Let me start this update with a PSA: please, if you haven’t yet, fill out your census information. You can save the hassle of someone coming to your door. More importantly, you can make sure you don’t get missed in the count. This stuff really matters! It matters for how much of a fair share we get of federal funding. It also matters for fair voting representation when Vermont does re-districting to align with town census numbers next year. It only takes a few minutes, and the questions are not invasive. Just go to my2020census.gov/
***
The Month Ahead
People sometimes ask me in October how the legislative
session is going. Just to be clear, Vermont has a part-time legislature which
normally goes from January to early May. Of course, nothing is ordinary this
year. We stretched into the end of June, nearly crippled by the constraints of
functioning on Zoom and trying to do a rational job in allocating federal
relief money, while at the same time holding off on the budget for the year
ahead in order to have a firmer financial picture.
We are coming back into session now to pass the budget for
the remaining ¾ of the fiscal year. There will be public hearings on the budget
this Thursday, August 27, from 5 to 6 p.m. and Friday, August 28, from 1 to 2
p.m. via videoconferencing. For the link to sign up to testify and to see the
budget information, go to legislature.vermont.gov/
Because of the overlap between this unique late session and
early voting by absentee balloting, it will be the first time – to my
knowledge, anyway – that we will actually be in session while voting has
already begun. It will undoubtably inject new levels of political posturing
into debate and votes. I will pledge to do my best to keep my updates as
objective as possible so that they do not double as campaign messaging. It will
be a strange campaign year for everyone, since going door-to-door, which I
consider to be an obligation if one expects voters to put their trust in you,
is off the table due to COVID precautions.
Our financial picture remains fuzzy, because we had hoped to
know what to expect from the federal government in terms of further relief, and
we do not. The revenue shortfalls are dire, but thankfully, not as dire as was
feared back in May. Late tax returns from 2019, when the economy was still
stable, brought in more than expected. While we are still more than $100m in
the red, it now looks as though next year is when the greater impacts of the
economic shutdown will be felt. The governor has proposed a budget that
maintains services without raising taxes, but the devil is always in the
details. Over the next few weeks, the House will analyze the proposal, counter
with its own, and send it to the Senate. What is usually a four-month process
will have only four weeks, since the budget needs to be signed before the end
of September when the second quarter of the budget year begins.
***
The Rest of the
Agenda
There is some tension – both political, and reality-based –
about what other business should be done in these next five weeks. Some argue
that we should address only the budget and get out. We’ve already overspent the
budget for the legislative session itself, and doing serious business by highly
limited Zoom committee testimony and even more limited Zoom “debate” on the
virtual House “floor” does not do justice to the issues or our constituents. On
the other hand, a great deal of work was done on important issues back in
January and February. Many finished the process in either the Senate or House,
and now sit in the other body, awaiting action. Since we are at the end of a
biennium, anything not passed now has to start from ground zero with a new
legislature in January. If they can’t be fully vetted in the opposite body, it
would defeat the checks and balances built into the bicameral legislative
process to rush them through now. But if a few of them can, it wouldn’t be fair
to bump them solely on the basis that we have to function in impaired ways.
Everything is impaired right now. We still have to make the
best of it. So, while I oppose trying to pass legislation that can’t get a
reasonable level of analysis (that’s what leads to bad law being passed), I
also think that it isn’t reasonable to say that everything that had to be
dropped in March has to be abandoned. I might not like some of those bills and
wish that the disrupted process means they die, but that’s not a legitimate
reason to not move forward.
What are some of the major bills on the list for
consideration in September? The climate change bill (establishing a council
that will have broad authority to set state standards); a bill on revamping our
Act 250 development standards (which has had mixed reviews on its drawbacks and
benefits); and the tax-and-regulate marijuana bill (which did pass both houses,
and is now in the hands of a six-member conference committee to seek compromise
between the different versions.)
***
Police Reform
Another item on the agenda is police reform, tied into the
larger issue of addressing systemic racism. Vermont is not immune in needing to
address this. In response to some rapid-fire action by the Senate, we passed a
bill in June that was very incomplete. It was consciously incomplete. It carried
a multi-layered message from the House, along these lines: the Senate did not
use a deliberate enough approach and we don’t have time to fix its work; we
recognize the need to take some kind of action to show good faith; we are
locking ourselves in to coming back and doing better work in August. It did
that by including sunsets in the law: dates less than a year away by which
parts of the new law will be revoked. So further action must be taken, or the
effort comes to an end.
One of the pieces the House recognized was the importance of
hearing the voices of Vermonters before making major changes. Over the past
several weeks, there have been three public hearings and a broadly disseminated
survey. A total of 1,446 responses came in from all over the state, a pretty
phenomenal response. I feared that the survey might get limited or skewed
exposure, but having skimmed the many comments that people added in their
responses, it is clear that a broad range of perspectives were captured. There
were some great insights shared. The full survey will be shared publicly in
short order. I got a preliminary look because I am part of a coordinating group
that was helping to organize the public outreach.
I’m sorry, however, to see some of the divisiveness that
seems to exist right now across so many subjects also becoming entrenched in the
policing issue. One Facebook meme articulates my perspective well. It has three
circles that overlap in the center: one circle says, “Supports good police officers,”
the second says, “Believes that black lives matter,” and the third, “Upset at
police brutality.” In the center overlap it says, “Me,” and notes at the
bottom, “Guess what? It’s okay to believe all three.” Recognizing that our
police are overwhelmingly sincere and well-intentioned, doing a tough job and
under a lot of pressure doesn’t mean not recognizing that there are areas of
change that are needed, particularly in accountability and often in attitudes
towards the public. It’s hard for anyone to maintain a positive and collaborative
attitude when you see so much of the darker side of society, but it’s part of
the job.
We also need to understand that just because not all of us
feel intimidated or bullied does not mean it is not the valid experience of
many, particularly members of minority groups. Those experiences matter. As a
member of a disenfranchised minority group – people with a history of mental
illness – I have shared that experience personally.
That extends to the broader issues of the criminal justice
system, education, employment and all sectors of society. Slavery was legal in
our country for almost 250 years; the era of widespread public lynching ended
only in about 1950; brutality against civil rights leaders was within the
lifetime of even more of us. It shouldn’t be a surprise that we still have much
to overcome.
No one is being asked to apologize for being white, but rather
to simply recognize that we have benefitted historically and still benefit from
the systems that evolved as a result of slavery. Saying black lives matter
isn’t saying white lives don’t. It is saying that our social systems still
treat black lives as though they don’t matter as much, and that’s wrong. The
focus should not be on being defensive. We should be thinking about what each
of our personal roles should be in helping to build a more equitable society.
And yes, it impacts Vermont. The debate shouldn’t be whether
or not we need this to be on our agenda as a state; it should be, instead, a
healthy dialogue about what the best means are to move forward – which also
means listening to our friends and neighbors who live with these impacts.
Vermont is offering us a good opportunity for starting that
discussion in this year’s “Vermont Reads” program of Vermont Humanities, which
is now in its 18th year. The program invites people across the state
to read the same book and participate in a wide variety of community activities
related to the book’s themes. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas was chosen last
year as the book for 2020, and it was a prescient choice. This year the Brown
Public Library and the Northfield Equity Awareness and Justice Group will be
collaborating to host the Community Wide Vermont Reads Book Discussion as an
outdoor, socially distanced event on Tuesday, September 29 at 6 pm. A limited
number of copies of the book are available at the library by phone or email
request.
***
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