One of the necessary quirks of the legislative process is that almost every bill passed by a policy committee must also go through one or more “money committee” — if a bill raises revenue, it goes to House Ways & Means and Senate Finance, and if it spends a damn dime it goes through House and Senate Appropriations. If a bill both raises and spends, it must be passed by all four.

There are good reasons for this. The money committees look at the entire landscape of government spending and taxation and make sure everything fits together. They are fiscal gatekeepers, in essence.

However… these committees can also derail a good piece of legislation without serious consideration of the rationale behind it. And that’s exactly what happened yesterday afternoon in the Senate Appropriations Committee. The potential consequence is a mass unsheltering event in mid-March affecting roughly 1,600 individuals, including children, seniors, and people with disabilities.

Not that anybody noticed, because there were apparently zero reporters present. It was the latest in a series of failures by our ever-shrinking media ecosystem. But hey, let’s get on with the story.

Senate Appropriations was considering H.839, the Budget Adjustment Act for the remainder of fiscal year 2024. The House-passed BAA included a fairly robust extension of the emergency housing program. It would extend motel vouchers from April 1 to June 30 (the end of the fiscal year) for those in the GA program, and would also include those covered in the adverse weather program, which expires for the season on March 15, who would still need shelter after that. It would also impose a problematic cap of $75 per night per household for motel reimbursements; more on that later.

This plan was put together after many hearings and much hard work by the House Human Services Committee, and approved in the full House by a lopsided 112-24 margin. Senate Appropriations set all that aside. Without taking a word of testimony or even inviting Human Services chair Rep. Theresa Wood to explain her committee’s thinking, It made some minor changes to the GA extension and just plain removed the adverse weather extension, citing obscure process reasons. At the end of the afternoon, Approps voted 7-0 to send its version of H.839 to the full Senate. (The hearing can be viewed here; emergency housing discussion begins around the 44-minute mark.)

It seems almost certain that the Senate will concur, probably by the end of this week. The bill would then go to a House-Senate conference committee where the full program could be restored, but only if the House holds firm and manages to convince Senate conferees to change their chamber’s stance.

There was barely any discussion of the adverse weather extension. Committee chair Sen. Jane Kitchel spoke for the room, it seemed, when she raised an objection — not to the substance of H.839, but to the process. “That gets us into the extent to which we make policy changes in the Budget Adjustment, rather than through [the committee process,” she said. “This is revisiting a [policy] decision we made last year.”

She also referred to adverse weather clients as “primarily able-bodied,” which seems to be how she rationalizes supporting a mass unsheltering. The “primarily” bit may be true, but there are definitely members of that group who are young, elderly, or living with disabilities. And all 1,600 would be S.O.L. on March 15, at a time when the supplies of shelter and low-income housing are close to zero.

Here’s the thing about the process argument. I’m sure that budget adjustment is normally a mechanism to make temporary tweaks to state spending, and that policy choices are best made in a more deliberate manner. But this isn’t a normal situation. Things have changed since those policy choices were made last spring. We’ve had a flood that unhoused countless Vermonters. We’ve had the end of Covid-era federal rent assistance programs, which has fed an increase in evictions across the state. Plus, the policy choices made about the GA housing program meant that more and more people resorted to the adverse weather program as the only port in a storm.

So even if you buy Kitchel’s argument, there are perfectly valid reasons to make an exception to her rule in this case.

Her committee also made a change in the GA program that may not be actively harmful, but isn’t helpful either. In the process, committee members ignored the informed input of one of their fellow senators.

Earlier in the afternoon. Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, chair of the Senate Economic Development, Housing & General Affairs Committee, testified before Appropriations. She focused on one part of the House plan: That $75 per night cap on motel reimbursements. Given the fact that the current rate is more than $130 per night, this seemed problematic and Wood’s explanation of why $75 was workable didn’t make much sense.

Ram Hinsdale expressed “concerns” about the $75 cap. “Motel owners have been housing people for three-plus years,” she told the committee. “They’ve been doing a pretty good job and haven’t been included in the conversation.” She referred to the $75 cap as a take-it-or-leave-it offer which is “more of a leave-it for motel owners.”

She added, “Having not been brought to the table, they’re still willing to come down.” She cited a figure of $98 per night as the statewide average for motel stays and suggested it as a more realistic cap. She also said that if the state offered $110 per night for long-term leases, many motel owners would sign on. That would provide more stability to the voucher program at a lower price tag, and would likely ease the transition to the kind of motel-to-housing conversions that hold much promise as a short-to-medium term solution to our shelter shortage.

It would also be a lot cheaper than any alternative proposal being floated, including the Scott administration’s ludicrous plan to cobble together maybe a couple hundred temporary shelter beds for no more than three months. (Seven Days‘ Kevin McCallum has a story up today that depicts the administration’s effort to establish these shelters as a “scramble.” How reassuring.)

Ram Hinsdale’s plan was based on consultations with housing experts, advocates, and motel owners. The Appropriations Committee seemed amenable to her presentation.

And then they ignored everything she had to say.

They took the position, without directly saying so, that both $98 and $110 were too pricey. Instead, Approps member and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth suggested changing $75 per night to $80 as a placeholder to allow for price cap negotiations in the inevitable conference committee.

(Then, in case their plan wasn’t Scroogey enough already, they added a provision that would force reimbursements to be made at the lowest room rate advertised by a motel operator, up to a maximum of $80. So it might be lower than $75. They couldn’t really decide how to define “advertised rates.” Is it confined to rates offered by an operator, or does it include discount lodging sites like Kayak or Booking.com? I guess they’ll work it out in conference.)

But it would also seem to set the upper parameter for negotiation. If the House is at $75 and the Senate is at $80, is the conference committee going to suddenly jump to $98 or $110? No, it is not.

So what we’re facing, barring a miraculous turnaround, is this. No extension for the adverse weather program, which will leave 1,600 Vermonters unsheltered on March 15, and an extension of the GA voucher program with a price cap so low that it’ll probably induce many motel operators to exit the program entirely. We already have a shortage of roughly 60 spaces per night in the motel program. We’re going to see far greater shortages if this BAA becomes law.

And that will mean more Vermonters living on the streets with the state offering no help at all.

This, may I remind you, is all being done by Democratic supermajorities. And by dicking around with emergency shelter, they are shifting the blame onto themselves and away from the Scott administration, which ought to be owning this disastrous policy failure.

Yesterday morning I drove by a small encampment along the Winooski River on the outskirts of Montpelier. I looked down at my dashboard. The temperature was 17 degrees. This is the result of policy choices made by our political leaders. And they still haven’t learned a goddamn thing.

Can we force them to spend one single night in one of those tents? It might be instructive.