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.
