We are entering what has been promised to be the last four weeks of the session. Senate committees have passed (or will, by Monday) the big money bills for the state budget and the capital construction budget. Those will be debated in conference committees for alignment and this is the sign that the end is in sight.
I was very happy to see that the Senate made no changes to
the language my health care committee wrote for the capital bill. The administration
sought, and received, the authority to begin construction of a 16-bed locked
facility for individuals who no longer need inpatient psychiatric care but are
not yet ready – for safety reasons – to return home. While we agreed to that,
our concern was the severe shortfalls in other parts of our health care system
for mental health needs. We added a requirement to the bill that a statewide
assessment be made for those needs along with review of whether the emergency
federal infrastructure funds could be used for the highest priorities
identified.
It was prescient. If you saw the WCAX report this past week,
it turns out that the longstanding issue of waits in the emergency room because
of a log jam in diversion programs and inpatient beds has worsened significantly.
We held a hearing to focus on children caught in this limbo, bringing the
administration, hospitals and parents to the table.
The update we received was staggering. Last week, there were
19 children stranded in emergency rooms across the state. Fourteen of them had
been waiting between one and six days. Three had been waiting seven or more
days. Yes, days – not hours.
Children in a mental health crisis so severe that they need
inpatient hospitalization, waiting an average of three days each, confined to a
single emergency room bay without treatment, without anywhere to go. Four
hospitals reported that between 20 and 35 percent of their ER beds were being
occupied by patients waiting for a transfer for admission.
I’m going to copy an excerpt from a letter I received as a
submission to Counterpoint, the
mental health newspaper I edit as my “day job,” because it was that letter that
was the red flag that led to our committee’s hearing: “[W]hile I walked through
the ER to my own room waiting for [lab] results, I could see the lines of
safety workers in front of doors to other patients. The doors were half open
and I could see the children, the young teens, the lost blank stares of ones
who had been waiting too long for help and were instead locked in as boarders
of the ER. A young girl about ten sat on a bed, her eyes wet with tears, the
safety worker at the door plugged into the internet, the young girl's gaze
settling on me for just a moment. She knew I was just walking by, no lift of
hope, no realized dream that I could help her out of the limbo she was in.”
The language we placed in the capital bill can help ensure
that the need for crisis beds for kids rise to the top of the future priority
list, but it does nothing for the children waiting next week or next month. We
have directed the Department of Mental Health to come back this week with an
emergency response plan. If we can put up emergency hospital wings for COVID
standby in two weeks’ time, surely, we can do better for our children.
***
Pensions
It isn’t news for me to tell you that our state employee and
teacher’s pension funds are in crisis. This past week the House passed a bill
that will begin to address it. I wasn’t happy with the bill, because it, once
again, delays real action while the shortfall grows exponentially every month
that it is not addressed. The bill creates a legislative task force to report
back for legislative recommendations for action next January. However, because
we failed to achieve any consensus on how to move forward immediately, it
became the necessary next step, and I voted for it. As far as I was concerned,
the one proposal that was placed on the table earlier was unacceptable. You
don’t renege on commitments already made. You fix it going forward.
There was one improvement made, because a significant part
of the problem has been that the investment decisions over the past decade have
returned only about half the average returns in the market. The bill makes the
investment board an independent commission and adds two financial experts to
its ranks.
There was quite a kerfuffle over whether the task force was
“stacked” against labor, and I heard concern from several constituents on this
issue. It’s important to know what that argument was. The task force has six
members from employee union groups (state workers, teachers, and state police),
two members from the administration, one member from the Treasurer’s office,
and six legislators. The only way that is “stacked” is if you count it as six
versus nine, in other words, the legislators are a part of management. But they
aren’t, and neither is the state Treasurer. This also is not a bargaining
group. It’s a brainstorming group, to bring a proposal back to the legislature,
and the overall public interest – employees and taxpayers alike, represented by
the legislators – needs to be fully present.
***
Bottle Bill
I was all in favor of the bottle bill expansion until I
found out what it actually included. I think most folks thought – like I – that
we were expanding the deposits to include the other single-serve beverages
(water, iced tea, and so forth) so often littering our byways. Come to Green Up
Day on Saturday and see for yourself.
The bill passed by the House last week goes way outside of
those lines. If the Senate agrees, you’ll be paying the nickel deposit on any
size beverage bottle – everything but milk or local cider. That includes a
gallon of OJ or the 3-quart fruit juices; wine is added in as well. The large sizes
will be a nightmare for our redemption centers, but an amendment to remove the large
containers failed. Ironically, the local cider exemption was added in for local
farmers who would be challenged in collecting and returning those nickels, but
without a thought to include other local farm-produced beverages such as iced
tea or lemonade.
The other problem is that we passed our universal mandatory
recycling law since the original bottle bill. Waste haulers invested in new infrastructure
to handle it all. It has been so highly successful that Vermont is now the
state with the highest rate of recycling in the country. If the more valuable
plastics now are diverted from that recycling stream, the waste haulers can’t
offset the costs of all the less cost-efficient ones, such as paper. The result
will be increases in charges for recycling from your local transfer station or
your pick-up service. So, you’ll pay a lot more for groceries unless you separately
bring them in for redemption, and you’ll pay more for your regular recycling as
well.
Taken as a whole, this could well result in a reduction in
recycling -- the very opposite of the well-intended goal. That is why I ended
up voting against it.
***
Literacy
It was good to be passing a bill that invests some of our
federal emergency dollars in literacy education. Our kids have suffered from a
year of remote learning, and literacy skills were already a problem area. But
one line in the bill caught my eye: it discussed educator training in “five key
areas of literacy instruction as identified by the National Reading Panel,
which are phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency, and reading
comprehension.”
I’m really hoping that the idea that phonics is a key to
literacy isn’t being identified as a new idea! I went to kindergarten and first
grade in the D.C. public system at a magnet school that was experimenting with
a return to phonics. They found that it worked. That was 60 years ago!
I hope we’re not just returning to phonics as a key to
literacy now.
***
It is an honor to
represent you. Please contact me (adonahue@leg.state.vt.us) or Ken
(kgoslant@leg.state.vt.us) any time for questions; you can also ask to get on
my direct mailing list for these updates. Remember that you can access any of
my updates from the past on my blog at representativeannedonahue.blogspot.com.
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