 So I want to introduce Sarah, and I bet a bunch of you have seen her on Friday nights on Vermont Public. She does such a great job on Vermont this week. Thank you. And I love her hair, by the way. So I want to tell you a little about her. Sarah Mirhoff is one of Vermont Diggers politics reporters covering the Vermont State House Executive Branch and Congressional Delegation. Prior to joining VT Diggers, she covered Minnesota and South Dakota State politics for forum communications newspapers across the upper Midwest for three years. She has also covered politics in Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, she is a proud alum of the Pennsylvania State University, where she studied journalism. Please welcome Sarah Mirhoff. Thank you so much, everyone. Is my volume OK? Is that me? OK. I'm Sarah. I am VT Diggers State House Bureau Chief, and I'm here today to give you an update from the 2024 legislative session. We're about halfway through. We just had two major deadlines, the crossover day deadlines, which I'll explain in a little bit what those mean. But too long, don't read. We're about halfway through this session. And so I'm here to tell you what's going on and what are the big priorities of this here, if my computer works. Oh, boy. OK. There we go. Sorry about that. OK. So these are the dynamics that we kind of saw heading into the state house. At the start of this legislative session, Vermont is really unique in that we have a divided legislature and governor. Obviously, Governor Phil Scott is a Republican. He's also the most popular governor in the country for the past couple of years now, as well as the House and Senate have a democratic supermajority. So not just a majority, but a supermajority, and in particular veto-proof supermajority, which means that there's a really interesting power dynamic where the legislature can pass their priorities. And even if the Republican governor feel amenable to them and he shows them, they, in theory, have the power, the numbers, to override those vetoes. Doesn't always happen, but it is a dynamic. The other major things going on this year is that it's the second year in a biennium. So Vermont's legislature operates on two-year cycles. So they're voted in every two years, but then in addition to that, the calendar for them, it's actually a two-year calendar. So last year, for instance, the first year of the biennium, whatever they didn't get done, it could stay. It was almost on ice until they came back this January. And they could pick up where they left off. Now, this year, we're in the second year of a biennium, which means that anything that doesn't pass this year, that's a written bill. If it doesn't get through, it dies. Have to pick up where they left off last year and reintroduce the bill, re-go through all of the committee hearings. And we see certain bills are politically pretty tense and will take multiple legislative sessions to get through. We're in the second year of a biennium. It's also an election year, which can pose its own challenges and we'll probably start talking in a little bit about some of the dynamics and power struggles and the rhetoric happening in the building this year because everyone wants to get voted back in, obviously. This is also the second legislative session that's fully back in person since the COVID-19 pandemic first began and they vacated the building for a number of years. And then the real biggie is that the state faced catastrophic flooding this summer and that has posed a real major issue to contend with. Both emotionally, it was a really traumatic event for a lot of folks and a lot of municipalities, but also the dollars and cents of how you pay for something so major. So I have mentioned the partisan breakdown of the legislature and so you can see here, this is a data visualization from my fantastic colleague, Erin Potenko. She's VT Diggers data reporter and you can really see the power dynamic within the body that Democrats have a very, very strong majority after contending with the Republican governor. I wanna hear from you very briefly, just in a couple of words, maybe if someone wants to raise their hand before we get into the bills that the legislature is working on, what's most important to you this session? Is there anyone in the back? School funding, yeah, we're gonna get into that. What else from info? Renewable energy standard, yep. Yeah? Public safety, yep. Job training, oh yeah, good one. Healthcare, yes, big time, okay. So those are actually, it turns out, very lined up with the biggies that the legislature said back in January or even back in December really when I was talking to lawmakers, what are your big priorities this year? Those are a couple of the things that came up. So I would say first and foremost, probably the most emotional and difficult issue to contend with was the flood that was major. It hurt so many people and like I said, it's very expensive to recover from. The other thing is that the timing of the flood presented a really interesting conundrum for state budgeters because we're in this off-ramp period where we've had a ton of money coming in from the federal government for several years now. The American Rescue Plan Act and all these various, you know, the stimulus checks that came in from the federal government during COVID-19 were now in a period where Vermont got pretty used to having money to put toward its priorities and what maybe $3 million two years ago didn't look so expensive. Now it does. Now they are in a situation where things are a lot tighter. That's another dynamic they're facing. Public safety is a hot topic and if most of you live in Chittenden County, I'm sure it's very, very top of mind for you. It's top of mind for a lot of folks. And then housing. Housing is every single year. We are talking about the housing crisis in Vermont. It's a nationwide crisis but it is very acute here. So these are really the top things that I heard from legislators going into the session but we'll get further into this presentation. There's more. We'll get into healthcare. We'll get into all of it. First, flood recovery. This is a photo of Montpelier at the peak of the flood in July taken by my colleague, Glen Russell. This was a really hard day. So building back from the floods, the first kind of major thing that lawmakers could do was pass the Budget Adjustment Act. It's bill that passes every single legislative session. It's the mid-fiscal year adjustment to the budget. Basically they have to, after several months into a budget cycle, they get more information on how things are going, what revenues are actually coming in, maybe what revenues aren't coming in. For instance, this year our transportation fund is really underperforming. But then other things like our sales tax revenues are overperforming, are doing very, very well. And so they have to adjust the budget every single year. The Budget Adjustment Act is the first major fiscal policy that gets through every year. And that presented this year, lawmakers the first and fastest opportunity to get flood recovery dollars out the door. And that's what they did. 23.5 million dollars in general fund money dedicated directly to municipalities that were affected by the flood. Some of that was flexible grant dollars that they could use to say, let's take Montpelier for instance, their downtown was ravaged, right? And their businesses couldn't operate for months at a time that had a massive impact on their sales tax revenues. And their city was facing an awful deficit. These grant dollars could help fill that gap. That was the point of that money. And the point of it was to be flexible so that municipalities could decide for themselves how to spend it. Then there is another 30 million dollars in FEMA match dollars. So those are match dollars that the state has to put up in order to leverage more money from the federal government. In this case, FEMA for rebuilding for the floods, for future flood resiliency projects, that sort of thing. There's also a lot of debate this session about how we go forward from here in terms of flooding with the reality of climate change being what it is and severe weather events being more frequent and more severe it seems every single time. There's a lot of talk about, do we build back the way that we were or do we build back differently? Do we have to reimagine? They are downtowns which are historically built along rivers because that's how colonies and old historic towns were built. Or do we have to go to higher ground? There was a really spirited debate in Montpelier, a city hall debate about whether downtown should be moved up to the college campus up there because they were like, it's away from the river. Didn't end up happening, but it was a really interesting debate. So there's a lot of that going on in the legislature too around reimagining how Vermont's landscape is going to look in the future of climate change and what state lawmakers have to do about it and of course how much it's gonna cost. There was a big flood omnibus bill that was crafted by lawmakers from Barrie and Montpelier which were both very, very heavily struck by the flood. It's largely dead but there are pieces of it that are moving forward and a lot of it is maybe going to be taken up in the big bill which is the budget which we'll get to in a little bit. There's also lastly a debate, I would say a philosophical debate honestly about what should be spent now versus what can wait and what can wait for the feds to come in. To take for instance, FEMA can offer money to homeowners who lost everything, right? It takes years, it takes years and years to get money from FEMA for so many folks and in the meantime there are folks who are living, I mean literally with sub floors, their floors are ripped up, they don't have walls in their homes down to the studs and there's this debate over can people live like this for up to years to get their check from the feds or does the state have a moral obligation to step in and do what it can in the meantime and then furthermore can the state afford that given its budget constraints. So it's complicated, I do not envy lawmakers, I cover them, I do not want to be them. Here's a clip of a story I did back earlier this month, this is when the Budget Adjustment Act passed the legislature and eventually Governor Scott signed it into law and there's a quote from Representative Conor Casey of Montpelier, he said on the floor when the house passed the BAA that the state capital was breathing a sigh of relief thanks to the package, Montpelier suffered so much, quote, we have miles to go with mitigation, economic development and helping individuals who have fallen through the cracks, but today this is tremendously important to us and keeping us afloat. We need to keep the lights on in City Hall before we can do any of those other things. So that kind of I think captures the gravity of the situation for lawmakers representing these municipalities that were so hard hit and we get to the budget, which is the intense battle this year. This is a lovely picture of the dome, by the way, our state capital is so beautiful. Okay, it is, the budget is such a conundrum this year. As I said before, we have this issue of, or maybe an issue is the wrong word, the reality of Vermont on this off ramp from the influx of federal cash for so many years, in addition to that, I'm sure you all know that former US Senator Patrick Leahy left office last election cycle and Leahy had a gift of bringing home the bacon for Vermont. He established the small state minimum, which has brought so much money into the state. He was a master of the earmarking process for our tiny little state and his retirement has marked a huge adjustment for the Washington delegation for Vermont in their ability to bring home money. So that is another piece of the DC puzzle as it relates to the state. There was no recession forecasted by state economists this year, which was interesting because they were really worried about one. Last year around January, it's called the Emergency Board. The state economists met with some high ranking lawmakers and the governor and said they were very concerned about a recession on the horizon. Same as the national conversation, right? This year it became clear that that didn't come to pass. We have this really weird economic reality right now where inflation is so out of control, but also unemployment is really, really low. So people aren't losing their jobs, but they're just paying more and more and more and more for essential services and goods. And so it's not a recession. That doesn't mean that it's an easy economic reality either, especially for working class folks. So no recession and state revenues, despite the off ramp in this extra money coming from the feds, state revenues are actually pretty healthy. I mentioned before that the transportation fund is struggling a bit, but other than that, sales tax are doing very well. The hospitality taxes are doing quite well. The money is coming in the door. There's just a question of how much we need. And this gets to this philosophical debate between our Republican governor and our Democratic legislature. The governor is saying, we just don't have money. We need to live within our means. We cannot raise taxes beyond where they are right now. Whereas the Democratic legislature is saying, look at working folks really struggling right now. The government needs to step up and do more and pay for more in order to help them. And in order to do that, we need to raise taxes in order to raise that revenue. So there's this fierce battle going on between the nickname, the fifth floor, executive branch and the legislature with this budget conundrum. This is a story I did last week, excuse me, when governors got signed the budget address or the budget adjustment into law. He signed it, but he also said he was really concerned about it. And he said that he signed it because he had to, that it had to go into law. It's a very timely bill and it would honestly kind of screw a lot of stuff up if it didn't go into law in a quick manner. But he made clear his objections to the Democratic legislature's spending habits when he signed it. Next, promised we get into public safety. This is a very hot topic in the legislature this year as well. So Vermont's crime rates are on the rise. They remain below the national averages, but there is a clear spike. And I think if folks live in Chittenden County, you're very aware of this. And it probably touches you on a personal level, I can imagine. The Scott administration has been very firm, that this is one of their top priorities, but it's time to get tougher on crime. They say that they don't want to take, say, a Nixon or Reagan approach to tough on crime, but that some of the laws that passed, particularly in that 2020 era, went too far is what Scott said. And so I have a direct quote here from the governor during his budget address quote, I may have been wrong. I've supported and signed some of the very legislation I'm asking you to change today. And this has put him at odds with the legislature. I mean, some of the lawmakers, even Democrats, but more of the moderate-leaning Democrats have agreed that there is something that needs to be done to change these laws, whereas there are some progressives and there's a generational divide, I would say here, really. There are some left-leaning lawmakers who are saying, no, you need to give it more time and that you cannot make a decision to revoke these really generationally significant reforms in just two, three, four years that you need to give it a hot minute before we pull out the rug from underneath the ball. Here's a clip from my illustrious colleague, Sean Robinson. He's been doing a great job of covering the public safety debates this year. This is from back when the governor gave his budget address and despite the title of his speech being a budget address, a lot of it revolved around public safety. And this is the moment when he said that we need to really think about going back on some of the 2020 era that were made in the state. Housing. Housing is major this year as it is every year. And I would say there are probably two prongs to the housing conversation in Montpelier. One is the emergency shelter program and Vermont's second highest in the nation, rates of homelessness. There's a real debate over the state's duty to house or shelter these people and how we can really mitigate homelessness in this state. On the other hand, there's also just the housing supply and demand crisis that is being faced nationwide but is at an nth degree in Vermont for a number of reasons, right? So the housing supply is clearly not keeping up with demand. We have some of the lowest rental vacancy rates in the country which makes it so hard for anybody to find an apartment. I don't know if any of you have looked for an apartment recently or know someone who's looked for an apartment recently. I can tell you it is darn near impossible. There's also like I said, second highest rate of homelessness in the country. Real estate prices are keep going up. But the difference between now and say in 2020 when real estate prices really went through the roof very suddenly is that now the interest rates are high too. Though it feels for some folks who want to buy homes, I mean it's more expensive than ever. Not only to purchase the home but also to borrow in order to purchase the home. And in terms of Vermont specific dynamics, we have Act 250. And Act 250 is our 1970s era land use law. There is some real heavy debate in the legislature over what on God's green earth to do with Act 250. Governor Scott thinks it has to really be rained in and that it has to be pulled back in a major way because it's simply too hard to build new housing in the state in order to keep up with demand. He said that the legislature and his administration has put more money toward building new housing than any administration in history but you can throw all the money in the world at an issue and if your land use law says you can't build here then you can't build even if you have the money. Meanwhile, there are other folks, particularly in the legislature who say that Act 250 is what makes Vermont what it is. Our beautiful, bucolic, lovely Vermont that we all love we can think Act 250 for. That is a very fierce debate going on and of course the floods have only made this worse. We had a housing shortage and then lots of housing got flooded and then the housing gets more expensive and there's less of it and it's just this avalanche that's happening and I would say at this time that it feels like the legislature and the governor are just like this, that they're just budding heads as the problem's just getting worse. Here's a clip from some of my colleagues, Carly Berlin is our housing reporter. We share her with Vermont Public actually and then Habib and Babette are two of our interns and they did some fantastic coverage of some of the latest developments in the Motel Housing Program for folks experiencing homelessness. And then we also had some coverage of Act 250 and the debates going on in the legislature around that and the fact that I would say at the start of the legislative session there was, I actually remember there was this press conference where the governor stood and he had a whole slew of lawmakers to either side of him and they said, this is the year we're gonna do something on Act 250. That bill that they proposed at that press conference where they all but held hands and sank whom by up, that bill is dead. So now we get into crossover and we are halfway through this legislative session. What is crossover? Trick question, there are two crossover days. The first was last Friday. That was the deadline for policy bills to make it out of their committee of origins. So say a public safety bill introduced in the Senate had to make it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee by last Friday. Then there's actually today is another deadline. This is for all the money bills. So any bills that have to raise revenues or are going to cost money to implement, those have to pass out of the quote, unquote, money committees today. So that is the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee or in the House that is the ways or appropriation. Two of those deadlines according to House Speaker, Jill Korinski, she told reporters at a press conference last week, quote, it's the part of the legislative process to hold ourselves accountable. It provides deadlines this week and next week to ensure that both bodies move bills to the other chamber. As a reporter who has covered this legislature and several other legislatures, I will tell you crossover days are, it keeps the gears greased. Things wouldn't get done without deadlines. I'm a reporter, I'm allowed to say that. I need deadlines too. This is the second year of the biennium. And so if, like I mentioned earlier, if a bill dies this year, it's dead, like for real, actually, it's not getting through next year. And so crossover day is this week, even though we're pretty early in the session, halfway through, if it doesn't make it at this point, it's not going unless the rules are broken. And they do happen sometimes. So sometimes let's say, for instance, if a bill dies during crossover day, but there is a real motivation to get it done, lawmakers could, let's say, tack on an amendment to another bill. And you will see at this part of the year that the legislature will really stretch the imagination as to what counts as germane-ness to a bill. They will also do what are called strike-all amendments where they will X out the entire body of a bill and then attach a new amendment onto it to reframe the bill entirely. These are real things, they are perfectly legal, and they do happen in every legislature, I can tell you. So that is what crossover day is. And then we will go through, I have a whole slew of bills on what is dead and alive with the important caveat that rules are made to be broken and things happen. So here are some of the dead bills this year. We have one which would have altered how the Green Mountain Care Board would operate, and that obviously the Green Mountain Care Board is so full of strife, generally speaking. It also had a relatively controversial piece of it that would have allowed children some STI preventative care and there were some interest groups that really came out against that. There was one bill, S211, which would have shifted some of the Green Mountain Care Board's power to the Agency of Human Services. That is no longer. There is another bill, or there was another bill, S224. This was the second attempt in two years to increase lawmakers' compensation. They wanted to give themselves a raise. It died, and there was also a bill that would have lowered the governor's salary. That died, too. Then there is H719, which was that bill that I mentioned earlier when the governor came out with all those lawmakers and said, we're gonna do something really big on Act 250 this year. Yeah, that's dead. S723 was the big on-the-bus flood bill, which, like I said, there are pieces of it that are gonna kind of get picked apart to the bone and they're gonna get dispersed through other bills, but the actual big, it's like a 50-page bill that is not moving through as a whole unit. Consistently alive stuff. More fun, I guess, one could say. Public safety. There is S58, which is a really big on-the-bus bill, which, when I say on-the-bus bill, I should probably clarify, that just means a big, multi-part, all-encompassing bill is what that is referring to. The biggest thing with that bill is there was a really hot debate over Vermont's raise the age initiative. So when I mentioned earlier how Governor Scott wanted to move backward on some of the 2020-era public safety reforms, that's one piece of that. Vermont, a couple years ago, implemented this law to quote-unquote raise the age so that suspects who are under the age of 20 would be referred to family court instead of criminal court, and they wanted to reel that back in, and they're saying that some of those folks should really be an adult criminal court, instead of family court. There's S195, which is a bill on suspects and how they should be supervised and whether they should be granted cash bail. There's H534, which is trying to address the real theft situation that we're seeing in Vermont to really try to tamper down on that because it's becoming such an issue for businesses, and then H626, which would create a one-employed division of animal welfare in the Department of Public Safety, which doesn't sound like much, but considering the fact that there is really no animal control for so many folks in Vermont to call, it's actually a pretty big deal. In healthcare, there's S98, which would give the Green Mountain Care Board more oversight over drug prices to try to lower drug price costs. There is H721, which would expand Medicaid and Dr. Dinosaur eligibility to a greater income bracket, and H766, which would limit pretreatment prior authorization requirements from insurers. So those are also alive. In education, I mean, this has been, I would say that education is one of the hottest topics this year as well. It's a bit of a sleeper hit. People weren't so much talking about it before we went into the legislative session, but with the property tax situation becoming what it has and just this debate over how much we are spending on our schools and what kind of bang we're getting for our buck. My colleague, Ethan, is our education reporter and he got recently switched to that job, and I was like, wow, I don't know what you did, man, to really light a fire under your beat, but you sure did it. So S284 would direct the Agency of Education to create a model policy for cell phones in schools. I don't know if any of you have kids or grandkids with a cell phone situation in schools being what it is, but there was talk about a statewide movement to address that. One bill, H871, would direct a group of lawmakers and law makers and education officials to make a decision on school construction. There's another hot debate I'm sure you all are aware of, and then H873 would pause the PCB testing program. So these are all live. Also alive, tons of environmental bills, and these really intersect with the flood recovery conversation happening in state too. So still alive, somebody mentioned before the Renewable Energy Standard, that's alive, that is moving forward despite the governor's opposition. There are also a couple of bills involving the new regulations around the management of rivers and wetlands and dams, hopefully to solve the, or address the issue of floods moving forward. Really interesting, there's S259, which is the quote, unquote, make big oil pay bill. This really was born out of, right after the floods, I heard from a lot of folks when I was on the ground reporting, people saying things like, it feels really unfair that we have to pay for this, that this is our cost to bear when the oil companies had their role in climate change is how people would raise it to me. And so this was a legislature's solution to that. They said, you know what, you're right, they should pay for it and we're gonna take them to court over it. So that is still alive. And then there's H687, which is the developer and the conservationist compromise bill on Act 250, the land use bill. I think this is my last one of alive bills. There are a couple of bills regarding government accountability. There's one that would set permanent rules for electronic access to public meetings that was born out of the cultural changes that we saw around zooming into public hearings and whatnot. S310 would bolster state government's response to natural disasters. That was in response to some criticism over the summer that state government wasn't as involved if folks thought they should be in the flood response. And then there's H875, which would establish a uniform ethics code for local and state officials. You would be shocked at the debate that I heard on that bill. People really didn't want ethics codes for themselves. Okay, maybe this is my last one. Big tech regulations are two big bills on big tech this year that are still alive. One would enhance data privacy and consumer protection for all of our monitors who access the internet or honestly, even if you don't access the internet, you walk into a building with internet. I mean the big tech apparatus is very, very strong. And so there's a big bill enhancing privacy rights and allowing for monitors a private right to action if their data privacy is compromised. And then there's S289, which would compel social media platforms to adjust their algorithms and coding for children who are on the apps after lots of criticism over social media's impact on young people and their mental health. And that was my last slide actually. So thank you for joining and I think now is question time. There we go. Any on Zoom, Kathy? Okay, you go. What is the status of H72, safe injection overdose prevention sites? Yeah, so that passed through the house and is currently in the Senate. That is a bill that is, oh, so I should explain what safe injection sites are, are establishments where folks who are addicted to drugs could go into a facility and have medical supervision while using drugs and be provided clean needles, if that's what they need, or Narcan if they overdose, things like that and there'd be medical personnel supervising them. The hope of these facilities is that people would not be drugs in the shadows, that there would be some sort of interventionist who could help if something bad happens. But it's really controversial. I mean, a lot of people have a more or philosophical opposition to a government allowing a space for folks to utilize illicit substances. But it is alive at this point. It has passed through the house. I think that was like a six hour long debate or something. It was very, very long and really intense. It's in the Senate right now. As far as I know, it's expected to pass, but the governor is deeply opposed to the bill. Yes, I was surprised to see that the State Department of Public Safety is taking on another role of animal welfare. Because, I mean, last year, under the housing bill, there was a study committee to address the lack of enforcement of building energy codes, particularly residential energy codes. And that study committee came up with a recommendation that public safety, because they are the code enforcer for every other building code in the state, that there should be a beginning to address the lack of enforcement of residential codes, particularly because less than half of the houses built meet the current energy code. And there just seems to be a reluctance for the legislature to even address this, even though it was a top priority recommendation of that study. Interesting. I'm not actually. And it doesn't even make the media, which is really frustrating for builders and architects. Yeah, yeah. Are you a builder or an architect? You're an architect. OK, we're at, gotcha. OK, I'm really interested in that. I didn't cover that study committee. Very interested in hearing all of that. There's been so much conversation this year also around just the capacity of state government. And I mean, clearly legislators thought that animal control was the priority for DPS to take on this year. But there were all these competing interests and only so much money in the bank. And I guess their argument that that's the interest that prompts the code enforcer. It's not my opinion. These are law makers making these decisions there. OK, Zoom? OK. I've heard that there is an issue of open positions in the state government. This prevents things from getting done. And we aren't spending all available funding from the feds because we don't have state resources to enable it. Yeah, this has also been a really intense conversation between the legislature and the governor's office. There are thousands of vacancies in the state government and our lawmakers allege that that is frankly on purpose on behalf of the administration that they're purposefully not filling positions in order to save money. And then lawmakers are saying, look, your state government is under resource. Do you have people doing four different jobs and they really should be doing one job? And there are some lawmakers who go so far as to say that it's setting state government up to fail. And so this is also a really hot topic. And the governor's office has been maintaining the whole time that there is an employment situation happening, too, where employers just cannot hire and retain folks the way they used to be able to. And so they say that they're in this position where they just can't get enough applicants. They can't recruit folks to fill these jobs that it's not intentional trying to fill them. Hi, Sarah, thank you for that very informative discussion. When we first came here about 12, almost 13 years ago, we went to Montpelier because we heard how accessible your legislators were. And you could go there, you could sit in. How has that changed or is it the same since COVID? That's a great question. I arrived in Vermont in 2021. And they were still hybrid at that point. And I was really surprised just personally and as a reporter during COVID times and during this hybrid model, how hard it was to cover this legislature. There were times that I was kicked out of committee rooms and they said, there's not room for you in here. And I was like, I see four empty chairs. Looks like there's room for me in here. And so that was surprising. And I will say that's been mitigated recently. Actually, my newsroom has been really, really active in pushing for open meetings and space in these committee rooms. Honestly, I've gotten into yelling matches with staffers and lawmakers over this because I feel very strongly that reporters need a seat at the table. We are the eyes and the ears of the public. And that's our job is to be a liaison between government and people, our readers, in the case of figure or any of my TV colleagues, watchers. So this has been an issue in Vermont. I will say that compared to other states, I mean, every state is so different, not the beauty of our country or whatever. I'm from Pennsylvania where there are little detectors that you have to go through. You have to show ID in order to get into the state house. Wallmakers are so often meeting in secret, especially in some of these really big states that have such a big government bureaucracy and apparatus around them. It can be really hard to penetrate that wall, right? Vermont, it's a small state house. You can walk right in. There are no metal detectors. I don't need a press badge in order to do my job, which is still weird to me. And then there are other states that are kind of like a middle ground. When I was in Minnesota, I would say it was about a middle ground, where the doors were unlocked, but I needed a press badge in order to get into a committee room or anything like that. So now I would say that Vermont leans more open, though there are issues, particularly around getting, say, open records and documentation. And we've had some issues with getting financial disclosures from lawmakers. They're legally obligated financial disclosures. We did a whole series on that actually last year. That has proven to be quite an issue for Vermont. I don't think I succinctly answered your question. That's my story. Thank you for your talk. And I would like to know more about the education component. I'm struck by what they're thinking about is the condition of the schools and studying how to pay for upgrading. But you didn't talk at all about the issue with the school taxes going up so much. Could you give us some background on that, please? Yeah. So this really all started coming to a head, I would say, in December. The governor's administration wrote a letter to lawmakers live alarm fires saying that property taxes across the state were slated to go up up to 20% in a calendar year. And the governor's office said that that is just unsustainable. People cannot afford it. And it was largely attributed to this deeply complicated education funding formula that was passed a half ago, I think. So that's where this really started. I will say that at the time that this letter was sent to lawmakers and I was starting to ask them about it, there is a lot of skepticism even among lawmakers or like he's just not going to be that bad. It's not really going to go up that much. And then it proved to be true. And you all saw this town meeting day, a third of state or school budgets failed, which was incredible. I mean, that's unprecedented in Vermont. And so it's true. People really can't afford these tax hikes. Now what's happening in the legislature is that there's this bill that is not subject to crossover day rules. Remember when I said there are these little finicky exceptions? It's called the yield bill. That is looking like the avenue that some of the state budget writers are going to take in order to tackle this education funding situation. So it's really hard to even fully answer this question because lawmakers haven't answered it at this point. I don't have a solution in front of me to even be able to report because they haven't given us money, and we're halfway through the legislature. Please, more information about moving existing buildings out of our current well-known flood areas. I think Montpelier should be moved in part. No, I mean, it sounds funny to say it, but there are folks who say that this is just going to keep happening and that we're going to pay all over again. And what Irene was 12 years ago, maybe we'll pay all this money to fix up buildings in another 10 years, or even if it becomes more frequent in another five years. And that's incredibly, incredibly expensive. And some folks say, you know, we've got to get the heck out of here, that we need to get out of these valleys. Now that in and of itself is really expensive. There's also, obviously, so much emotional tie to place and to home and to history. If we're talking Montpelier, there's so much history in that downtown. And I think that's a really hard emotional burden for folks to get over. There was actually a press conference on Tuesday that I covered where lawmakers from Barry and Montpelier were asking for money in the budget to raise buildings. And they were asking for homeowners specifically. There are 20 homeowners in Barry and Montpelier that their homes are flooded waiting for those FEMA checks. And they're scared to death that they're going to be flooded out all over again. So they're asking for money to raise up their home. That is one possibility. Municipalities are asking for money to improve stormwater drainage and infrastructure, maybe raise bridges or widen their rivers. I mean, there are all sorts of things that folks are trying to think about. And I really do think that they're trying an earnest and that they really want to prevent another. This storm wasn't even named. It's not like a hurricane, but another great flood of 2023. People don't want it again, but this is new territory completely. I mean, we are occupying a time that is unprecedented in weather events. And so people are getting really creative, imaginative. Like, say, for instance, the idea to completely uproot downtowns is one that's being seriously discussed. Sarah, first of all, thank you for the emails you send out each week. And if there's anyone here who doesn't get them, you might want to give them the information about it. That's so helpful. My question had to do with housing. One of the solutions to improving the number of housing units was to allow accessory dwellings, and in effect, to say to every town, it overrides their local zoning that there can be two housing units on every five-acre lot. But a lot of these accessory dwellings are being used for short-term rentals like Airbnb. So is there a discussion about a higher tax through the rooms tax to try to offset that? I haven't heard discussion about that. Probably haven't heard, because they kind of snuck it in this week, actually. Yeah, there is a proposal to establish a surcharge for short-term rentals, so exactly that, the Airbnb conundrum. I think a lot of folks think of their accessory dwelling units as a side hustle, one could say, or something to kind of pat out their retirement or their fund money every month. And there is, again, a real moral debate over, is there an obligation for us to be utilizing this space for permanent housing for people who want to live in apartments? Vermont has some of, oh, I'm trying to think of what the actual term is for it. Basically, there are, in a given house, the average number of people living in a single family house in Vermont is two. And that is largely due to our aging population that a lot of folks are empty nesters and their kids have moved out and they stay in their homes and they want to stay in their homes as their home. They've lived there for decades and decades. But there's this question over whether that's efficient when we're living in a time of a housing crisis and whether, say, if you have that mother-in-law suite, you have an obligation to rent it out. I mean, obviously, it's up to every individual person what you do. But if you choose to do an Airbnb, there are some lawmakers who are debating this proposal to increase taxes on that money. Just going back for a moment to the education funding issue, are you able to briefly explain to us how money is distributed from the state to the school districts and what are the proposals for changing that? So Vermont's school education funding formula is incredibly complicated. And to be totally honest with you, there are lawmakers that don't even understand it. I don't fully understand it. To be completely frank with you, it is partially state money and then it's partially local money and then there's a formula to meld those two things together. And there are funding weights depending on the income, the median income of certain areas. So say, I live in Barrie and Barrie is a low income school district, particularly Barrie City, the elementary school district. It's a Title I school. It gets a lot of federal funding. And the intention of the recently redone school funding formula was intended to help schools like Barrie and to say that these kids need more help from the state because the local property taxes in Barrie where the property values are lower, they're getting less money because there's less to tax. That was the intention of it. And it is clearly coming to pass that it is not working as lawmakers. It's not shaking out how they hoped it would. There is this one component of the school funding formula that said that more wealthy school districts were not supposed to increase their funding or their spending by a certain amount starting five years from now. And what ended up happening was that a lot of these wealthy schools said, oh, if that's happening five years from now, that I'm going to be capped at what I can spend, I better spend it all now. And that's part of the reason why we're having this. And then it's distributed across the whole state. So I don't know if I clarified that very much for you, but that is just kind of the spark notes version of how we got into this situation. And it's wildly complicated. And folks are really struggling now to pay their higher property taxes. Is there any movement in the legislature to change the formula or the concept that's used to divert property taxes from so-called wealthy towns to so-called poor towns? Because in each, quote, wealthy town, the property taxes are paid by a bunch of individuals, some of whom wouldn't be able to afford it, wouldn't be wealthy, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. And there's also the issue, too, of you live in a, quote, unquote, wealthy town now that doesn't necessarily mean you're an incredibly wealthy person. It means that you bought your house when you did. Maybe that was 30 years ago before you were considered to be. And we see this with gentrification, right? Like, Tchaikovsky is actively gentrifying. Or there are parts of Burlington that are actively gentrifying. And folks who moved in 30 years ago wouldn't be able to move in today, right? Yes, there are talks of how to reform this. There is nothing solid at this point on what is happening. And to be honest with you, I have a hard time thinking that they're going to do something really major on this this year because they have so little time. And it's such a big issue to struggle with. And so I think that they're going to make some movement on it this year, but not fully solve. We all see stories that basically the governor and the legislature sort of are firing artillery at one another. But do they sit down and across the table and actually try to work things out? Does that happen very often? No. That's what I thought. They are supposed to have legislative leadership. And the governor are supposed to have, I think they're bi-weekly meetings. And I've heard that a lot of those meetings are getting canceled. Hi. My question arises from the last slide that you had with information on it, which if I read it right, yes, that one, S289. Yeah. OK, it's not passed yet. OK, well, anyway. My question was, can a state require media companies to conform to standards addressing mental health or emotional health or whatever you want to call it? Some good that they think they're going to protect their children. Can they do that? Or do they set the standards? Or are the federal standards that states can have the option of implementing? I mean, we see a lot of this stuff, especially. We've read a lot about the state of Florida, in particular and maybe elsewhere. But throwing out a lot of books and setting standards around what can or cannot make it on the shelves of libraries. But the relationship between states and national companies was triggered by that last slide there. And I wonder if you could explain that. So there are not federal regulations on this very issue. And that is part of the reason why Vermont lawmakers have said that they want to pass a bill like this, is because Congress isn't acting on this. And they'll tell you that they think Congress should be. But they simply aren't. There's not much happening in Congress these days, to be totally honest with you. And this is a really big problem to reckon with. There's also a lot of questions over whether this should be a state-by-state issue, because what, you drive over to New Hampshire and there are different laws subject to these multinational social media corporations. It's kind of a whole mess, to be honest. Now, this specific bill, the nickname, the Kids Code Bill, there is a similar bill that passed in California last year and they got their pants suit off by the social media companies who said it infringes on their First Amendment rights. And there are a couple other states, in addition to Vermont, that tweaked their bills this year to hopefully address those legal challenges and to hopefully stymie a First Amendment challenge in court. It's like Vermont, New Mexico, Minnesota. I want to say there are two more that are looking into bills like this. Vermont is by far the smallest, actually, the smallest state that's looking into passing legislation like this. But the way that they would go about it with this bill is actually, it wouldn't be censorship of the content itself, like it wouldn't say you can't post XYZ content because it's like explicit for children. It wouldn't be that, it's on the back end, so it would basically compel the social media companies to rein in for younger users the coding mechanisms that make social media so addictive. So when you're scrolling on social media and you feel like you can't stop and you're like, oh my God, how did an hour go by? That's what it's trying to address. So it's not the actual speech itself is what lawmakers will tell you. It is the design of the app because they say that this addictive nature of these social media apps are so harmful to kids who are staying up late, scrolling through their phones, addicted to their phones. The other day I read where one of the registrations was suggesting additional taxes on income over $400,000 and also taxing unrealized capital gains for these people. I'm curious how many people in Vermont follow into that category? A pretty small number, yeah. And that is part of the debate over these policy ideas is there are some folks who say that folks are not paying their fair share, that even if there aren't many that we should be taxing that income. And it's a progressive tax policy where the current one actually is for five income over $500,000 and it would be, I believe, an 11.7% tax rate of income exceeding $500,000. And so it's not like all of your money is taxed at 11.6% just the money over 500K. Now the Sky Administration has said that's barely anybody in Vermont and even when it is the case, so often times that's for folks that that's only like one year, maybe two years. A particularly lucrative year, maybe you sell your house, something like that. And that it's not actually continual, that there are very few people in Vermont that would be paying that tax on a regular basis. But then the argument that lawmakers in favor of this bill are saying is that these are folks that are making quite a lot of money and that they should be contributing more in order to help pay for services for the rest. This will be our last question. There's a real shortage of staff, of low income, of low paying jobs. And I think about the immigrants coming in. Do you, is immigration ever discussed in the legislature and is it easy or difficult for immigrants to come and take these low wage jobs that are lacking? Oh that's a really good question. And there is actually some discussion on that at that emergency board meeting back in January that I mentioned where the state economists were talking to legislators and Governor Scott. Now something that the economists said was that immigration is actually something that state governments can have like quite a bit of power in trying to attract more people coming into the state via immigration. You can do a lot to ease that process for immigrants and they contrasted that with the declining birth rates in Vermont and nationwide really. And they said it's really hard to change the economic landscape so much that people will start increasing birth rates. But immigration is something that you really could do. The issue in Vermont is that they have no where to live. There's no how. That's the biggie is that I mean that's the part of the job crisis in general in Vermont. There's so few affordable housing especially if we're talking about some of the lower wage hourly jobs folks need to live. Sarah this has been very, very good. So knowledgeable. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.