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.

***

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.

March 1, 2026 Legislative Update

 I’ve been fairly quiet thus far this year, because most work has been in committees rather than having bills ready for action on the House floor. That will change in the next few weeks, since we are nearing the deadlines to send bills over to the Senate – and the Senate to us – if they are to move at all this session. The key areas being addressed in my Human Services Committee are a homelessness bill and addressing the treatment of youth in need of intensive residential care. Swirling in the background are the annual state budget and the question of reforms to education funding. So, this is an update on those topics.

Homelessness

Ever since the COVID crisis, when we wanted people to be isolated in hotel rooms rather than in congregate shelters, we have maintained a major backlog of homeless households who have no shelter options at all. Everyone recognizes that using hotels and motels is not the right way to support these folks, even if there was enough money (or enough hotel capacity) to do so.

We have attempted to increase shelter capacity for cold weather months, but that still isn’t enough to have a place out of frigid conditions for all who need it. It also results in the exodus to the streets every spring when the “cold weather exemption” ends. We are trying to develop a bill that has levels of support based on needs, that reduces hotel use, and that builds shelter capacity. The biggest obstacle is that it isn’t possible to move people into stable housing, if no affordable housing exists. That’s what is maintaining the backlog.

We are also focused on staying within the governor’s budget. That includes recognizing that if we increase case management support, we may decrease the number of households that can access help, at least for a transitional time. No choices are easy.

Kids in Care

Ever since the Woodside Rehabilitation Center closed down amid issues of mistreatment, Vermont hasn’t had a locked detention facility for the limited number of adolescents who need that highest level of attention. Planning has been slow, with one significant delay being finding a site where neighborhood opposition doesn’t close the planning down. As an interim measure, a 4-bed program was opened in Middlesex last year after rehabbing the old trailers that were previously a secure mental health residence. A 3-bed “crisis stabilization” program is now about to open in Windham in a rehabbed basement space of the sheriff’s office there.

We have struggled for the past two years to get a picture of the overall costs of the “master plan” that the Agency of Human Services is working on. They say they don’t have estimates for future budget years. Last year, we were disturbed by the cost of the contract that was signed for an out-of-state agency to run the Middlesex program. This year, we were aghast at the contract just signed for Windham County.

Make sure you are sitting down when you read this.

The contract is for $4.3 million per year. That amounts to almost $4,000 per day per bed – billed whether the bed is used or not – for this 3-bed program. (It’s $4.1 million for the four beds in Middlesex, which is slighter lower but the same per-bed price as for inpatient hospitalization for a child at the Retreat, but without any of the services that a psychiatric hospital provides.) The out-of-state provider who just signed the contract had its license suspended in its home state for violations of child protection regulations. It cost somewhere around $2 million to do the rehab work for the three bedrooms and common area.

We are suggesting freezing the budget from use for further development until the administration produces the cost estimates on the full plan that we have been asking for. It is painful to see this kind of expenditure while the same budget from the governor proposes cutting funding for child abuse and neglect prevention and for post-adoption supports due to lack of resources.

In the meantime, we’ve also been concerned for several years about reports of overuse of restraint and seclusion at some of the state’s residential facilities. And there are still instances where youngsters who pose no threat at all are being transported in shackles. So we are working on a bill that would put more teeth into oversight by the state on these practices. (That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of good work happening in these agencies; but even occasional violations can cause serious harm to a child.)

Speaking of Budgets

Inflation and other cost-drivers are making it a tough budget year. The governor’s budget proposal holds to a 3% inflationary increase, and legislature leaders are saying they are committing to keeping the budget in balance without any new taxes. The directions from our Appropriations Committee to policy committees was that we could not recommend restoring a budget item that is targeted for a cut unless we identified a replacement source of funding (a cut somewhere else.)

I’ve heard some committees did not come as close as ours did in abiding by that, which only ends up putting more pressure on the Appropriations Committee to make decisions. We did recommend saving the abuse prevention and post-adoption programs, for example, by cutting a tiny percentage from the juvenile detention program budget.

One big driver of needed budget cuts is the plan to once again transfer tens of millions extra from the general fund into the education fund, so that school budgets voted on by towns don’t crush people with the degree of property tax increases. Every year that happens, the “debt” back to the general fund keeps growing. So that’s a segue into the education funding reform issue…

Education Funding Reform

Last year, Act 73 was a desperate effort to respond to the number of defeated budgets by moving a reform plan forward. Getting enough votes in the legislature to support it was a bit dicey, so it was constructed with multiple “off ramps.” If certain next steps did not occur in sequence, the plan would collapse. And collapse it has, with disputes about just about every aspect stalling the progress. It’s hard as an outsider (and I am an outsider, pinned in my committee room while debates go on in the Education Committee room) to predict where it will end up.

For years, we have allowed the façade of “home rule” to stay in place, allowing towns to vote on their local budgets that get merged into a statewide pool of money and distributed back to towns – but you don’t necessarily get back what you raised in taxes. The distribution system is highly complicated in how it shares the resources, and some schools operate for much lower than the state average, and others, at much higher. If it is a statewide funding system, it needs to be raised the same way for everyone, so that it can be shared equitably. We are mandated by our Supreme Court to have a statewide funding system, but the one we’ve created doesn’t work. To do that requires much larger districts and the kind of funding systems that most states use, called a “foundation formula” that equalizes the playing field for all students. The state legislature then controls that funding, not individual towns.

There is a push this year to give towns a few more years to make their own decisions about how to combine existing districts into larger ones. Only if they can’t, would the state step in. There’s lots to complain about in how it might roll out, but the bottom line is that the longer we wait to act, the worse the situation will get. Waiting a few more years for changes to get underway is not a sustainable plan.

It’s important to remember that it is well established that small schools in upper grades are detrimental to educational opportunities for most kids. Given our current testing scores, the one thing that we can’t do is pretend that, aside from the tax issue, all is well with how we educate our children in Vermont.

Thanks for the honor of representing you. Please be in touch with your questions and concerns. All of my updates can be found at representativeannedonahue.blogspot.com. I can be reached at adonahue@leg.state.vt.us, and Rep. Ken Goslant can be reached at kgoslant@leg.state.vt.us.