Legislative Update, March 17, 2026

 Legislative Update

March 17, 2026

Rep. Anne Donahue

I usually write updates to share pressing issues of the day that are seeing legislative action. That’s pretty hard to pinpoint right now. We’ve reached the halfway mark, meaning most House bills must be out of committee and likewise for the Senate, so that there is time for review by the other body.

There were 33 bills reaching the floor on Wednesday, with others in queue until they’ve been reviewed for spending or tax impacts, and the big bills – Appropriations and Education reform – have more time before that “crossover” deadline. That’s a lot to take in and sort out at once.

So, I want to take a bit of time sharing some recent issues I’ve been involved in that I believe are important to our values and process, even if they aren’t headliners. 

Thumbs Up

We passed a bill this week to end the extraordinary expenditures to test and remediate schools for the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls (better known as PCBs), a chemical believed to be sufficiently harmful to health that Burlington High School had to be torn down and replaced a few years back. Schools were mandated to get tested, with both testing and remediation paid for the state.

Since the bill was passed in 2021, tens of millions of dollars have been appropriated. Although only about half our schools have been tested, the cost figure has kept growing. There is no money left in that budget line right now, yet schools are still officially under a 2027 deadline for compliance. The bill this year will cut the program short, if the Senate passes it.

I was prepared to support the bill, figuring that we must have learned that the threat was not as severe as we originally thought. We were first in the nation to set this standard and requirement. It seems we jumped the gun. 

Then I heard the bill’s presenter explain that this had nothing to do with the health standards being in error. It was just that we had run out of money. There wasn’t even testimony taken from the Department of Health in terms of possible impacts.

What?

We need to judge every expenditure on a risk-benefit basis. If it doesn’t cost much and solves a big problem, great. If it doesn’t cost much and solves a small problem, that’s OK. And if it costs a lot and would only solve a small problem, that’s easy, too. We shouldn’t do it. But if it costs a lot but addresses a critical problem, we need to really analyze what we should do about it. 

That was the problem with this bill. This program was started because we believed there was an urgent risk to our schoolkids and staff. Now we think it costs too much? Don’t we have to also re-look at what we think the risk of ending action will be – before ending it? 

I was truly aghast that we would not first get the information we needed to make an informed judgement. 

Among the schools that have tested, some found high levels of PCBs and are receiving the funds needed to do remediation. Now we leave the others to suffer the consequences of not even knowing if their schools are in danger, leaving parents to worry about it. It’s a serious inequity.

It isn’t true that we “don’t have the money.” Money is always about priorities. Maybe the level of risk does not justify the cost of using money that could otherwise go to housing, health care, public safety, or other key public services. But we need to know the facts to make the cost-benefit judgement in the spending of taxpayer dollars.

I debated this on the House floor, but the committee defended its position. So, before the final vote, I offered an amendment to ask the Health Department to report back to us next year on an updated health impact statement and other potential remediation plans. 

My first draft for an amendment was pretty aggressive, and as I talked it through with the committee, we fine-tuned it to focus directly on getting a health update for next January, prior to the 2027 end of the program. Collaboration always works best. It was a good, thoughtful debate and the committee unanimously supported the amendment.

While we were still on the floor, I received an email from the Agency of Natural Resources letting me know that “people in Vermont schools are being exposed to PCBs above levels that exceed Vermont and EPA’s target cancer risk.  This was documented in an article published recently by a professor from the University of Iowa.” 

So, we do have updated information. We need to review it before we drop the ball on students and their teachers.

Thumbs Down

On another bill, I fought unsuccessfully to protect Vermonters from a law that sticks government’s nose into our personal business without any need or public benefit.

The bill seeks to protect consumers and performance or sports venues from ticket scammers, which is a growing online problem that hurts our arts community as well as unaware buyers. The bill bans resales at more than 110% of the original ticket price, which takes the value out of doing fraudulent business. This was a really good bill, and I was happy to see us take action.

There was one glitch. The definition of a “reseller” was anyone who resold a ticket. In other words, if you bought a ticket for yourself and then got sick or couldn’t use it for some other reason, your attempt to resell it would be regulated by the state.

Most people in that position feel lucky if they can resell it at 80% or even 50% of what they paid. But the issue is whether government should be involved in personal transactions such as this. If there was someone really anxious to see a sold-out Norwich hockey game and willing to pay extra, why would we step in and say: “Nope. The seller can only make 110% of the value.” Why is it government’s business?

I proposed an amendment that would exclude from the definition of “reseller” a person who bought a ticket for personal use for a single event. It would keep individual Vermonters out of a state regulation that the bill intended to create for protecting the public from commercial fraud. But it was rejected by the committee that had passed the bill, and that translates into guaranteed rejection on the House floor.

Thumbs Up

Twenty years ago, the norm for our Department of Children and Families when it needed to arrange transportation for a child in its custody was often to contract with local sheriffs’ departments to do the job. The sheriffs’ policy was that since they didn’t have the expertise as to whether the child needed security measures or not, they had to use their standard policy: “you call, we shackle.”

So youngsters being picked up at a group home to be brought to another residence were shackled – meaning handcuffs, legs irons, and belly chains. All of them. Whatever age, whatever status.

I discovered this because in my other job as editor of the state’s mental health newspaper, a father came to me with a picture of his 12-year-old boy, lower lip visibly trembling even in a picture that cut his face off for confidentiality. If he had lowered his wrists, the cuffs would have fallen off. His little body bore the weight of chains.

His dad was distraught that his compliant little boy would be shackled that way to bring him from the hospital in Rutland to the Brattleboro Retreat, even though he was ready and willing to drive him down himself. He dashed to a local pharmacy to buy a throwaway box camera, beat the sheriff to Brattleboro, and snapped the picture.

A picture can speak a thousand words, and when I brought it to the state house along with a bill to ban that process unless there was an actual safety risk for the child or the public, it passed with broad support – including the support of the Agency of Human Service, which was somewhat shocked itself that its prior policy existed. It was a proud moment for me, as a “newbie” legislator.

Today, many fewer children are subjected to that kind of treatment, but data is poor. Last year, my committee asked for an update of the numbers. It took the Department almost a full year to get us the data. It showed that in the past five years there were still 98 child transported in “hard restraints” (cuffs or leg irons, and 44 times, belly chains) and no record as to why. Was it an appropriate safety measure?

At the same time last year, we received testimony about the use of restraint and seclusion in many of the residential programs caring for children under the custody of the state and paid for by the state. The state had some regulations about it, but they are not set in law and the regulations are not applied to out-of-state contractors caring for Vermont kids in the situations where we don’t have the right setting for them in-state. The need for oversight is clearly most important there.

Last week, after I headed up the initiative, our committee passed an update to the law on transporting children so that we have data and documentation of standards being met. It also adds a new law on measures to protect children in residential programs. (All assuming, of course, that it passes the Senate and is signed by the Governor. Bills have long journeys to become law.)

I’ll be reporting it on the House floor, and, all these years later, it feels good to continue progress on this important issue for our children.

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Please reach out if you have questions about bills or other issues before the legislature. I can be reached at adonahue@leg.state.vt.us and Ken Goslant can be reached at kgoslant@leg.state.vt.us.