And good Lord, I hope it works, but I’m not optimistic.

Last week, while the Statehouse press corps was doing God knows what, state lawmakers and Scott administration officials were hashing out another baling-wire-and-duct-tape extension of the General Assistance emergency housing program, which is scheduled to expire on April 1. The scheme was devised in the House Human Services Committee downloadable here) and forwarded on Friday to the House Appropriations Committee as a recommended amendment to the FY2024 Budget Adjustment Act. On Monday, Approps voted 8-4 along party lines to approve the amended BAA, including the emergency housing plan. It will go before the full House later this week.

Reminder: Hundreds of Vermonters are due to lose their vouchers on March 15 when the “adverse weather” program shuts down for the season. Over a thousand more are due to be unhoused on April 1 when the GA voucher program will expire.

The Human Services amendment, now approved by Appropriations, would roll all recipients into a single class and mandate that they all be housed, one way or another, through the end of the fiscal year on June 30. (The program’s future after that will be decided in the FY2025 budget.)

Sounds like great news. Human Services deserves credit for working very hard to try to avoid a mass unsheltering event. But the devil is in the details. And I’ll be pleasantly surprised if this thing actually works.

The plan would impose a $75 per household per night cap on motel reimbursements. This was the rate before the Covid pandemic and the federally-funded voucher expansion. Currently, the state is paying an average of $132 per night. Since last July, under a legislative mandate to negotiate lower rates, the administration has managed to cut the average nightly rate by only about $13 per night.

And now they’ll be tasked with lowering that figure by another $57 per night in the next two-plus months.

I’m sorry, but I can’t feel good about that prospect.

I asked Human Services Chair Rep. Theresa Wood if $75 by April 1 was a realistic figure. “It’s what was being paid before the pandemic,” she replied. “The administration came to my committee a week ago Friday and said they wanted a cap. That’s a figure that they had agreed to.”

Which doesn’t answer my question. At all. Administration officials have testified that their efforts to bargain down rates have largely failed because motel operators have no incentive to cooperate. It’s unclear why the situation would be different now. Either there’s truly no room for bargaining, or the administration been doing a piss-poor job of it.

And now we’re putting our trust in them. At the same time that they’ll be working frantically to set up temporary shelters for the April 1-June 30 period.

Yeah, that harebrained scheme is still in the Budget Adjustment Act.

Human Services also included language in the BAA authorizing the state “to enter into a full facility lease or sales agreement” with motel operators. Conversion of motels into low-cost housing is a model that works, and there have been success stories here in Vermont. But it takes two to tango, and again, administration officials have said that motel operators have no incentive to lease or sell because they’re making good money under the voucher program.

The incentive will definitely increase with the new $75 per night cap. But will it all work out by April 1? And would there be enough resources to actually convert motels into housing by April 1? That seems like quite a stretch.

Plus, who would operate these hypothetical facilities? Not the state. The nonprofits that provide shelter and low-cost housing are already stretched to their limits. They simply don’t have the resources to staff and operate a bunch of new facilities, which would include providing necessary support services for residents. It just can’t be done. And the BAA doesn’t include any new funding for the nonprofits.

The revised BAA does give the administration some wiggle room. The mandate is to provide shelter for all clients, not necessarily motel rooms. Temporary shelters would qualify. Newly converted motels would qualify. Hell, I imagine anything north of cardboard boxes would probably quality.

But it all seems like a house of cards. And while the BAA imposes a mandate on the Scott administration to provide shelter for all clients of the adverse weather program and the GA voucher program, there’s no indication of what happens if they simply cannot comply. Reminder: They’re already falling short. They’re turning away about 60 households per day, according to VTDigger. Frankly, it’ll be something of a miracle if they can pull off what Human Services has tasked them to do.