 Welcome to week three of Capital Beat here at the State House. I'm Joshua Gorman with the Vermont Press Bureau. We're going to be talking about paid sick leave this week. We're going to be talking about solar siting and local communities that want a larger voice in that. And we're also going to be talking about what's going on with school district spending thresholds. The House and Senate are looking at competing plans to either repeal it or to raise the threshold. Joining me first is Dan Barla with Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. And you have been paying attention to the paid sick leave bills that have been discussed in Senate economic development this week. So if you would, please tell us a little bit about what's going on with that. Sure. So this is actually I've been working on this bill for three years now. So last year the bill did pass the House and now it's in the Senate. So what this bill does, it's H187 if people want to look it up at home. And it sets up a really minimum standard of pay time off for all workers in Vermont. And the problem we have right now in Vermont is that there are about 60,000 people right now who have no paid time off at all. And that causes a lot of anxiety and economic insecurity for families who have to often make tough choices about whether to go to work sick or stay home and miss that paycheck or send a sick child to school or daycare because they still have to go to work. So VBSR believes that this is a benefit that really is off for both employees and employers. And that's why we're supporting the bill. Absolutely. And so can you give us just an idea of how many days people would earn and what exactly is the mechanism for this to happen? Sure. And of course this is the caveat here is that this is a negotiation right now in Senate economic development. So everything could change very, very quickly. But right now, so the bill that did pass the House last year that they're looking at right now, an employee would earn one hour of paid time off for every 40 hours they work. They wouldn't earn benefit. They don't automatically get this. And that would accrue throughout the year. The bill has a minimum floor of, for the first couple of years, three days off is what the employee would earn. And that goes up to five after a few years. So there's a step up for employers who aren't doing this right now. Some flexibility. The bill does include part-time workers right now, which we do believe is an important part of the bill. And what's, I think, especially important is that if an employer has what's called a combined time off policy or a policy of time off that already meets that minimum requirement. So let's say a business has, it gives an employee five days of vacation time. If those employees can still use the vacation days as a sick day, they wouldn't have to change anything underneath this bill. So this is not a requirement on top of already existing paid time off policies that a business has. And in some ways this is a continuation of the efforts that were achieved a couple of years ago to raise the minimum wage, correct? Yeah, you know, we do see these kind of going in hand and hand, but mostly because they do affect the same population of working for moners. So the individuals who don't have access to paid time off right now, they are minimum wage workers. They're working in the service industry, the retail industry. So we thought the bill we passed last year was pretty good to step up the minimum wage over a number of years and we really see this as the other hand also supply the paid time off so they can care for themselves or their family. Just to play the devil's advocate for a moment, you know, employers a couple of years ago when the paid sick leave was happening and being debated, they said, you know, this is a burden for us. This is going to be really difficult for us to provide this. We're really stretched thin as it is. And now we're adding paid sick leave on top of this. Now you are an advocate for a group that is businesses for social responsibility. So what are you hearing from your members in terms of being able to afford to provide these extra services? Sure. You know, so most of our members are already providing some level of paid time off, usually far beyond what the bill is calling for. So I do hear the concerns from some members of the business community that this is a burden. But you know, often what we've heard the past few days, the businesses that have testified, including the ones that have testified against the bill, they're already doing this. They wouldn't have to change any of their policies. And for the businesses that aren't doing this right now, that this would be an add-on for them over the next couple of years, we think they will see other benefits after adding this, including improved morality among their employees, improved productivity, and decreased turnover. And that has a real effect on the bottom line. So we think this pays for itself after a little bit for small employers. So I imagine you've been on the hearings that have been happening over the last few days. Have you got any indication that Senate economic development is looking to change in some way the bill that came out of the House? Sure. So I never want to, every time I peer into my crystal ball, I always get something wrong. So I would anticipate that the bill will look different than the version of the House passed last year. You know, they're looking at a number of things, whether or not to exempt, you know, a small business, depending on how they define that with number of employees, whether part-timers should be included. They're talking about whether high school students should earn this benefit as well. So I think, and also looking at the implementation date and the number of days you can earn. So I think there is some flexibility in the bill to give a little bit on both sides. I anticipate we'll still have a very strong bill coming out of that committee. I think they're doing negotiations right now downstairs, and I think they'll have a vote next week, and I'm feeling really optimistic. Excellent. Very nice. Anything else you would want folks to know from your perspective on this issue that we haven't discussed? You know, I think that, you know, if you're a business owner and you're not doing this right now, I urge you to take a closer look at the benefits that paid time off would bring to your employees. You know, I think the reason VBSR supports this is that we've seen a transition in our economy over the past 50 or 60 years away from families that have one adult income earner that could, you know, supply the whole budget for that family, and now we have, you know, most families need two adults earning full-time incomes. We also have fractured families, single-parent families. So, you know, we really think that this, again, pays for itself for a business and that they're not doing this now. They may need to do this down the road, but they should look at it. It's not actually a huge cost, and what we see in other states and municipalities that have done this is that employees don't use all their time off that they're allotted. They really just use it when they're sick or a family member is sick. Absolutely. Very good. Excellent. Dan, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you. I appreciate it. We come back. We're going to be talking with Nicole Mace, Executive Director from the Vermont School Boards Association. And joining me now is Nicole Mace, Executive Director of the Vermont School Boards Association, and we're going to talk about school districts spending thresholds and how local school boards are reacting. So, Nicole, what's going on here right now? Well, I can tell you it's been a long and frustrating journey for local school district officials since the thresholds were put into Act 46 as sort of an 11th hour measure in order to address concerns about rising property taxes. School district officials were just beginning to understand the impacts of the thresholds on their local circumstances when they were hit with a 7.9% increase in health insurance premiums. And so our association and the Superintendents Association in the fall started to gather information about what was happening and really began to understand that due to the tremendous variability across our 273 school districts in terms of enrollment patterns and terms of availability of reserve funds in terms of composition of the workforce, the impact of the threshold was playing out very differently district to district. And so the VSBA and the Superintendents Association, each of our associations took the position that the better course, the fairer course, was to repeal these provisions. The Senate affirmed that position earlier this week on a vote of 28-1. And now we're in a place where the House has deliberated really past the point where school budgets have needed to be finalized and is working today on a proposal that would make the thresholds fairer but leave them in place. This approach that the House is taking continues to be problematic for school boards. I think, you know, understand that the dilemma that the House is facing, we understand there are legitimate concerns about the property taxes in this state. But there are really two important tenets of public policy that we believe should be paid attention to. The first is that people can understand it. And the second is that it's applied equitably. And the approach that's being taken in the House laid on top of a mechanism that people had a hard time understanding and we knew wasn't playing out fairly. The House approach doesn't address either of those issues or doesn't satisfy those requirements. So we continue to be sort of unwavering in our call for repeal of the thresholds. And we are hopeful that this will get resolved as soon as possible because, quite frankly, it's just gone on too long. Yeah, I mean, at this point, is it too little too late at this point? I mean, we're talking on January 22nd. And municipalities have until the end of this month to warn their budgets for tau meeting, which is the first day in March, I believe is when people go and vote. Is this too little too late? My understanding is just standing totally. A lot of school boards already have finalized their budgets, regardless of what's going to happen here in the General Assembly the next few days. Correct. So my sense is that most boards have gone ahead and finalized their budgets and are hoping that some relief comes out of Montpelier with respect to the penalties, but we're in a position of not being able to wait any longer. Districts that vote their budgets from the floor have a little bit more room to move. Districts that vote by Australian ballot, they walked into the budget that they were able to finalize using the best information they had available to them. And we know that some districts are going to exceed the threshold because they just could not responsibly make the cuts that were required in order to meet the threshold. And it's going to be up to communities around the state to understand the implications of the threshold, understand whatever changes emerge from here and vote the best they can. But it certainly I think has caused a lot of confusion, frustration among local officials. Yes, and so it was just one week ago that local officials got revised threshold numbers, right, that in some cases were different from what they got in August, right? Correct, correct. Which injected a whole another, you know, sort of when you talk about frustration and confusion, having to deal with new numbers in some cases after your budget's already been finalized really through districts for a loop, I think. And at the end of the day, my understanding is that the revised numbers may not negatively impact folks in terms of their bottom line. It still was new information that needed to be processed, analyzed, and in some cases at a point in time where there was literally nothing they could do about it. Some districts have already warned their budgets. So my understanding is that the House proposal that they worked on today tries to mitigate that misinterpretation that occurred between the agency and the legislature so that districts won't be harmed by that mistake. But again, it just adds more confusion to an already confused situation. Excellent, Nicole. Thank you so much for coming on today. I appreciate it. Thank you, Josh. Appreciate it. We come back. We'll be talking with Senator John Rogers, who is looking to ban industrial wind projects and is calling for a greater local voice in solar siting. Thank you very much. We'll be right back. Joining me now is Senator John Rogers, Democrat from Essex or Leans counties. And you had a very interesting event that happened here in the Cedar Creek Room in which a lot of folks came out calling for a greater local voice in the siting of renewable energy projects. Tell us about what happened. Well, we've had a growing anger in the communities, I think, for several years now. And the legislature continues to promise to do something from dating back to the governor's siting commission on wind, where they came to the legislature with what they call the package of take it or leave it. They didn't want us picking and choosing, which a lot of us felt strongly. We are a separate section of government and shouldn't necessarily listen to everything the administration wants. So we didn't get anywhere there. And now solar is rolling out quickly, largely developer driven. And communities feel like they have done what the state asked them to do for years in municipal and regional planning. And their plans are getting run over. The process is extremely expensive. We took testimony from, I believe it was nine different town officials from around the state. And every one of them said they had spent over $75,000, some of them well up over $100,000 on legal fees to take part in the public service board process. In many of these communities, that's a big portion, maybe the majority of their normal municipal budget. So it's really putting a strain on the municipalities and their taxpayers. And so we now have over 80 towns that have signed on to the Rutland Resolution, calling for more local control. So I decided after all these years of nothing happening, it would be nice for the whole group to be able to get together in one day. And so working with Karen Horne of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, we got all the local elected officials in for testimony before the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee had some great testimony from them. And then, of course, held the press conference slash rally it turned into at noon time and presented my thoughts on where we should go. First and foremost, I think that industrial wind doesn't belong in Vermont. We've tried it on a couple sites. Those sites still have ongoing environmental problems. We know the environmental impacts of the original construction are just dramatic. And the wrecks are being sold out of state. They're owned by out-of-state companies, so the profits, the rate-payer money, is going out of state. And I think we can reach our goals without the environmental impact and do more to benefit Vermonters. And so that's my focus. I also presented my thought on how we should get more community involvement in the siting and that is by moving the land-use portion of energy siting into Act 250. It's proven to work in Rutland City where the community has worked with developers. It has also been proven in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire that have local processes and they're rolling out renewable energy. So that was my start. I'm hoping that the next step is in working with a friend of mine who has extensive knowledge of renewable energy issues and the proper way to roll it out from his past work in New Mexico that we can come up with a plan on how to reach our goals because the people who have set the goals and the people that are pushing for the rapid rollout are renewable energy advocates, but none of them are engineers or physicists or PhDs or know the semantics of how we get there. And I think we need to know that so that we can get to our goals with the least amount of environmental damage possible. So just to play the devil's advocate for a moment, Solar Advocates and Energy Advocates will say, hey, if you give local people veto power over proposed projects in their town, we're not going to end up with any renewable projects and we're not going to meet our goal of 90% renewables by the year 2050. What do you think about that? We hear that. I compare it to chicken little. They think the sky has fallen. Our developers have had very little pushback. Almost every development that has been before the public service board has gone through and some of them are good projects and some of them are bad projects. Every community that testified before the Senate committee without exception said we want renewables in our community. We just want them to have to work with us. I think every community that I've heard from and talked to want renewable energy projects. The other big problem with the way we're developing today is we're basically on many of these larger projects, even some of the large net metering projects, we're building a pipeline for Vermonter's cash to go out of state. Many of these outfits are owned by out-of-staters and out-of-state corporations. If we change our focus and give more incentive to Vermonter's and Vermont businesses to put solar panels on their roofs, there is new technology for storage of energy, which we've been waiting a long time for. I think in the next few years we're going to see a whole bunch more new innovations come along. My focus is let's not go full speed ahead and do huge environmental damage when we have new technology that can help us now. We know new technology is coming along. Let's make sure we get it right. Now, you've actually introduced legislation specifically regarding wind projects. Would you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, that piece of legislation proposes to ban industrial wind development over 500kW, which would allow folks or businesses that still want to have one of the smaller ones like the ones that are built here in Vermont. That would still be acceptable. But the giant ones like we have up in Lowell and Sheffield and some of the ones that are being proposed around the state would be eliminated. We've gone through extraordinary efforts in this state from the time we implemented the billboard law and Act 250 and many things that we've done since in trying to maintain compact development and working landscape and we have gone through extraordinary efforts to protect everything above 2,500 feet. And I think that we should not vary from that protection and so this is an attempt to protect the high elevations. I mean, is it an aesthetic issue? You make a comparison to billboards or are there other issues regarding it? Aesthetics is actually a small part of it. I wouldn't say it's the biggest part. The biggest part is if you go to one of these developments it is basically like driving through the interstate system. They're literally up in Lowell. They did 45-foot cuts through ledge so that they could fill in great crevices and so they're basically building a highway down a ridge and there's many scientists who say that the high elevation forest are some of our most important areas to deal with the effects of climate change that both plants and animals will need those high elevations, large chunks of connected land to be able to evolve and we know that no matter what we do here we're not stopping climate change. So the forest, number one, each acre of forest sequesters the carbon of approximately 63 cars a year. We know that it slows water, slows runoff, filters water. I mean, the forests have huge benefits and so when we go to the most fragile forest in the state and basically build roads and highways and giant concrete pads, we're damaging something that is essential to deal with the issues of climate change. Do you expect that the General Assembly is going to take up any legislation this session that will potentially give local municipalities a greater voice in the siting of projects or do you think that's something that might come up at the start of the next biennium? Well, the Senate committee that I serve on, Natural Resources and Energy, certainly seems serious about getting something done. I can't say the same for the House. I have no idea where they are. I know they made promises to some people last year and said they would get something done and it never materialized. So I'm very hopeful. I'm going to continue to work on it and bring proposals forward and do everything that I can because what I would like to see is local control, local planning matter. I think if we move it into Act 250, the other thing that it does is there's a lot of towns around the state that have never got plans together, never developed zoning. This is going to be incentive for them to get on board, do the planning necessary. And then I guess my second hope would be that instead of going with lots of large installations owned by out-of-staters where it's just piping our cash out-of-state, that we figure out a way to do more of it on Vermonters' homes and businesses where they can take the 30% tax credit and they can save money on their electric bills so that more of that money stays in these communities. Very good. Excellent. John, thank you so much for coming on. Very welcome. I appreciate it. John Ty Rogers, Senator Essex Orleans. And that's the end of Capitol Beat for week three. We'll be back with week four with my colleague Neil Goswami in New Hampshire falling around Bernie Sanders. So we'll see you guys next week. Thank you.