 We're here to show people around the state house visually, but also to, you know, get an understanding of the governor's budget address today. So I'm wondering from your position, what you think is going to come down today and what are your thoughts about it? Well, I mean, first of all, one of the things we keep in mind generally is that the governor proposes and the legislature disposes. You know, we then, not that we just, you know, don't accept any of his recommendations, but we are the ultimate arbiter of what goes in the budget. And so, you know, we then look at what the governor is putting out there as his priorities and try to find some common ground. I think we have to all keep in mind the governor received a huge mandate from the voters and so did the Democratic majority in the legislature. People are asking us to work together. And I hope we hear a lot about housing, transportation, some basic infrastructure issues. I think where we disagree with the governor and we'll probably hear some of that is the revenue needed to help support families with paid family leave and childcare. I'm Senator Tanya Vihovsky. I am a senator from Chittenden Central. And Tanya, so you just heard the governor's budget address. What are your first impressions from what we heard from Governor Phil Scott? Yeah, I mean, the governor certainly is keen on making some record one-time investments, which I think is really important. You know, it was hard for me to hear some critical things left out. You know, he is talking a lot about affordable housing, but he continues to talk about that as rentals only, which we know shuts middle and lower income people out of the wealth market. In this country, we hold the vast majority of our wealth in our home equity. And if we only discuss affordable housing as rentals, we're actually trapping people in cyclical poverty. So that was certainly, you know, disheartening to hear him continue to only talk about affordable housing in terms of rentals, rather than building housing equity so people can afford to buy in the state. I mean, I'm the only renter in the Senate. And I've given up on ever being able to afford to own a home here, which is is really unfortunately the state for so many younger Vermonters. And it's I think why we have such a demographic problem. You know, I think the investment in child care is important, but we know from the RAN study that's not enough. It is not actually going to ensure that every child has access to equitable, high quality child care and that our early educators are getting paid fair and livable wages. So I'm happy that he is committing to making additional investment and we need to do more than that. Some of the other pieces that, you know, talking about substance use and mental health care, I'm a social worker. This is certainly critically important. And there was no reference to harm reduction services. We have seen year after year record deaths due to due to overdoses and we simply have to keep people alive. We can build out treatment services and of course we need to do that and we can build out prevention services and of course we need to do that. But if people aren't alive, they can't access them. And so we simply have to change the conversation and make investments in harm reduction. And we've seen across the globe really that when we do that, people are more engaged in treatment and prevention. One, because it prevents death, but also because it builds trust and it builds the capacity for people to enter into those services when they're ready. The governor also really didn't mention the climate catastrophe. He talked a little bit about pollution and a little bit about clean water. But the reality of it is, is we are in an absolute catastrophe in terms of climate. I mean, we've seen it just this winter with extreme weather events and 60 degrees in January and flash freezing where we're being begged to stay off the roads by the Vermont State Police. And those events are just going to get more and more frequent. And so I think it was frustrating to not hear that mentioned as well as not really talking about the climate resiliency that we need. Talking about investing in our mobile home parks is important but we also need to talk about how we move the largely low-income individuals out of flood zones, which is where we put a lot of these mobile home parks. So I think that it was a only partially formed conversation. So we've just heard the address. You're coming up with your thoughts. The legislators are coming up with their responses and their impressions on it. So what happens next and how does the governor's budget get moved forward and revised? And what does that process kind of look like? Yeah, it's kind of a complex process. And my understanding is it looks a little different on the House side than it does on the Senate side. And I'm obviously a little more familiar with the House process having been there previously and being a new senator. But the committees of jurisdiction that are working on policy points will certainly take into consideration the things that he talked about and the things that he mentioned and where there might be points of compromise and where there might be spaces where we fundamentally disagree and the appropriations committees will really go over that with a fine tooth comb and work with the policy committees of jurisdiction to try and flesh out what policies and what initiatives need to be funded in order to meet the needs of Vermonters. The capital bill, which is sort of separate from the larger budget, will go to our institutions committees where they will start to look at the buildings and infrastructure and where they need to make investments and how that lines up with the governor's proposal and how maybe it doesn't. And then the transportation committees will work on the transportation bill again to look at where they align with the governor's proposals and where they don't. And then we know this governor has heavily used the veto pen so there can always be those spaces if there's big enough disagreements where we get into that space of vetoes and veto overrides. Yeah, do you expect now with the combination of the Democratic caucus now having a veto proof majority or at least that was something that the Democrats were celebrating and on election night, I remember, is that something that you see potentially playing a role in this legislative session? I certainly think it'll play a role. I mean, I think it's important to keep in mind that the Democratic caucus has a wide range of where people sit and we have certainly been in a space in previous bienniums where we had on paper a veto proof majority and when some critical votes came down, that's really not how things went down. I mean, I do know that in both chambers we have historic super majorities so I think that that does give us a little bit more freedom and sort of protection in some of those instances but at least my hope, and I certainly can speak for the conversations we've had in the Senate Democratic caucus, we don't want to govern that way. We don't want to govern by ultimatum and veto and it's bad governance. We wanna be at the table and we want the administration at the table building compromise and doing better work for Vermonters but I certainly do think there are some critical policies that have been vetoed in the past that we may try to move forward again because we feel that strongly that it is what's best for Vermont and I can't speak for the governor but we've certainly seen some interesting vetoes like the pension veto last year that passed both houses unanimously and was still vetoed by the governor so I don't anticipate that there will be zero vetoes. Just curious to know, do you think four million is enough for welcoming refugees? It seems to have the biggest standing ovation so I'm just curious what you're thinking about and where you think that money's gonna go? Particularly, do you think there's a need for language access money? Well to answer your first question, no, four million is not nearly enough to provide support and housing and language access for new Americans, refugees, immigrants, anyone needing that. I think part of the reason there was a standing ovation to that is it's, in my knowledge, the first time that the governor's ever publicly made mention of putting any money in that direction and so I can't speak for every one of my colleagues but I can certainly speak for the ones that I was sitting near and have spoken to after that, of course it's not enough. Where exactly it'll go, we'll have to wait until we see the more detailed budget from the governor and how we wanna work with that. You know, I, in my first internship, actually worked with new Americans through Connecting Cultures in Burlington and so it's, and being the representative for Chittenden Central where we have our most diverse cities and the most need for those supports, I think it is critically important and four million is not even close to enough, especially in this moment when we're starting to see more refugees coming, particularly we're seeing a lot of influx from the war in Ukraine. We just heard the governor's budget address. What are your first impressions? What did you hear from the governor and what might have been left out in that speech? Well, my first impressions was that there's a couple of policy areas that actually line up with what House and Senate progressives have said are our priorities but I left with the underlining impression though that they're all tiny little incremental investments in areas that need much more significant attention to actually make systemic change or to make a significant change to really address some of the crises facing us and two in particular that stood out, House and Senate progressives talk a lot about economic dignity. That's one of our priorities this biennium. That looks at really supporting working families, looking at our housing crises, looking at workplace protections for workers, things that wrap around in a deeper, more meaningful way around workforce development and figuring out what really protects workers and helps retain workers and good paying jobs. So when the governor talked about housing, he talked about putting some more money into the VHIP program which upfits basically blighted properties. And we've put a lot of investments of federal money into housing, new building and again upfitting blighted property. But one of the continued things I am looking at is where are tenants in this conversation? We are moving a lot of money towards developers and landlords and when you think about who is most struggling in a hot housing market, it is not those folks. It is folks who are paying rents or trying to move out of a rental into a home that they're buying for the first time. And we've made very incremental investments and I haven't seen any significant investments in tenants long-term, so renters. These short-term programs that were emergency oriented are all drying up with federal funds. We didn't even do enough funding to get people through the winter with the VRAP program which was that temporary rental and utility assistance program. So we need to be much more strategic and we need to get into the details around where tenants are in housing investments and making sure that we strategically say this must be passed on through the landlord into tenants. For example, controlling rent for a certain period of time if a landlord is accessing the VHIP program. The other piece around economic dignity is childcare. Childcare and housing are sort of intertwined with working families of what we, I'm one of them struggling with. I have young kids myself and it is a massive problem and we have been told by advocates for years now that to make a significant enough change you have to think about two things related to childcare. You have to think about affordability for working families and you have to think about early educators as well which are predominantly women in this field. And so he did not say a word about early educators. He talked about supporting working families up to 400% of federal poverty measure which is still not all working families. That's only to a certain limit. So I appreciate of course supporting the lowest income people but he left out people who are just above that income level who are still paying well more than 10% of their income on childcare and then I also did appreciate he went in a little bit about after school that has no subsidies whatsoever and it's a real struggle for families with kids over five of what you do after school and during the summer to be able to work a full-time job it's impossible to figure that out. So we have to do more there but he didn't provide enough money to really come up with the solution we need and I wanna emphasize again early educators our jobs that don't get exported from the state they are in our communities we can even make more childcare spots which we also need in this whole issue. If we invest significant money in paying these people professional wages they are professionals they are educating our young children they are supporting our young children shout out to my childcare center I am so appreciative of what they do every single day I could not do what I'm doing without them but the investment that the governor proposed is insignificant we need something more like 175 million to 250 million roughly and he did something I forgot the number now but well below 100 million dollars that will not get us there. Thanks so much so it sounds like so we've listened to the governor's speech you and your colleagues are coming up with your impressions and your thoughts on the proposed budget so what happens next how does his budget get kind of carried forward and revised and eventually on a track to be approved and put into action. That's a great question so there's actually two things that start now we have what's called the budget adjustment act the BAA and that is gonna go through first through all the committees to give our recommendation our sign off on where we need to tweak this year's budget so we're halfway through the state fiscal year right now it's turns over on July 1st and so there's a whole and these are significant they used I don't think they were probably as significant before we had all these federal funds but we basically come back in in January it's about halfway through that fiscal year and we get to get reports on where is their surplus where was money not spent where was it spent completely and where does money need to be shifted around for the final five or so months of the fiscal year so that's the first thing we'll work on and the governor sends along recommendations on how we should do that through state agencies around those requests so we'll dive into that first and there's usually no new policy that comes out of that it's just kind of moving things around of what we've already approved but then we'll dive into the big budget and that's one of the last things it starts in the house starts in the house I wanna say that confidently I'm pretty, yes it starts in the house and then we go through our overall policy committees I serve on house commerce and economic development which is often called a mini money committee because we actually have a lot of big ticket items like workforce development and economic development which has a lot of money that we have to allocate through policy decisions that we make and then it goes over to the Senate and then there's the great negotiation by the end it's one of the last things we usually pass at the end of the session because it goes back and forth and there's a lot of things towards the end that get pulled out pulled in so we started but there's many weeks ahead around figuring out what will be funded and then frankly how we're still gonna do this dance with the federal money that most has been allocated but there are new infrastructure funds that we also have to learn related to climate and related to infrastructure money that gets kind of put on top of what is called base funding which is the general fund money that Vermonters generate within our tax system here. Okay, kind of a complicated process. Yeah it is, let's start with the house I was feeling a little insecure about that but it does start in the house, yes. And I wanna circle back to one more thing that the governor said which is that he mentioned at the end an investment in supporting refugees immigrants coming to Vermont and that got probably the biggest ovation of any of the comments that the governor said. The governor's proposal to invest $4 million in the refugee and immigrant community in the state of Vermont I believe was the only thing that got a full standing ovation in the chamber today. I am encouraged by that because we did a little bit of consideration of increasing funding last fiscal year for the new office for refugees and immigrants. It's a new office set up by the state of Vermont that has literally one person at this point. So we invested about it, we were gonna try to move more about upwards to a million dollars last year but because of limited capacity we were moving a lot of federal money of course at the time. They actually didn't need all that money, they said we can't actually move all that money. So I'm encouraged that I guess capacity has grown, interest has grown, need has grown around that. However I think one of the things again a policy question here is not all immigrants and refugees are welcome to the state in the same way. It was amazing to me and not in a good way how people chipped over themselves to send state dollars out to Ukraine to support folks who are struggling in that conflict zone over in Ukraine. And yet we have for years not held the same level of welcome and belonging and inclusion kind of practices with people who are black and brown coming from other parts of the world. And so I think if we're gonna make this investment I hope that we double down on what does being an inclusive state mean? How do we become a welcome state that really thinks about these folks as contributions to our community and really challenges the national rhetoric where it depends on where you come from if you're a valuable immigrant or refugee to our country. The other part about that is we have to level up on language access for folks and really make that seamless within state government. We fail, we fail on a lot of levels right now with inclusivity. So I don't know where he's going to specifically say propose to spend that four million dollars but language access and making sure there's cultural competency with employers, making sure our agency of commerce shows up with that level of technical support for businesses as much as they show up with how to turn a profit. You have to be good employers. You have to be inclusive and belonging employers that value those pieces. So if those are elements of it, great. I doubt four million will get us there with everything. If this is a priority we need to be responsive to what the community needs and then put the money forward. Because I also worry that some of this might be checking a box when if we really want to make a significant investment of what's needed it will take more than that to really help folks transition and stay in Vermont and figure out how to navigate these systems we talked about before. Affordable housing, affordable childcare, et cetera. Because after folks are relocated after a year there's a lot of federal money that dries up in terms of supports for folks and we have to be thinking about that. One last thing is of course it's all well and good to put money towards an issue but Vermont as it's in and of itself also needs to look at being true communities of inclusion and that means really thinking about safety and belonging for black and brown folks, BIPOC folks, immigrants, people who were English is not their primary language. And I think leading by example as a state so that we make sure that we are, there's a declaration of inclusion going around for example with many towns there's only 80 that have signed on at this point. So really leading with policy that supports communities growing in that way and really rethinking what does you know what do state communities look like? How do we talk about racism, racism exist? We are one of the whitest states on purpose this is not by accident. And so we have to grapple with that other reality so that when folks are relocated here who are black and brown they truly are landing in a state that sees them and values them for who they are.