 Welcome to Capital Beat, a joint production between the Vermont Press Bureau and Orca Media. I'm Joshua Gorman. Joining me is Press Bureau Chief Neil Goswami. It is Tuesday, May 10th, and this is the final episode. We're gonna do a wrap-up of what happened with the legislative session. We're gonna talk about the budget. We're gonna talk about marijuana. We're gonna talk about independent contractors and everything else that came up. And so to begin, Neil, a lot of Durham and Strang coming out to nothing with this pot legalization. Tell us how things went and how things ended up. Yeah, so we'll do a quick recap of last week. Lawmakers worked pretty late into the night on Friday, wrapping up their business, voting on money bills after, I guess it was around 10 o'clock or so. They then, leaders who are leaving their positions, House Speaker Shapsmith, Senate Pro Tem John Campbell, Lieutenant Governor Phil Scott, and Governor Peter Shumlin all addressed lawmakers at the close of business, and they finally gaveled the session out right around 12, 20 or so on Saturday morning. So the legislative session is officially over. We are going to have a very new look and feel next year with the new Speaker, new Pro Tem and new Governor and new Lieutenant Governor. This is the first time this has happened in quite some time, right? Yeah, most people can't recall when there was such a historic turnover of leadership positions at the state house or in state governments. So it'll be interesting for us and the media. It'll be interesting for voters and it'll be interesting for other lawmakers when they return next year to see who is in charge and sort of who claims the power base here. Shapsmith has been a very effective and powerful speaker and he seemed to have sort of more sway over legislative affairs than the Senate Pro Tem John Campbell. And early in his tenure, Governor Schumann was more powerful and we saw that sort of wane over the years. Now in his sixth year, he was not as effective as he hoped to be. And we'll talk a little bit about that as we go through the issues. So kind of exciting and a little bit unnerving for a lot of people as we move into a new era of state government as these four gentlemen go off to different things. As you mentioned, one of the issues that lawmakers tried to tackle this year was legalization of marijuana for recreational use. We've talked a lot about that on this program before and it's been talked about on lots of programs out there but there was no sort of last ditch effort or trick up their sleeve to get marijuana legalization over the finish line. The Senate, as everyone knows, passed S241. It created a legalized retail market for marijuana. I think it had 54 retail outlets throughout the state that it would have been, that would have been permitted under the bill. But the House never really warmed to that position and really didn't warm up to anything at all regarding legalization. They didn't agree to that proposal. They tried to pass the study commission to the House Judiciary Committee amended the Senate bill to include a study commission on the issue that would report back to the legislature. Even that didn't make it through to the end. A final compromise that the Speaker and Democratic leadership in the House tried to put forward was decriminalization for the possession and cultivation of up to two marijuana plants. That also failed on the Senate floor. I think it was a 70 to 77 vote. The Senate plan, which finally did get a vote on the House floor, failed miserably, 121 to 28. This was something that Governor Peter Shumlin really wanted. He pushed for it. He worked the final weekend before the voting took place. His administration worked to find the votes and Shaft Smith had been warning him and other advocates that the votes weren't there and it shouldn't come to the floor for a vote because it would go down miserably. But they kept pushing for that vote and they got it and it turns out Shaft Smith was right. So you know, one of the things that Shaft said to us going into the weekend before that vote excuse me, is that he didn't wanna see a vote because he was worried he was going to possibly set back the efforts. Do you think the overwhelming drubbing that the bill received in the House is actually set back the cause for legalization going into the next session? You know, I'm not so sure about that. This conversation around the legalization of marijuana was certainly advanced this year. There's no question that the conversation now was about how and when, not if, to legalize marijuana. So if you are an advocate of legalization for recreational use, that has to be a positive step forward. And there's a joint legislative committee, judicial oversight committee that has agreed to hold I think six meetings over the summer and fall to figure out how to move this issue forward which is also a real step forward for advocates because the House was very, very reluctant to even consider this issue this year. House Judiciary Committee Chairwoman Maxine Grad, a Democrat from Moretown, didn't even want to take this up after the Senate sent it over. But she did so reluctantly with urging from the speaker. So the fact that there's a joint House and Senate oversight committee that will talk about this over the summer to figure out how to move it forward is a good thing. I'm sure advocates are very disappointed they couldn't get something more concrete even the decriminalization of two plants. But at the very least they have some momentum and some positive aspects to take forward into 2017 which I'm sure this will come up again. Absolutely, and I would say the opposition to marijuana actually manifested itself in the form of a counter attack with law enforcement advocating and almost getting roadside saliva tests, right? Yeah, that was an interesting thing. And people like the ACLU of Vermont, Alan Gilbert, the outgoing executive director there, raised some very serious concerns about that and it didn't pass. And it's probably a good thing that didn't pass. It seemed like there were a lot of scientific and legal questions around how effective this testing was and whether or not it actually could prove that somebody was impaired on the roads after smoking marijuana given the questions about how long it stays in your system, how effective the testing is, and also what the legal ramifications are, whether it could be used simply for probable cause or as a piece of evidence against somebody who has stopped and believed to be driving under the influence of marijuana. So in the end that was pulled out of bills that were moving ahead and they opted not to do that. We should say there was some positive developments on the medicinal marijuana front. The legislature agreed to include glaucoma and chronic pain as conditions that would qualify you for medical marijuana. And that allows you to possess and grow marijuana legally if you are registered with the state. And they also shortened the timeframe that you have to work with your doctor to be eligible. In that sense, the medical marijuana stuff did move forward. The recreational use will be another conversation for next year. I see. Yeah, yeah. There were a couple other judicial reform stuff that sort of wrapped up at the end of the year. There were a handful of bills that were sort of, the House and Senate were angling over and holding up in hopes that their priority would also advance. In the end, they were able to pass a reform of driver's license suspensions. Chittenden and Windsor counties have held license restoration days where people who have really old, outstanding traffic fines were able to go and settle them at a very reduced rate. And the governor asked lawmakers to do that on a statewide level so that people who are constantly driving around with suspended licenses and accumulating more and more fines that more than likely they will never be able to pay or just never pay. They'll be able to settle those and become a legal driver again. So House and Senate negotiators were finally able to determine that tickets issued before July 1st, 2012 will be eligible for this program that'll allow them to get their license back at a far cheaper rate. And there was another bill that Senator Dick Sears, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, really, really wanted was reforms to how youth offenders are dealt with in the criminal justice system. The legislation will raise the age to 22 for youth offenders who can be referred to the Family Division of Criminal Court, which, as people might know, is confidential and would protect their records from public scrutiny. So all those college kids who do something silly while they're at school and they may face a criminal charge, they can now be referred to the Family Division and have their records protected as they go on to graduate and grow up and move on to the real world and look for a job. So those are a couple of pretty significant reforms that will probably have some pretty long-lasting impacts on a lot of Vermonters that the Judiciary Committees in both chambers were quite happy and proud of. Excellent. The DLS reform was one of Schumann's priorities in the outline during his final state of the state address and that was a victory that he got. One thing that he did not get that he pushed for all session was a call for divestment from fossil fuels. That's correct. So tell us about how that ended up, I guess, not happening. It's still, I suppose it could happen but it won't be a result of legislative action as the governor called for back in January. He wanted legislation that would have the state automatically divest itself from coal and fossil fuel stocks. Lawmakers were not going to do that. They simply said, no thank you. And the governor is now working sort of with state treasurer Beth Pierce and an investment committee that sort of helps her make decisions on how state funding will be invested, state money is invested. So there's a subcommittee now looking at this issue and they may or may not decide sometime in the future to divest but it won't be this sort of automatic thing that the governor had hoped to get through legislation. You know, and there's, treasurer Beth Pierce has been opposed to divesting from these stocks saying that she has a fiduciary responsibility to do what's best for taxpayers and retirees that count on this money being invested wisely. And you know, there was a lot of back and forth all session long. There were a lot of divestment supporters wandering the halls of the state house working the issue. But in the end, we'll have to wait and see what this committee decides to do. And it was something that, another thing that the governor couldn't pull across the finish line this year. Yeah, and to be clear, the Vermont Pension Insurance Committee has voted numerous times in recent years to commit to not divest. So I don't know if we're expecting some sort of change of art here or some sort of change in leadership. Is that what it's gonna take you think? Probably more change in leadership than a change of heart. It's not, you know, it's hard to say what a group, independent group like that might do, but it just seems to me that it's something that they've been unwilling to do in the past. So, you know, I'm not sure all that has changed to sort of send them in a new direction. Lovely. Yeah, so you've been doing some wrap up stories on a couple of issues. Independent contractors was something that got a lot of ink this year and it turned once again into a whole lot of nothing. Yes. Fill us in on that process. Sure, well, you know, people, there's very few people would say that the current independent contractor laws that exist that define what an independent contractor is are clear and easy to understand for employees, employers, and for enforcement agencies with the Department of Labor. They currently have a series of tests, including are you performing what they call so-called like work, meaning if you are an employer and you have employees that are, say you have a landscaping company or something and you have people who are cutting, cutting grass or something like that, that you can't bring in people who do the exact same job but then just treat them as independent contractors. And so, folks are saying that, hey, this is really stifling development in Vermont's growing tech sector that these high tech companies should be able to bring in independent contractors when they need to, if they're working on projects that might be of a limited scope and that's something that's ongoing. So, folks have been trying to, so the House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development spent most of the first half of the session, I think some of the second half, working on a bill to redefine how independent contractors would be defined. And this bill came out with universal support, a vote of 11-0 out of the committee. And when it came time to bring it up on the House floor, House Speaker Shep Smith said, I don't think this is ready right now. He was afraid there's gonna be a fight with the government operations folks and he saw that it was not, he believed that he was not gonna have a lot of support in the Senate. And so he actually asked that the bill be recommitted and this was a real blow to folks such as Corey Parrott and Heidi Sherman who serve on that committee and who are really, really pushing for this to happen. So they went ahead and they took it back and they worked on the bill and the bill appeared to die. And then magically it was resurrected with like a week left in the session. Kurt Wright asked that that committee be relieved of the bill and they're gonna bring it up on the floor. And so that kind of pushed the issue and they said, okay, we need to come up with something that's going to make it different from the bill that we didn't have. And so representative Mary Hooper from right here in Montpelier came up with compromise amendments that barely got out of committee with like a six-five vote and only with a positive vote was somebody who ended up opposing it. That would be representative Michael Markot. The vice chairman of the committee. Yeah, the vice chair who voted in favor of it just to bring it to the floor even though he didn't support the bill. And so this bill ended up dying and for folks who were really gung-ho to reform the way that independent contractors have defined this is a tough loss. And the way it died was interesting as well. It was a motion from representative Chris Pearson, a progressive from Burlington who made a point of order that it should go to, I think with the Ways and Means Committee. Yes, right, because there was going to be an impact on the state's unemployment insurance fund. And so it's going to have an economic impact that should go to Ways and Means. And so yeah, with this procedural move it effectively killed the bill for the session. Left not enough time for it to sort of come back and be on the calendar again. So yeah, very interesting. I think there were a lot of people who felt like they were going to actually be able to get this done. It's been an ongoing question for years and once again, it came up short. There was one big victory that the governor can claim this year, paid sick leave. Yes. And that seems like so long ago now. It does. But they did get that done this year. Yeah, and it was a long road for sure to make this happen. The paid sick leave bill passed the house during the 2015 legislative session. And they went ahead and then the bill went over to the Senate and there's much debate what form should this thing take? What changes are they going to make? And in the end, the Senate ended up approving the bill no fewer than twice through some interesting procedural chicanery. The bill initially passed. Never a shortage of that government. No, there wasn't. So the bill initially clear cleared the Senate and what the bill called for was employers and so workers who work in places with at least five employees or more would accrue as many as three paid sick leave days beginning in 2018. So the bill cleared the Senate and then Senator Bill Doyle out of Washington County the following day asked to reconsider his votes. And since he had been on the winning side he was allowed to do that. And so what that did is it brought it up again and allowed Senator Brian Campion out of Bennington into introduce an amendment that would have made a larger carve out for small employers so that there were basically the net result would be there'd be fewer employers on the smaller end who would have to provide paid sick leave. And so this was certainly a contentious issue and Campion's amendment was ultimately defeated and it was defeated with an affirmative vote or I should say a vote against it from his fellow County Senator Dick Sears who went ahead and switched his vote because he was upset about Bill Doyle switching his vote. And so in the end the Campion amendment was defeated and they substituted an amended version and what that does is it calls for a study to look at what the economic impacts are going to be for employers having to provide paid sick leave. Senator Joe Benning said, hey we should have had the study before we're passing this thing as opposed to studying the impacts after it's already been imposed but that's what ended up happening. So yeah, this is definitely a victory for folks who are really advocates for labor. It follows the raise in the minimum wage that came. So yeah, if you're a small worker I suppose or low paid worker, this is gonna be a good thing for you. Yeah, another thing that happened early in the session that seems to be almost forgotten about now was the tweak to Act 46, the school governance law. What was that all about and why did they act with such haste to get that done? Yeah, I mean some people would argue that there wasn't enough haste taken. So what happened, so Act 46 is the big bill that calls for the merger of smaller school districts into larger school districts. And the advocates of this say that, hey this is going to, among other things, save money because it's going to provide for some measure of efficiency among school districts. You're gonna be able to purchase things on a larger scale and it's gonna be a good thing. But they realized that it's gonna take years, literally this thing is supposed to be done by 2020. So it's gonna take years to potentially find any savings. So they imposed this two year spending cap or I should say spending thresholds. You can exceed them. And so these thresholds are based upon, they're individual and they're based upon how much a school district spends compared with the statewide average. So if you're a low spending district you're gonna have a higher threshold as opposed to if you're a higher spending district. And so what happened was last fall, all these school boards and these school districts went ahead and they started making their budgets and they were like, man, we cannot stay under these thresholds. And part of the larger reason is because they were hammered with this 7.9% increase in health insurance costs. I can tell you when the bill was being drafted and the spending thresholds were put in, it was kind of at the last minute and there wasn't a lot of consideration for things like, hey, what if we have a giant increase in the cost of health insurance? They were just kind of, the thresholds are just kind of arbitrarily tossed in there. And so what happened was lawmakers had to wrestle with, okay, what are we going to do? And Republicans said, hey, leave them in place. It's supposed to hurt as we were told. This is supposed to be difficult. You're supposed to make really tough cuts. This is supposed to be painful. However, in the end lawmakers came back for a special session early on a Saturday morning on January 30th to go ahead and change the thresholds. And so what this allowed them to do was to meet the January 31st deadline for school districts to warn their budgets. And so lawmakers went ahead and patted themselves on the back going, hey, look at that, we made it. But in reality, school districts had already created their budgets with the thresholds in mind. So the idea that somehow they, that the school boards were able to go ahead and make all these adjustments, I mean, they really had 24 hours to do it. So yeah, they went ahead and did it, but I don't know. So much to do about nothing perhaps? Well, I mean, it was a good thing, but it was a sort of thing that maybe should have been thought about when they were first doing the thresholds in the first place. So they went ahead and changed the thresholds for this school, the budgets that people voted on in March. And they went ahead and got rid of the thresholds for next year all together. Yeah. Okay. We mentioned earlier that in a lot of ways this was a difficult year for Governor Shaman. And he's seen his sort of political sway diminish over the years as he's been governor. One of the things, another one of the things that he failed to pull through this year was a dedicated funding source for Medicaid. Last year, people will recall he tried to push the 0.7% payroll tax, which would have raised about $100 million, including federal funding for the state's Medicaid program. This year, after he was rebuffed by lawmakers on that, he returned with a plan to expand the healthcare provider tax. Right now, hospitals and the doctors they employ face a 6% assessment on their services that they pay to the state that helps fund healthcare initiatives. The governor in January proposed expanding that to independent doctors, those outside a hospital umbrella, and dentists at about a half, around under 3%, about half of what they charge the hospitals and hospital doctors. What have raised $17 million? Again, lawmakers said no and they didn't do that. They ended up passing a fee bill this year that raises $27 million. The biggest chunk comes from raising mutual fund registration fees, $24 million, and lawmakers argued that most of that money, almost all of that money, is coming from people out of Vermont, so it won't really impact Vermonters at all. They passed a smaller fee bill, I think that was, or excuse me, tax bill, that was maybe $3 million or so. The Senate stripped out a bank franchise tax, an expansion of the employer assessment to really bring down that tax bill and focus on raising money through fees. And then they wrapped up the budget as well, late Friday, 5.76 billion total spending, I think it was about 2.45 billion in state funds. Any surprises to you in any of these money bills? Surprises, no, I guess I, I mean surprises in that by the time it was all said and done, we all knew where we were gonna be going, I suppose. There was really no, last year we saw a lot of shuffling back and forth between, for private meetings between the speaker, the pro tem and the governor, as they really had some major differences over how to raise money. This year, it seemed like it was a much smoother process. They weren't really arguing a whole lot over the money bills. One of the bigger issues, I guess, was the renewable energy siting bill that had some hangups in the end. The bill tries to give local communities more say in where these projects, wind projects, solar projects can be put in their communities. But the big thing, the big hold up at the end of the session, which sort of leaked into Friday evening to everyone's surprise was how noise standards for wind turbines would be handled. And they finally agreed that they would go through an emergency rulemaking process with the Department of Public Service until they can go through the more formal rulemaking process. And that seemed to be enough to get everyone on the same page and agree to move forward with eventually creating some sound standards for these things that a lot of people claim they can hear when they're up near their homes. Yeah, do you think this satisfied the folks in the yellow vests who were, these folks who were at the state house who were at times, I wouldn't say packing the gallery, but certainly making themselves visible. They were certainly visible. You know, I think it does for now. I think the rulemaking process in which they actually set the sound standards is going to be the new battlefront. And I'm sure they will once again make themselves a very visible presence there and try to influence that process. So hopefully it moves the state forward and how and when and where these energy projects can be built. I think everyone generally agrees that renewable energy is good for the state. There's some questions about what's appropriate and what's not appropriate. So hopefully this can move the conversation forward. Great, so now we're leaving the session and we're getting into election season. Yes, yes, we are, yeah. So the fundraising can start, they have adjourned. Yeah, so in fact there's gonna be an event this Friday, correct? Yeah. Tell us a little bit about what's coming up. What is it? Palooza or something? The shappening. The shappening, yes. House Speaker Shapp Smith after eight years is on his way out. He's weighing a run for Lieutenant Governor. He was in the Governor's race last summer before pulling out in the fall when his wife was unfortunately battling breast cancer. By all accounts, she's doing much better and he is considering not the Governor's race but the Lieutenant Governor's race and he may jump in yet. But first, the Vermont Democratic Party is holding a party and fundraiser for him at the Vermont College of Fine Arts on Friday called the shappening. And it will be a celebration and fundraiser basically for the party. Now, I would imagine there will be nothing said of his pending, perhaps pending, LG campaign since that could raise some issues about in-kind contributions from the party to the campaign if it were to sort of be viewed as one thing. Yeah, we'll have to see how the shappening goes and maybe next week we'll get an announcement from Shapsmith himself about what his plans are. And so if Shapp enters the race, then he will be the third Democrat in a potential primary where people are voting in August, correct? Right, Senator Dave Zuckerman, a progressive and Democrat, is in the race, is Keisha Rahm, a representative from Burlington. And so it could be a three-way primary if he jumps in the race, but he brings with him a lot of sort of institutional power from the Democratic Party and perhaps a number of foot soldiers in the house who would work their districts for him in both a primary and general election against Randy Brock, the Republican candidate. So we have a lot to look forward to in the election season. I'm assuming that campaigns will begin ramping up now that they can focus entirely on this and not the legislative session. So we'll see how that goes. Absolutely, and so we're gonna have a real concrete idea of who's in the race and who's not in the race on May 26th, right? That's the deadline? State races, I think, have to file by the 26th of May. So we should have a good understanding of where legislative seats might be headed and where these statewide seats are going. I don't expect a whole lot of any real surprises for the statewide races at this point. The only pending question right now seems to be if Shaff Smith gets in the race for Lieutenant Governor. But there will be a number of interesting candidates for the House and Senate that we will try to do our best to keep everyone updated on after the filing deadline. Very good, excellent. So Josh, it's been a fun session. Oh yeah. Good work, appreciate it. Thank you. And we thank you for tuning in and watching us discuss the week's progress during the session and we'll be back next year on Capital Beat, a joint project between the Vermont Press Bureau and Orca Media. Thanks again.