Tuesday was the Housing Policy Dog and Pony Show at the Statehouse. Housing-related officials from the Scott administration made the rounds of three House committees, talking about housing policy with an emphasis on helping the homeless. The big takeaway: Man, are we ever screwed.

The lead witness slash sacrificial lamb was Chris Winters, former deputy Secretary of State and former Democratic candidate for SoS, who now occupies the hottest seat in Montpelier — the commissionership of the Department of Children and Families, home base for the moral and administrative failure that is Gov. Phil Scott’s policy for dealing with homelessness. (Winters is pictured above with one of his deputies, Interim DCF Business Office Director Shawn Benham, speaking to the House Appropriations Committee.)

There were, as my headline indicates, a whole lot of hard questions and precious few clear answers. But the biggest and least-answered question of them all: How in Hell did we get to this place, where Winters and his team are hastily cobbling together a temporary shelter program that will, at best, house a fraction of those about to be unhoused when the state’s motel voucher program expires on April 1?

The backdrop for the big question was this chart, presented by administration officials:

Now, there’s a picture that tells a story. The blue line represents the number of homeless Vermonters reported in the federal government’s annual Point in Time count. And it shows that homelessness has skyrocketed since the year 2000, with by far the biggest increase between January 2020 and January 2021.

One could have reasonably written that off as a consequence of the Covid epidemic and its widespread economic dislocations. But the number grew even further in January 2022 and again in January 2023!

Hence the question, stated (not in the form of a question) by Rep. Kath James of the House Committee on General and Housing. “I’m getting a bad case of dejà vu,” she said. “The administration has had ample time to get a plan in place. This is not a conversation that started last summer; it’s been looming for a long time.”

Winters, who was appointed a bit more than a year ago, acknowledged that the situation was “years in the making,” but otherwise pleaded ignorance. “I can speak to the past year, and our aggressive policy to develop more housing.”

There was no follow-up. None of Winters’ more tenured colleagues stepped forward to speak, nor were they asked to.

The question hangs in the air. Why did the Scott administration wait so long? It relied on federal Covid relief funds to pay for motel vouchers, an overly costly short-term fix, and as far as one can tell, made no plans whatsoever for the continuing rise in homelessness after the epidemic turned to pandemic and finally to background noise.

You may recall that last winter, administration officials filled the ears of worried lawmakers with assurances that we could end the voucher program and it would all work out. Too many lawmakers believed them. And now we are screwed. More to the point, the vast majority of voucher clients will be out on the streets as of April 1 — and that’s if the administration manages to deliver its Hail Mary of creating temporary shelters before that date.

Its current plan would create perhaps, with God on our side and the wind in our sails, a couple hundred new shelter beds. That would accommodate only about 18% of those scheduled to lose their housing on, of all days, April Fools Day.

And those temporary shelters would only operate until June 30. After that, nothing. Winters made it clear that the administration would not seek funding for the shelters in its FY2025 budget, which begins on July 1.

It’s a goddamn clusterfuck, and a looming humanitarian disaster of monumental proportions. Also, for those who look at such things through a policy lens, it’s a big hairy argument for the proposition that Phil Scott does not deserve his reputation as a competent manager.

This is on him. It should be, anyway. Let’s hope he has to answer tough and repeated questions at some point. That would provide a bit of cold comfort at least. But it won’t solve the problem, which is, as Winters said last week, ““There’s going to be a cliff at some point.”

We are on track to reach that cliff, and push more than 1,000 Vermonters off it, in less than four months. Thanks to the administration’s years of dithering, there appears to be no way to avoid it.

And if you want to suggest extending the voucher program yet again, as we have done (I think) three times previously, Winters delivered a vociferous argument against doing so. ”We absolutely need to move away from private hotels,” he said. Continuing the program diverts money away from longer-term solutions, he contended. He also argued that lodging operators are making big profits on vouchers, which disincentivizes them from selling their facilities to create permanent low-income housing, a model that’s been successfully employed on a limited scale and shows great promise as a way to rapidly increase livable shelter.

I don’t know if the Legislature will spit in Scott’s face once again and add voucher money to the FY25 budget or if they’ll swallow hard, shrug their shoulders, and go along with pushing vulnerable Vermonters off Winters’ cliff. There aren’t any good choices here. Only a bunch of bad ones.