 Hello and welcome to Under the Dome. My name is Bobby Lucier. We're here on the last day of the legislative session this year where legislators are considering a budget bill that does not include funding to continue the emergency housing program that was established during COVID that's currently supporting a little under 3,000 Vermonters and housing them in motels across the state. So we're going to be chatting with legislators today to talk about what the state could be doing to better support some of those families that are facing houselessness possibly this summer and what the state could do to support those families moving forward. So let's go talk with some lawmakers. Brenda, can you just tell us why you're here at the state house today? Sure. I'm here today because they are going to be voting on the budget. The legislature is going to be voting on the budget both the House and the Senate. Actually, they're going to be voting on the conference report, which is the compromise between the Senate and the House on the budget. And right now that conference report does not put the funding needed into emergency housing. There are 1800 households and 2800 individuals across the state who will be unsheltered on June 1st and July 1st and there is nowhere for them to go. Shelters are full. All of the other options are full and this is going to be placed in our communities, which is not good for communities or in individuals. This really is an abject failure of our legislature to make sure that we protect the absolute most vulnerable people in our state. Over the last few weeks, I have gone to 16 hotels and visited with about 1000 of the people in the hotels and motels. The people exited will include 500 to 600 children. It'll include people on oxygen tanks. It'll include people who are wearing defibrillators and need to be near a outlet. It'll include people who just had brain surgery. It'll include many single moms, people who have DCF involvement and a termination of parental rights will occur as a result of this. It will include many people in recovery and people with mental illness that are finally stabilized and those things are not possible to keep stable while on the street. So we are really putting a lot of people's lives at risk. I mentioned that it's a humanitarian crisis that we're dealing with. Why do you think that the legislature and the governor have not come around to funding the program? You know, I don't understand it. I'm going to be really honest and say when we're looking at 2800 individuals, 500 to 600 children being put on the street, I do not understand how you come to the conclusion that it's okay to unshelter people to the street. It is in my understanding of how we should operate as human beings from a moral perspective and also from an economic perspective. This is going to have an incredible impact on our businesses, an incredible impact on our downtowns and our communities, on our health care providers, on our public safety. So even from an economic perspective, I don't really understand it. I think one thing that does happen is that people in poverty are very easily swept under the rug. And so these are really the most vulnerable people among us. And so we're looking at a situation where it's easy to say to dismiss the humanity of the people who we are causing suffering. So this this is a humanitarian crisis and it is being caused by our legislature and the governor. So what are the options on the table for the legislature today to address the crisis that you're talking about? So there will be legislators that will vote no on the conference report, which is a really hard thing to do. And I want to really name that this is a really brave action. This is work that a lot of them have done, all of them have done throughout the legislative session that is important to them on a lot of other issues. But by voting no on the conference report, if it were to fail, then they'd have to go back and renegotiate that conference report. And therefore we'd have another opportunity to actually keep people inside. There's also a possibility for the two sides, the Senate and the House, to actually come together and say this is not going to work. It's not tenable. It's not politically tenable. It's not morally tenable. And so we have to fix it before we get there. I've seen that happen as well. I don't expect it to today. I expect us to walk out of here having made the decision to create a state sponsored unsheltering of nearly 3,000 people. And I think another point I really want to add is that Vermont has the second highest rate of homelessness in the country right now behind only California. And 80% of the people experiencing homelessness are utilizing the GA Motel program. So this state sponsored unsheltering is unsheltering 80% of the people in our state experiencing homelessness. You think you'll be done by the end of the day? I am crossing all my fingers and toes. However, I do want to say a big however, we need to do some good work. And so sometimes the thing I really hate about the end of the process here is we rush the work. I've equated it to being like a lab partner and showing up and doing all the hard work. And then someone shows up at the 11th hour, who's supposed to be 50% of the grade as well. And they didn't do very good work quality work. And I think that reflects on our policy sometimes. So, you know, one big example, which I'd like to switch to talking a little bit about is the GA emergency housing program and the struggle that many people have been in trying to really bring this forward in the budgeting process to name the fact that we have upwards to 2000 households about to be evicted by the state from the Motel program on either May 31st or July 1st. And it is it is a humanitarian crisis. It is it is a crisis that the legislature has a part in now because in the budget compromise that came out yesterday, there is a fraction of what is needed to actually support these Romaners. And as a representative from Burlington, just last night, I heard that there was a fire at a homeless encampment in part of my district. Just last summer, there were tons of people in Battery Park camping, which is an untenable situation. It's unsafe. It's not what we should be doing for our neighbors and community members. There's encampments all over the waterfront. I mean, just I'm a one member district and just in my district alone. And then if many people from Burlington will remember Sears Lane, it we're creating the same the same parameters that will repeat this and and blow that into a greater number of proportions of numbers of people just out on the streets. And the communities that are going to feel that impact are not prepared. Burlington, Winooski, Montpelier, Berry, these Rutland, these communities are not ready. And the small amount of money put into the budget is a drop in the bucket of what we need. So many of us are the shows like we had space and time to figure this out. We still have time and we need to there is no alternative. We need to call the governor to the table and come up with using our full process, which is calling us back for a special session if necessary to deal with this incredibly important issue. Otherwise, people's lives are on the line. And I'm sure you'll talk to more people about this as well. But I'll just speak for that house progressives were incredibly concerned also our Senate counterpart progressive because this will negatively impact people's lives. And you know, I fear about the outcomes of these these remonters in the coming weeks. House is or the legislature is considering a budget bill, which does not include funding to continue the emergency housing program that was starting during COVID. You're gonna just tell us a little bit about what you hope that the legislature would do or will do to support those families. Yeah, so when when the state shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic, we offered housing in hotels and motels for those who were unhoused in an effort to protect public health in order to quarantine people so people could be quarantined and be safe. And we essentially ended homelessness as we knew it at the time and we have had an opportunity to invest a massive amount of money and unprecedented amount of federal funds into housing, but we have not moved fast enough. And unfortunately, we've spent over $150 million on these hotels for the last two years without building enough housing for people in the hotels to move into on a permanent basis. And people are concerned about that ongoing expense. And so the general assistance program is being gutted in the current state budget without a plan in place to house people. And so as we end one public health emergency, we're about to create another one, because the mass eviction of 2,800 people to the streets is going to be a humanitarian crisis. And when the city of Burlington evicted the Sears Lane encampment, there were 30 to 40 people living there, but they had a safety net the state offered them hotels. In this case, we have enough people to fill 70 Sears lanes with no plan in place to keep people safe. And people are concerned about the cost of continuing the program, but they're not looking at the cost of the eviction that hospital room visits or over $1,000 a night, hospital stays, incarceration, all of these expenses will go up when we evict people from hotels because housing is a social determinant of health and it's a social determinant of crime. So we will see a wave of crime and illness spread through the community because of this mass eviction, not only impacting the individuals in the hotels and the families in the hotels, but the neighborhoods and the communities surrounding the hotels across the state. And what I would like to see us do is guarantee housing for the next year for the people in the hotels with an with a path forward to housing for all. So we buy as many of these motels as we can upfront. For example, one of the motels is for sale for 2.1 million with 77 rooms. That would that's going to cost us 4.1 million to rent. We save half the money just by buying that hotel and we have that moving forward as an emergency shelter. We can place people in mobile homes and mobile home parks where there's vacant lots with some of the money. And what we really need to do is identify public land near the hotels and rapidly develop it and build housing for three times as many people that are in the hotels. So we're not just rehousing people in the hotels, but we're building housing for people who want to move around Vermont or move to Vermont, because employers can't even find workers because there's no housing for people who want to move to Vermont. So I see what we can do is take the same amount of money we would have spent on hotels for a year and we can guarantee housing and rapidly, rapidly reinvest that money into permanent and temporary housing that includes supportive housing, transitional options. If there's a will, there's a way and we can do this instead of turning our backs on people and casting them into shadows and throwing away all the money we've spent so far guaranteeing housing. Also, what people fail to see is that it's not only housing, but other social determinants of health, like structural conflict, the stress that people experience when the system's geared against them, inclusion and belonging and discrimination and violence of the state. And because this is an act of state violence, we can't get around that. But also the increased violence people will experience from being unhoused and the increased violence in the community will see from the tension this creates that by investing in housing for all now, using this as a moment to turn the page in history, we can address multiple social determinants of health with the same cost. One of those things you mentioned in the budget bill, the budget does not include funding to continue the emergency housing program that is supporting almost 3,000 Vermonters at risk of losing their home in July. Can you talk about how the state government might support those folks or how the process could have unfolded differently to support those people? So again, I know the house had a very different sort of belief than the Senate did and I do not sit in on those meetings. I am a social worker by training. I have spent my entire career working in the non-profit sector, including working at programs that did transitional housing and a homeless shelter. So I know when people go into transitional housing, at the very day one, you're talking about this is temporary housing. Where are you going? I realized the Motel program didn't get set up because we as a society care about the homeless because this was federal money. It was about keeping people from spreading COVID, really. And we know that some people who are homeless don't necessarily want to be housed, but that is not the case of the people who are living in the Motel. So I have been on the phone today talking to the director of COTS, talking to some of the cap stone agencies and looking at could we, I mean, having that many people hit the streets in a two-month period is going to be extremely taxing on Vermont and I'm worried about that. The chair of Appropriations made a wonderful analogy today about how Vermont can come together. We did it with Irene. And so one of the questions I asked was, can we have a czar of smooth transition? I'm not saying we should keep people in motels permanently, but let's fan it out over four to six months so that we're not trying to find a good landing place for that many people. A lot of the people who are in motels are in recovery or struggling with recovery or struggling with other issues and it doesn't have to be a crisis. And so one of the things I'm trying to figure out again is how can we make things as smooth as possible? Can we designate someone in state government who's going to help pull things together? I was asking, does COTS need more money to keep the day station open longer hours? Can they be at full capacity? Do they have enough staff? What other things can we be doing? And I think all of us in the state house need to be advocating for people because I think a lot of my colleagues have not gotten to know anyone who was homeless and there are so many reasons why people are homeless and it's not about people trying to live off, you know, the government or, you know, I used to work with people who are on the welfare to work program and it's like they're on a gravy train. There's no gravy. It's not this people, we can't legislate to the lowest common denominator. These are our neighbors, our community members and any of us could end up in that situation and we need to show compassion and help people to land in a good spot and not just assume that, oh, they'll find a place. Maybe they were sleeping on their cousin's couch but like that's not, no one's gonna, that's not a long-term solution. There were 700 kids that we're talking about and we're, I moved here from big states a long time ago. We can, like, it's not that many people, we can figure out a way to help, you know, everybody land somewhere. I'm glad we're looking at permanent housing. I wish that the governor's office or the administration had negotiated a sensible rate with motels because having worked in the nonprofit sector, I know that like, COTS, I don't know if what the, this is a couple of years old now, but they hadn't gotten an increase in how much they were getting reimbursed in like 10 years to house somebody overnight and we're turning to the motels and saying name your price and we're gonna pay it while the nonprofit sector is struggling to, you know, pay the bills and give their staff increased wages and pay increased health care costs. So, so we, I think getting rid of the stigma that comes with being homeless, which again also goes back to people who struggle with addiction or any kind of mental health struggle are so important and sort of at the crux. It's easy for people to judge, but like we need to all show compassion and like walk. Let's, you know, think about what it's like for the people that are living in a motel room and now know they're, you know, where are they gonna go? Where's their stuff going? What's, you know, what's, how are they gonna take their medication or try to get a job if they don't have electricity or, you know, a place to land so. Looks like the budget that's going to pass today does not extend the emergency housing program that has supported almost 3,000 folks through the pandemic being housed in motels around the state. How do you expect or hope that the state government will support those people as they potentially lose their housing in July? Yeah, that was a very sad and disturbing piece of news as we, as we went through these final weeks. Housing, if nothing else, is an upstream investment. If you can get folks housed, it saves you a lot of time, energy, resources, pain downstream. So I'm saddened that we weren't able to find or haven't found the money to house these folks until we have a solution. That said, I also have to listen to my colleagues who have said that a lot of the money that was going into this temporary program will be placed into wraparound services long-term housing solutions. But I wish instead of an and or it was an and and, you know, we're doing this and we're doing this other thing because I am very concerned and we received very compelling emails from a lot of folks who are in that program and I worry for their safety and their well-being.