In situations of dire emergency, triage helps guide the use of available resources. When there are no other options, it’s a logical way for those resources to have maximum impact. A battlefield, a weather incident, a disaster of any sort.

But when resources are available or the situation is predictable, triage is not appropriate. And that’s the situation we’ve got with The Great Unhousing. Vermont doesn’t have to end the motel voucher program and throw thousands of people out on the street. We don’t have to create the worst homelessness crisis in living memory.

And yet our official policy, both executive and legislative, is to ignore easily affordable and comprehensive solutions in favor of triaging the unhoused — providing shelter for those with extreme risk factors and leaving the rest to go hang.

In this situation, triage is not only unnecessary. It’s inhumane.

What’s worse, our approach to triaging the unhoused is haphazard. Our political leaders knew this situation was coming. They chose not to prepare for it in advance. Now they are scrambling, and it’s the unhoused who suffer.

We have heard stories of people who were evicted on June 1 despite qualifying for extended motel stays. At least one participating motel simply decided on its own to evict all the voucher clients as of June 1, regardless of status or qualification. And now there’s a land rush to get a share of the limited funds available to help the unhoused.

I should say “the limited funds that might be available,” since they were included in the budget vetoed by Gov. Phil Scott. Those funds will exist if the Legislature overrides the veto. If the money does come through, state officials will be making decisions as quickly as possible.

And even if they magically make all the right calls, there will still be huge areas of disparity. Some communities, some counties, will have partial programs in place; others are likely to have none, either because they get unlucky in the funding decisions about to be made or they never submitted a proposal at all.

The real tragedy, the dismal failure behind this Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling of housing policy, is that it’s all unnecessary. One might excuse our leaders if this was truly a sudden, unexpected event. It’s not. It’s been foreseen, quite accurately, for months. And policy solutions have been offered, time and time again, only to be ignored by the Legislature and the Scott administration.

Instead we have triage — and a rushed, poorly conceived triage at that. It didn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be this way.