I don’t know exactly what changed their minds, but after months of insisting the motel voucher program was going to end on schedule come Hell or high water, leaders of the House and Senate are working on a deal to extend the program.

My reactions are all over the place. Wow. Finally. Thank goodness. What took you so long?

And… let’s not get carried away until we see the fine print.

Here’s what we know, courtesy of VTDigger’s Lola Duffort. The extension would apply to roughly 2,000 people scheduled to be unhoused in July. It’s an indefinite stay, meant to allow people to stay in motels until state officials can identify “alternate stable setting[s].” There will be a mandate for the Scott administration to regularly update lawmakers, which is embarrassing for Team Scott but utterly necessary due to its complete failure to plan any sort of transition before now.

And it will not apply to anyone unhoused on June 1. So, not only are those people SOL, it also means there will be another mass eviction on Thursday Friday. You may recall that hundreds of June 1 evictees were offered free two-week extensions by some motel owners. Those extensions expire tomorrow Friday. No reprieves on offer for those folks.

I don’t know why leadership is so firm on excluding the June 1 and June 16 unhoused, who number approximately 800. I guess that’s an acceptable level of human suffering.

It was, in Duffort’s words, “a remarkable about-face for legislative leaders” who had been dead set against any extensions. They had included $12.5 million in their budget for transition support, but that proved just as inadequate as housing advocates predicted.

Why did they cave? An explanation came from Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth and House Ways & Means Committee Chair Emilie Kornheiser, subbing for the absent Speaker Jill Krowinski. As Kornheiser explained, leadership had come to realize that the administration was completely unprepared to deal with the mass unhousing in any sort of orderly or humane way.

“Since we recessed it’s become clearer to folks in both the House and Senate that the administration needs more time, and maybe more resources perhaps, to be able to support folks leaving the motels in a way that is humane and equitable.”

Yeah, well, they’d failed to listen to the loud, insistent voices from the housing advocacy community who saw this coming a mile away. None of this was a surprise. Or it shouldn’t have been, if they’d paid attention to the red flags and alarm bells.

For me, there was some extra irony in the announcement because it was none other than Kornheiser who told me recently that funding the voucher program was impossible at this late date because it would have required reopening the budget, thus imperiling all the good stuff it included.

She did so during a recording of the Montpelier Happy Hour podcast (video version here, key exchange just past the 18-minute mark) which she co-hosts with southeast Vermont’s Queen of All Media, Olga Peters. I was a guest on the episode. Kornheiser was genuinely upset about the precipitous end of the voucher program. “It’s so upsetting to see what we could have done and didn’t do and what the administration could have done and didn’t do,” she said.

But then she went on to explain that it was “way too late, like we’re way too far along to do anything about it at all in this budget cycle.” That’s because if the Legislature fails to override Gov. Scott’s budget veto, “we’re not gonna have a budget, and we’re gonna negotiate a budget that the governor will pass. ..it’s just the only option to get a budget passed.”

The bleak scenario: If the override failed because a small group of lawmakers refused to back a budget without voucher funding, they’d be imperiling all the Democrats’ hard work on child care, housing, Medicaid reimbursement, substance use, and more.

It was technically true — reopening the budget would put Scott in the driver’s seat — but fundamentally misleading because there’s always a legislative work-around. The simple way, which apparently is what leadership is going to do now, is to pass a separate bill containing the voucher extension and then proceed to the budget override vote with all Democrats and Progressives on board. If Scott vetoes the standalone bill, the budget remains intact and the Legislature can override that veto. Plus, extra bonus, Scott has to explicitly oppose a humane end to this crisis.

So yeah, don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. There’s been a lot of that from legislative leaders and key committee chairs. I don’t recall an argument against voucher extension that turned out to be true. The straw men really got a workout, I can tell you.

There’s one big unknown in the plan. No one has said anything about funding. How much will the Legislature be willing to approve for more vouchers and for a robust transition?

They can afford to be generous. Advocates have made it clear that a solid plan won’t break the bank. In fact, avoiding this self-inflicted humanitarian crisis will actually save money because state and local governments, schools, the health care system and more won’t have to deal with an explosion in homelessness.

There’s every reason to do this, and no good reason not to. So welcome aboard, leadership. Where ya been?