Lawmakers got right to work on opening day of the second half of the biennium. Within an hour of the first gavel fall, senators and representatives were in committee. There they began the work of legislating — of evaluating statutory changes, assessing the effectiveness of programs and listening to the conflicting points of view of state officials, constituents, advocates and lobbyists.
By the end of the day, several committees had already voted on draft legislation. A bill to allow child-care workers to unionize passed unanimously out of the Senate Education Committee. A Senate and House conference committee voted out a campaign finance bill that will lift the ceiling on contributions to political parties to $10,000 and allow parties to make contributions in unlimited amounts to candidates.
Over the course of the next 16 weeks, Vermont’s citizen lawmakers who hail from every corner of the state, will debate and vote on scores of bills addressing issues small and large that affect Vermonters. Everything from whether Burlington can include restrictions on guns in its city charter to regulating police use of Tasers to creating a statewide school calendar. Climate change, an issue that was front and center last year with the appearance of activist Bill McKibben at the Statehouse, doesn’t appear to be a priority. (Rep. Tony Klein urged his colleagues to consider climate change, “the most serious problem facing the planet,” as a factor in every decision they make.)
At the top of the list are the state’s annual appropriations for government operations, transportation and capital expenditures. The money issues are the pivot around which all the other legislation takes shape. Without money, it’s hard to pay the state’s bills, let alone launch ambitious programs. And this year will be unusually tight. The difference between the state’s revenues and expenditures is about $70 million this year. Though there have been similar sized gaps in each of the last six years, this year federal and other funds that were previously available have dried up.
The new mantra in the House and Senate Appropriations committees is “results-based budgeting,” which is shorthand for building more efficiency into state agency budgets. Shumlin has promised to hold the line on new broad-based taxes to support existing government programs, and belt-tightening will likely be part of the equation in the governor’s budget address next week.
In an interview, John Campbell, Senate president pro tem, explained how lawmakers will close the gap.
“The priority, of course, is the budget. And what the key is, for me, is to try to balance the budget without raising any revenue. And people say, ‘Well how do you do that?’” Campbell said. “So, again, you always go back to see how programs are working, whether there are certain costs that are being incurred by certain departments or agencies that may be superfluous or their not getting the result we had intended when we first started the program.”
The Shumlin administration and the Democratic leadership, which holds a supermajority in the House and Senate, however, will need an infusion of cash or a diversion of resources to address the governor’s top priority this year — addressing the thorny issues of poverty and “opiate addiction epidemic.” Lake Champlain cleanup will also be costly for the state; towns may have to raise taxes to prevent pollution runoff from roads and sewage treatment centers.
Money will also dominate the health care reform debate. Gov. Peter Shumlin’s ambitious plans to make Act 48, the state’s universal health care framework, a reality in 2017 will require the Legislature to begin “groundtruthing” (as Sen. Claire Ayer puts it) whether the state can afford to move ahead with the first-in-the-nation “single-payer” medical insurance system.
Shumlin made a rare appearance before the House Health Care and Senate Health and Welfare committees to announce that his administration will hire an outside group to analyze the bumpy health care exchange rollout in Vermont. In addition, Lawrence Miller, the secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, will lend his expertise as an entrepreneur to the Vermont Health Connect team, which has struggled with the insurance enrollment technology for the exchange website.
Education spending and funding pressures are building and lawmakers will begin to consider whether to recalibrate the property tax system this year, but it’s unlikely that any major changes to the property tax — or income and sales systems — will be made. 2014 is an election year, and the governor has asked lawmakers to hold off on proposals so that his administration has the political elbow room to develop a tax mechanism for universal health care.
Marshaling agreement on the wide variety of contentious issues that will come before the House and the Senate will be no small task. House Speaker Shap Smith who is renowned for his disciplined leadership reminded the 150 lawmakers in the House that no matter what party they are affiliated with, they are unified by the same goals for their constituents and for Vermont as a whole — they merely differ on how to get there.
“We want a healthy economy with good jobs,” Smith said. “We want to make sure that our friends and neighbors have the tools necessary to unlock their individual potential. And we want strong, lively, vibrant communities that are safe for our kids and for our neighbors.”
“We don’t always share the same views on how to achieve those goals,” Smith continued. “And that’s good. That’s okay. Because democracy is about the free exchange of ideas. If we were all a big monolith moving in one direction, we would not serve the constituents and the citizens of this great state as effectively as we do.”
Speaker Smith’s Opening Remarks on the first day of 2014 Legislative Session
As we embark on a new legislative session, it is wonderful to see those who are returning, and I offer a special welcome to Kathy Hoyt and Marjorie Ryerson who are just joining us. It’s great to welcome Kathy and Marjorie to the body, though it is with some bittersweet-ness. Marjorie replaces Rep. Larry Townsend, who was a generous man, unafraid to express his own views, and who really embodied public service in doing his utmost to bring the concerns of his constituents to this body. Those of us who did have the opportunity to serve with Larry are very lucky. Kathy replaces Margaret Cheney. I want to express my congratulations to Margaret; I don’t quite understand why anybody would want to leave this august body for the Public Service Board. But our loss is the Board’s gain. They’re lucky to have someone with keen intellect, empathy for Vermonters, and willingness to build a consensus. She will be a real treat and it’s good to finally have another woman on the board.
I’ve struggled quite a bit to decide what I would say at the beginning of the session. Often, I’ll go through a laundry list of legislation. I know we are already familiar with this list and we will have the opportunity to work on that list as we move forward. But I think of the second year of a biennium as an opportunity for us to reflect — to reflect on the successes of the past session, to think about what went right, and also to consider what might not have gone as well as we had hoped.
We all share the same goals for Vermont. We want a healthy economy with good jobs. We want to make sure that our friends and neighbors have the tools necessary to unlock their individual potential. And we want strong, lively, vibrant communities that are safe for our kids and for our neighbors. We don’t always share the same views on how to achieve those goals. And that’s good. That’s okay. Because democracy is about the free exchange of ideas. If we were all a big monolith moving in one direction, we would not serve the constituents and the citizens of this great state as effectively as we do.
There is an inherent tension in the work that we do, reflected in the motto of the seal that hangs above this podium: Freedom and Unity. Freedom: the individualism that is the bedrock of the citizens of this state of Vermont. And Unity: the idea that we can’t have a successful community without those individuals coming together. As lawmakers, we must work to create policies that benefit both the individual and the community as a whole. I hope that we will remember that as we face the challenges that we have ahead of us this year.
We have a budget gap to close. We have concerns about the opiate epidemic in our communities. We have continued growth in our education spending and pressures on our education funding system. We know that we want to do better for our kids. We know we face real challenges in our environment. Our lakes are sicker because pollution continues to affect them and we haven’t been able to reach a consensus about how to fix that problem. And we’ve had a bumpy rollout of the health care exchange this past month.
We have a number of issues that we have to fix, but just like at the end of last year, we know that in the end we’ll come together to solve these problems. Each year we have significant challenges that present themselves. And we know that each year we come together, with the input of our constituents, the expertise of our legal and fiscal offices, and the hard work of the individuals within each of the committees, and find solutions to the challenges that we face.
When I look out at you all, I don’t see Democrats. I don’t see Republicans. I don’t see Independents. I don’t see Progressives. I see people who are here to represent their communities, to represent the individuals within their communities. And I know that our communities sometimes send us here with conflicting instructions. They want us to represent them as individuals and they also want us to represent their community. It is our job to try to resolve those disparate interests and knit together the individual interests that ensure that we have the fabric of a strong society.
So, as we embark on this next session let us remember how much we’ve done so far. Let us look forward to the opportunity we have to continue our work.
Let us not ever forget that we are working for our families, our neighbors, our friends.
Let us find strength in the diversity of our views and work to knit those diverse interests together for the common good of this state that we all so love.
And let us get to work.
Thank you.