Nothing has changed since my August 18 post about pending reductions in the state’s emergency housing program. Well, that’s not exactly true. Nothing has changed in terms of the official response, but there are all kinds of ways in which the situation is looking even worse than previously thought. That light you see at the end of the tunnel? That’s the headlight of the train headed right for us. Today is September 6; hundreds of people in state-paid motel rooms will see their eligibility expire beginning in mid-September, at the same time a cap on the number of motel rooms will take effect.

That cap is 1,100. At last count, there were more than 1,400 households in the program — and a waiting list of hundreds more. Om case you’d forgotten, eligibility had already been restricted to the truly vulnerable: People with young children or disabilities, people who had suffered a natural disaster or are fleeing domestic abuse.

Remember when Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Jane Kitchel sought reassurance that no one in a wheelchair would be put out on the street if the voucher program were cut back, and Department of Children and Families Commissioner Chris Winters replied “Hopefully not”? Well, turns out we definitely will be kicking out people in wheelchairs, and others with severe disabilities, and generally, people with nowhere else to turn.

In Friday’s mail was the latest edition of The Montpelier Bridge and its two front-page articles: “City Moves to Clear Country Club Road Encampment” and “Motel Program Restrictions Mean 100 Local People To Be Ousted.” Yeah, welcome to the greatest nation on Earth.

Meanwhile, official Vermont was strictly adhering to procedure, which means that nothing will be done until at least January to restore voucher availability to all of our most vulnerable. Which means that several hundred Vermonters will have no shelter between this month and the onset of the winter motel program. And some of them “will end up losing their lives,” according to Brenda Siegel of End Homelessness Vermont.

She spoke those words at a Thursday meeting of the Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules. These confabs are normally boring as all getout; when a bill becomes law, the executive branch has to write rules for implementing said law, and LCAR gets to review and — usually — rubber-stamp the rules.

On Thursday, the panel took up the rules written by the Scott administration for conducting the voucher program under the terms of Act 113, the terrible compromise bill that extended the program but imposed the cuts that are triggering this month’s mass unsheltering.

For those keeping score, those would be the rules that were received by the committee on June 25 and had been governing the program since July 1. More than two months later, LCAR conducted its review.

Siegel brought the customary fire to the proceedings. She accused the administration of acting contrary to the intent of Act 113 in order to limit eligibility and cut costs. Even before the pending reductions, she said, her organization has been overwhelmed by the demand for help from voucher recipients and applicants. “We’re drowning,” she said. “We spend at least a portion of every day holding back tears.”

Siegel said the administration wrote overly complicate rules and has administered them inconsistently. As a result, many people who qualify for vouchers have been turned away. “My organization, in August, addressed 400 unique needs.” she said. “In September, we have addressed 40 in the first two days. That tells you what we’re going to end up with” after the 80-day limit and 1,100-room cap take effect.

Playing the role of Soulless Bureaucrat was Nicole Tousignant, economic benefits director for the Department of Children and Families. She said the administration had no choice but to exclude some vulnerable people. “If I included everyone with disability, that would be 1,250 households, so we had to somehow break up the population to get below the 1,100 cap,” she said. You know what they say about eggs and omelets, I guess.

Sen. Ginny Lyons expressed dismay. “In our legislative discussions, we wanted to preserve disability,” she said. “We included language to do so. It doesn’t look like you’ve used that at all.”

Tousignant responded, “It simply comes down to 1100 is too low a number to prioritize everyone with disabilities.”

And you know, she’s right. The Senate may have wanted to cover everyone with disabilities or high risk factors, but the room cap is at odds with that intent. Lyons is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which devised the 80-day limit and the room cap. Approps chair Kitchel talked herself into believing that every person with disability would be covered. And the committee, Lyons included, allowed Kitchel to bigfoot the proceedings. Not to mention that Lyons is chair of the Senate Health & Welfare Committee. If anyone should have been fully informed about the implications of the room cap, it’s her.

Expressions of chagrin notwithstanding, LCAR has limited room to maneuver. “[The committee] can only object if rules are out of line with legislative intent,” said Damian Leonard of the Office of Legislative Counsel. “The legislation is silent on how to use the 1,100 rooms or how priority should happen.” He said the Legislature could “come back in budget adjustment and give more direction,” which wouldn’t happen until January at the earliest. Otherwise, Leonard said, “in the absence of giving the department direction, the department has chosen a course of action.”

In the end, LCAR voted to postpone action until its next meeting, which seemed both a feeble gesture of protest and the most it is legally empowered to do. The place to make a stand wasn’t in LCAR last week; it was in the Legislature last spring. At the time, people like Siegel warned them that Act 113’s caps on rooms and eligibility would leave vulnerable people unsheltered. The Legislature didn’t listen, and left it to the administration to figure things out. The administration, which has wanted to kill the voucher program for years, acted completely in character by writing restrictive rules and incompetently managing the program. Somehow, LCAR managed to be “shocked, shocked” at such goings-on.