County lawmakers who attended Monday’s breakfast.

“We have all this federal money to continue making investments that is dwindling away and not many members are long-term people who remember the regular times,” Boyden said.

Rep. Jed Lipsky, I-Stowe — he’s also a freshman lawmaker — said things are exacerbated by the hefty toll caused last year by some of the worst flooding in Vermont’s history.

“One hundred million this year went directly to flood recovery and there’s no way to make that up. It really hurts the distribution to all the social needs that we have,” Lipsky said.

The forum’s third first-term lawmaker, Rep. Saudia LaMont, D-Morristown, said there’s no getting around the fact that “part of the way, we know, our revenue comes from that big T-word, which no one likes.” She said no one relishes the idea of a huge corporate tax, but it’s just not possible to fund things without taxes.

LaMont offered more questions than answers about how to improve the state’s economy, reflecting the quandaries lawmakers, business owners and every other Vermonter faces when trying to invest in the state.

How to build the workforce if people don’t have access to housing? How to fund designated agencies when those agencies can’t access funding because they can’t fill grant-supported job positions?

She said it’s frustrating that the policy committees and the money committees don’t more regularly communicate while the former are working on their bills earlier in the session. She pointed out that a housing bill came back from the appropriation committees with 80 percent less money attached to it than proposed.

“When you’re looking at creating policy and you don’t even know what number you have to work with, you are working with funds in the sky,” Lamont said.

Rep. Mark Higley, R-Lowell, one of the more experienced lawmakers in the region, and one of the more conservative, said he saw the writing on the wall in Gov. Jim Douglas’s last term, which ended in 2011. Douglas vetoed the Legislature’s budget, and the General Assembly came right back and overrode that veto. Ever since then, Higley said, initiatives haven’t been tempered with funding.

He said that comes especially with “climate change initiatives that aren’t going to change the climate,” yet could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Add to Higley’s list of maligned revenue raisers the corporate tax, the personal income “wealth” tax, the property transfer tax, and proposed Airbnb and cloud taxes and it’s too much, he said.

“Vermont tries to create this utopia, and my rural constituency is paying for it,” he said. “They can’t pay any more.”

Rural issues

Eric Nuse, who worked for decades as a game warden for the Department of Fish and Wildlife, wondered about the political pull of the Rural Caucus of Vermont, which is made up of more than 50 House members — including all four representatives at Monday’s breakfast.

“Vermont seems to be slipping into this kind of culture war of the Burlington area and all of us who live in rural areas,” Nuse said.

Boyden said the caucus’s mission is to make sure rural Vermont has “an amplified voice” in the Legislature. She said the caucus is working on a “deep dive” into Act 250 reform but also a bill regarding open meeting laws and making sure, in a remote world ushered in by the pandemic, that rural people have access to their elected and appointed town and school officials.

Lipsky said the caucus is tri-partisan, with a Democrat, an independent and a Republican all serving as co-chairs. He said one of the chairs, Rep. Laura Sibilia, I-West Dover, has been a major driving force behind getting broadband internet services to Vermont’s most far-flung places.

As part of Act 250 reform, Lipsky said, the rural caucus is also weighing in on calls to eliminate Vermont’s Environmental Court — which is where people appeal zoning decisions made at the local level — and replacing it with a board within the Act 250 Commission.

“If you lose there, you appeal to the same board, which doesn’t make a lot of sense in the kind of democracy and hierarchy we’re used to,” Lipsky said of the proposal.

Higley said he hasn’t made it to any meetings this session, and he expressed a dimmer view than others on caucuses in general, noting there are so many of them — including defunct ones like the old Northeast Kingdom Caucus — and they harbor a lot of political clout.

“I hope they don’t gain too much power and traction, in a sense, because it’s hard for a number of us to make it to these other caucuses,” Higley said.

He also criticized some perceived incongruities between caucus members’ stated values and their eventual votes on the House floor, saying he doesn’t understand how someone who supports forest products and logging, for instance, could turn around and vote for initiatives that call for conserving 30 percent of Vermont land by 2030 and 50 percent by 2050.

He said the idea behind things like that “30 by 30” initiative — which he said comes from the United Nations — is to keep it voluntary for landowners, but he said there are ways to erode that voluntary nature, such as making it too expensive to own large swaths of land.

Patrick Ripley, director of the Lamoille Economic Development Corporation, added that, when the organization is seeing funding for initiatives, the rural caucus is often the first place it turns.

“They have been a more friendly body to economic development than some of the other caucuses,” he said.