It appears that the Senate Appropriations Committee is ready to kill a House-passed proposal to extend the motel voucher program that shelters thousands of homeless Vermonters. So says the chatter in the hallways, which I would not take as gospel — except that the committee made its intentions more than clear in a recent hearing.

On April 2, the committee heard from Commissioner Chris Winters of the Department of Children and Families and some of his top deputies. The panel had asked him to prepare a presentation on the challenges of implementing H.883, the House-passed FY2025 budget bill that includes a broader version of the voucher program than the administration has proposed.

Mind you, the panel made no effort to hear from anyone in the House to tell their side of the story. The committee took no testimony from housing advocates or clients of the program. They sought counsel only from the very administration officials who have been responsible for repeatedly fumbling the program and trying to kill it. Committee members rarely pushed Winters or challenged his testimony. They pretty much took his word on every issue. You might think the committee was on a fishing expedition looking for reasons to kill the House plan.

Because that’s exactly what they were doing.

At one point, committee chair Sen. Jane Kitchel was seeking assurance that nothing bad would happen under the administration’s plan. She lobbed Winters a softball: “Will you be putting somebody in a wheelchair out on the street?”

And Winters replied, “Hopefully not.”

How reassuring.

The rest of Winters’ response to the question was a little less dire: “We are talking about prioritizing those with disabilities and those with children, those who are over the age of 60 in the governor’s plan. And it’s for a certain number of days, it’s not in perpetuity.” But he had already made it clear that the governor’s budget would provide vouchers for “a lot less people than what is proposed in the House budget.”

But hopefully no one in a wheelchair, right?

Winters’ presentation included cost estimates for the governor’s voucher budget ($25.9 million) and H.883 ($63.3 million). From the tone of senators’ questions, it was clear the real sticking point was the bottom line. They simply don’t want to spend that much on vouchers.

And they don’t want to confront the fact that the governor’s plan would unhouse a hell of a lot of people — not all at once, but spread out over a period of months so there’s no single dramatic event that might trigger uncomfortable media coverage.

“The governor’s recommended budget has a lot fewer people in the program. And that means more people not housed to start with,” said Winters. “The House’s proposal would keep more people sheltered, it’s going to exit more people all at the same time when the funding runs out.”

Which assumes that the funding will run out at some point, but whatever makes the House plan look bad by comparison, I guess.

Winters’ presentation included a comparison of how the House and administration plans establish eligibility. There are four big differences.

• The Scott budget sets a cap of 28 nights for each household. The House cap is either 45 or 90 days, depending on the housing vacancy rate as measured by the U.S. Census.
• Those limits don’t include the Adverse Weather Condition program, which allows access to motel rooms in wintertime. The administration would continue the current AWC duration of December 15 to March 15. The House would add a month on either end.
• The administration uses the SSI/SSDI definition of “disability,” which is a measure of whether someone can work or not. The House would use a broader definition more in line with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
• The Scott budget defines “seniors” as those over 65. The House sets the age at 60.

In all four measures, the administration budget would significantly restrict eligibility, thus lowering the program’s cost. And unhousing hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

Winters had plenty of complaints about administrative challenges in the House plan. To which I say, hasn’t the administration failed to create a glidepath away from vouchers that doesn’t result in a mass unhousing? Hasn’t it repeatedly created situations of dire need that force the Legislature to devise its own fixes?

I wish someone had asked him that, but no one on Approps seemed interested in challenging an administration that has made a right royal hash of the program for years now.

The committee — well, mostly Kitchel — also engaged in one of its favorite pastimes: Shitting on the work of the House. Aside from complaining about the cost of the House voucher plan, Kitchel brought up DCF’s alteration of an eligibility form that had been specified in the Budget Adjustment Act. You may recall that Judge Helen Toor ruled that was a violation of the BAA. Kitchel somehow managed to blame the House for failing to make its intent clear, not the people who actually altered the form. Illegally.

Need I remind you that the Senate also approved the BAA as written? Kitchel explained that the Senate had merely “accepted the language that the House had provided.” Senator, I think we call that “failure to exercise due diligence.”

Kitchel tried to make her stance seem less inhumane by setting one group of needy Vermonters against another. She asserted that there is “a fixed pot of money” for social service programs across the board — which is a choice made by budget writers, not an unchangeable fact carved in stone.

“I’m looking at the cost and I’m thinking, wow, I have people saying we should be doing more for ReachUp benefits,” Kitchel said. “When people are advocating for this …they basically are advocating against making increases in benefits to other constituencies.”

No, Senator, they are not. You are the one making that argument. The advocates would say we must meet the needs of our most vulnerable — something I remember Phil Scott committing himself to do on hundreds of occasions.

There are potential pitfalls in the House plan. The most significant is that it depends on state revenues coming in higher than expected, which has consistently been the case for years but is not guaranteed. Winters argued that this uncertainty makes it difficult to plan, and I’m sure it does. But again, which entity has repeatedly failed to plan, thus plopping the whole mess in the laps of the Legislature?

If Senate Appropriations acts as expected and adopts the administration’s voucher program, then the issue appears destined for a House-Senate conference committee on the budget bill. That panel is likely to face a number of contentious issues on which the two chambers differ — and on which, generally speaking, the Senate seems disposed to favor the administration’s approach.

That would be the Senate that allegedly has a Democratic/Progressive supermajority.

And you can bet your sweet bippy that Jane Kitchel will get herself appointed to that conference committee, and she will bring to those proceedings all her contempt for the work of the House and all her powers of rationalization. She will be a powerful, determined foe of any attempt to expand the voucher program and prevent a mass unhousing of vulnerable Vermonters.

Including, maybe, people in wheelchairs. But hopefully not.