“I can’t believe this is where we are again.”

Those words came from Brenda Siegel, former gubernatorial candidate and head of End Homelessness Vermont, upon finding herself back in the Statehouse begging legislative budget writers to provide shelter for vulnerable Vermonters.

She spoke at a press conference called today by housing advocacy groups, in the middle of budget deliberations by a legislative conference committee. That panel is hammering out (Only in Journalism) a compromise budget for FY2025, and one of the items at issue is the General Assistance emergency housing program. The House budget includes a fairly robust program; the House also passed a bill to transition from the current bowl-of-spaghetti program to something that makes sense.

The Senate, as it so often has, pinched pennies on the issue. Its budget imposes a cap of 80 nights’ stay in state-paid motel rooms for each household, and caps the total motel rooms available at 1,000 in most of the year and 1,300 in winter. As the advocates pointed out, this would result in hundreds of households losing access to housing. (The Senate also killed the separate transition bill, which means the program would continue to be an ungovernable mess.)

The beauty of it, from a political point of view, is that the pain would be spread out over months and months. Instead of a mass unsheltering that might attract unpleasant media attention, people will be “exited” (such a nice bureaucratic term) slowly over time, a few here, a few there, as they run out of eligibility or the need is greater than the arbitrary room caps. Hey, if the problem is invisible, does it really exist?

“The current budget fails to provide the basic human need of shelter,” said Beth Ann Maier, pictured above, deacon of Christ Episcopal Church in Montpelier, which operates a weekly free lunch program and an emergency food shelf, and has opened its building as a warming shelter in cold weather.

Frank Knaack of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont laid out the unforgiving math. “There are now about 1,500 households in the program,” he said. “Over 500 households would be unsheltered” under the Senate budget. “Last winter, over 1,650 rooms were used” in the voucher program; the 1,300 winter cap would leave more than 350 households left to their own devices in the coldest months of the year.

And this only accounts for those defined by the Legislature as “vulnerable.” As Siegel pointed out, every homeless Vermonter is, by definition, vulnerable.

The presser was something of a Hail Mary pass. It’s possible the conference committee will be shamed into improving the Senate program, but Senate Appropriations Committee chair Sen. Jane Kitchel is one of the six conferees and she is dead set on limiting the cost of the program rather than, say, accommodating the actual need. Overcoming Kitchel’s determination is a lot to ask of the House conferees.

The sad thing is, Kitchel is dead wrong in every aspect of this issue. She has claimed that the only way to provide more shelter is to take away money from others in need, which is an either-or that only exists in her mind. She opposed the House transition bill because it would have drawn revenue from a tax on high earners and a bigger tax on property transfers for big-ticket real estate deals. She echoed Gov. Phil Scott’s contention that Vermont has reached its taxing capacity. As Siegel pointed out in the press conference, there is no such thing as taxing capacity. The House carefully targeted those who can clearly afford to pay more — like those who have been greatly enriched by federal tax cuts enacted under the Trump and Bush administrations.

Kitchel has also spent a lot of time bashing the House for repeatedly changing the rules for the voucher program, making it difficult to administer. Well, first of all, the House has repeatedly changed the program in hopes of gaining approval by Kitchel and her fellow penny-pinchers.

But the kicker is that in writing her version of the FY2025 budget, she created a whole new set of rules that will be at least as difficult to administer as anything the House has ever devised in an attempt to gain her forbearance.

Kitchel’s rules, including that 80-day cap for participating households and the total caps on available motel rooms, are not designed to solve a problem or meet a fundamental human need. They’re designed to minimize the cost of the program and spread out the impact so there’s no singular mass unhousing event that might cause people like her some political embarrassment.

And if you think I’m being unfair to Kitchel, I invite you to watch her committee’s April 2 hearing with Chris Winters, commissioner of the Department of Children and Families. Kitchel dominated the proceedings, and spent her time complaining about the House, punching straw men, and commiserating with Winters. The rest of the committee barely spoke at all.

During today’s presser, Siegel asked, “Is this the Vermont we want to be?” For Kitchel and her allies, why yes, it is.