In situations of dire emergency, triage helps guide the use of available resources. When there are no other options, it’s a logical way for those resources to have maximum impact. A battlefield, a weather incident, a disaster of any sort.
But when resources are available or the situation is predictable, triage is not appropriate. And that’s the situation we’ve got with The Great Unhousing. Vermont doesn’t have to end the motel voucher program and throw thousands of people out on the street. We don’t have to create the worst homelessness crisis in living memory.
And yet our official policy, both executive and legislative, is to ignore easily affordable and comprehensive solutions in favor of triaging the unhoused — providing shelter for those with extreme risk factors and leaving the rest to go hang.
In this situation, triage is not only unnecessary. It’s inhumane.
Note: Several hours after this post went live, I got a complaint from someone in Mayor Weinberger’s office that I had mischaracterized his proposal. After multiple text exchanges, I got some additional clarity on his plan. I’ve tried to accurately reflect it with notations to the original post. Newly added text is in bold type.
However, the thrust of the piece is unchanged. Weinberger’s plan would provide for the most at-risk of the unhoused, but not nearly for all of them. Also, it must be said that while Weinberger’s plan would mitigate the worst effects of The Great Unhousing in Chittenden County, I’ve never heard him lobbying for a broader solution. He has not called on the governor or Legislature to restore the voucher program while alternative housing can be brought online. He is one more political leader who’s trying to limit the damage rather than address the whole problem.
Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger has come out with a plan to deal with most of Chittenden County’s share of The Great Unhousing. His proposal is to create a 50-bed shelter and a day shelter with space for 75 in an empty state office building, and extend motel voucher eligibility for 318 people due to be evicted at the end of July until alternative housing can be found for them.165 households with significant risk factors including families with minor children, adults with disabilities receiving home health and/or hospice services, seniors (60 years+), and pregnant households.
Left off his list: Anyone already evicted on June 1 (almost 200 people in Chittenden County) or about to be evicted on the first of July.
This would include some households that were evicted on June 1 and others due to lose their motel accommodations on July 1 or July 28. But it would far from cover all of those being evicted; the total in Chittenden County, according to Weinberger’s proposal, is 354 households encompassing 512 individuals.
Even so, the estimated price tag for the office building conversion and the extended motel stays is somewhere around $4 million, per VTDigger. The source for that money, if state officials accept Weinberger’s plan? The $12.5 million allocated by the Legislature to make the end of the voucher program slightly less catastrophic.
Perhaps you can see the problem here. If the state says yes, it will have committed one-third of the statewide total for Burlington alone. For a partial solution to Chittenden County’s share of The Great Unhousing.
And according to VTDigger, Weinberger’s is one of 44 proposals submitted to the state on June 1 alone — the first day the state was accepting proposals.
The 2023 Vermont Point-in-Time Report of Those Experiencing Homelessness is out, and it shows an explosion in homelessness over the last four years, including an 18.5% increase from last year — and a 36% hike from 2022 in unhoused families with children.
The latter figure is bitterly ironic considering the Democratic Legislature’s laser focus on helping children this session. Too bad that while they were funding child care programs and universal school meals, they couldn’t be bothered to keep roofs over unhoused children’s heads. (They could still reverse course during the upcoming veto session, which would be nice.)
The PIT Report also makes the Scott administration look even worse, which is quite the accomplishment. The numbers make clear that homelessness was exploding even as Scott was bound and determined to kill the motel voucher program that provides shelter for 80% of Vermont’s unhoused. Well, it did until last week, when the state evicted some 700 voucher clients.
The numbers also shine an unforgiving light on the administration’s failure to make any transition plan whatsoever for ending the voucher program humanely. They had to know this was happening, and yet they did nothing. It was “a crisis outrunning the state’s response,” in the words of Dartmouth College policy fellow Anne Sosin, who spent the 2023 legislative session desperately trying to get state officials and lawmakers to acknowledge the obvious.
The continuing rise in homelessness also belies Scott’s argument that the program was a response to Covid-19 and now that the pandemic is “over,” the program has to end. Problem is, even as the pandemic was waning, homelessness kept on rising dramatically. The real problem was a massive imbalance in real estate markets. There was never a policy adjustment to that change in reality.
It went unnoticed at the time because our media was dominated by stories of the newly-unhoused being evicted from state-paid motel rooms, but last Thursday Gov. Phil Scott announced what he called “continued progress” toward his voluntary paid family leave program.
You remember that, don’t you? It’s the plan he and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu came up with in 2019 as an alternative to universal paid leave plans. It was supposed to be a joint effort, but that quickly unraveled. Instead, each governor set out to establish equivalent programs in their respective states.
Phase 1 of Scott’s plan takes effect on July 1, ironically enough on the next scheduled mass eviction event. On that day, Vermont state employees will be enrolled in a paid leave plan that will offer up to six weeks of leave at 60% of an employee’s average weekly wage for new parents or those dealing with urgent family situations. The state workforce will then serve as a base for a voluntary program to be offered to Vermont employers in July of next year.
Sununu’s plan took effect last year for New Hampshire state employees. The second phase was announced last summer with a $1.9 million state-funded “publicity blitz.” December 1, 2022 was the date that private employers could start enrolling.
And although Sununu officials are furiously lipsticking that pig, the program is, in fact, off to an unimpressive start. So unimpressive that it casts serious doubt on the prospects for Scott’s program.
In case you thought the unhousing of Vermonters from a motel shelter program was a new thing, VTDigger comes along with a history lesson that manages to deepen my anger at and understanding of our current situation. It seems that we went through the exact same thing only 10 years ago.
And apparently we didn’t learn a damn thing, because we’re doing it again.
The circumstances were different, but the outcome was the same. Funding for an emergency motel voucher program was cut, and a large cohort was suddenly tossed out on the street. Some were given tents and sleeping bags in lieu of actual shelter.
One big difference between now and then: The Democrats ran the roost. They held the governorship as well as the Legislature, and they still managed to screw our most vulnerable. That sheds some light on the capacity of today’s Democratic leaders to defund the program and accept the consequences. They’ve done it before, so why not now?
Gov. Phil Scott’s reputation as a sound manager of state government took another hit last week — well, it should have taken another hit — with the publication of Auditor Doug Hoffer’s report on the Agency of Digital Services (downloadable here). In short, Hoffer examined six major IT projects and found that only one was completed on time and under budget. He also found that five the six had such “poorly defined measures” that it was difficult to determine success or failure, and that there were “limited efforts or plans” to ensure the new systems met expectations. That’s, um, not good.
The agency was a centerpiece of the then-newly elected governor’s “overall strategy for modernizing state government.” Scott unveiled ADS in mid-January 2017, just days after his inauguration, as a way to unify and streamline what had been a scattered information technology effort. Hoffer’s audit suggests that the agency has fallen far short of Scott’s promise.
It reminds me of Scott’s much-touted commitment to “lean management.” You may not remember that phrase because it’s been years since he uttered those words, but during his first run for governor he said “lean management” just as often as he said “cradle to career,” “affordability,” or “protecting the most vulnerable.” And he promised that in his first year in office, lean management would save one penny for every dollar spent by the state — or about $55 million in total.
Which never materialized, at all, not even close. That’s why you never hear him talking about it anymore.
Renowned nice guy Gov. Phil Scott has made history — again — by vetoing yet another bill. According to the Vermont State Archives, Scott’s veto of the legislative pay raise bill was the 40th of his administration.
Scott is the first Vermont governor to reach 40, just as he was the first to reach 35, and 30, and 25, and 22. The previous record holder was Howard Dean, who vetoed 21 bills in his 12 years in office. Scott has nearly doubled that total in only seven legislative sessions. And he might rack up another one or two before the books close on the 2023 Legislature.
The State Archives list 184 veto messages by Vermont governors. The first one happened in 1839, when Gov. S.H. Jenison vetoed a bill to establish the Memphremagog Literary and Theological Seminary. Phil Scott is now responsible for 21.7% of all the vetoes in state history. He’s only occupied the office for 2.9% of the time that Vermont has had a governor.
The Scott apologists in the audience may be thinking “Well, of course he’s vetoed a lot of bills. He’s a Republican facing a Democratic Legislature.” Sure, but (a) he’s supposedly a moderate and (b) he’s an extreme outlier by any standard. Jim Douglas had a very contentious relationship with the Legislature, and yet he vetoed only 19 bills in his four full terms in office. He averaged less than two and a half vetoes per year. Scott is averaging almost eight.
Day Two of The Great Unhousing passed with far less fanfare than Day One, but the human toll was just as high and the consequences just as shameful. Our area of central Vermont was hit by a tremendous rainstorm yesterday afternoon, and I had to wonder how many of the newly-unhoused were being thoroughly soaked and their possessions destroyed by the downpour. Too bad the state’s “Adverse Weather Policy” is only designed to minimize the number of people who actually freeze to death. Dangerous heat and severe storms? Eh, that’s okay, I guess.
(The image above is taken from a video posted on Twitter by Brenda Siegel. I used a screenshot where the person’s face is obscured because I want to be illustrative without being exploitive. We do need to be reminded of the humanity behind the statistics and the policy debates without reducing our fellow Vermonters to political props. I appreciate Siegel continuing to bear witness; somebody’s got to.)
There was little media coverage on Day Two because there wasn’t anything “new,” just another day of unnecessary misery. Just another day when people who were living on the edge come closer to falling over. Just another day when the bland professions of our political class ring hollow. Heck, the only thing that’s got them hot and bothered is a bit of vandalism on their doorsteps.
At this moment I have a hard time ginning up any outrage on their behalf. We’d all like to feel secure in our homes, and I understand that. It’s just that some people don’t have homes at all, and our leaders played an active role in making that happen.
Now that a judge has tossed a spear into the chest of those who hoped to prevent The Great Unhousing, the next political step will be the upcoming veto override session in the Legislature, scheduled for June 20-22. The House and Senate will be trying, among other things, to override Gov. Phil Scott’s veto of the FY2024 budget.
They should have a comfortable margin of victory, but 17 Democratic/Progressive lawmakers have promised to vote against override of any budget that doesn’t extend the motel voucher program and build an offramp to better housing solutions. This week, I’ve had two conversations that shed contradictory light on the pending budget debate: One cast doubt on the very idea of reopening the budget, while the other basically called bullshit on the first.
Scenario number one. The budget override attempt will be an up-or-down vote on the budget as adopted by the House and Senate. No changes allowed. That wouldn’t prevent leadership from negotiating with the 17 between now and then, but they couldn’t amend the budget before the vote. The best they could do is craft a Plan B to expedite the process after an override failure.
Now, let’s assume the override fails. At that point, the power swings to Gov. Phil Scott. Counterintuitive, but here’s why.
I won’t try to convince you that I hate to say “I told you so,” but it’s true that I hate to have to tell you I told you so. Way back on March 26, when legislative leaders were assuring us that the end of the motel voucher program was being prepared for, that there’s no way we’d actually leave thousands of Vermonters without shelter, I wrote this:
When we see pictures of mass evictions, stories about struggling Vermonters suddenly tossed into the void, and coverage of human service providers despairing at the chasm between demand and supply, the Democrats will not be able to shirk responsibility for it.
Well, today was Day One of The Great Unhousing, and our print and broadcast media are full of stories about people having nowhere to go and pictures of desolate evictees surrounded by their possessions. VTDigger: a distraught young woman sits on a curb with hastily-packed items in bags on the pavement and no idea where she’s going. The Bennington Banner: an older woman loads her belongings into her car, where she’s planning to sleep into the indefinite future. WCAX: a young man says he’s “probably [sleeping] in the street.” Channel 22/44: A young mother says “we don’t know what’s next” and “it’s terrifying.” WPTZ: A middle-aged man talks of “reaching out to friends, seeing if anyone has a room available.” The Rutland Herald: Small towns in Rutland County struggle to prepare for a possible influx of the unhoused. Vermont Public: an outreach worker in Burlington describes a demand for tents, cooking supplies, and other necessities of outdoor living.
Oh, and also on Vermont Public: vaunted nice guy Gov. Phil Scott talks of how “some choose to maybe set up a tent somewhere.”
“Choose.” As if they were given a choice. Good God.
The Vermont Political Observer. 