Tag Archives: Joint Fiscal Committee

In Which the High and Mighty Look Down from the Clouds and Determine the Fate of Our Most Vulnerable

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Love the online access for legislative hearings where the audio quality is poor and the view so expansive that you can’t tell who’s talking. It’s even worse when a powerpoint presentation occupies 90% of the screen and all the little people are confined to a small corner.

But the optics seem appropriate when the subject is Vermont’s troubled emergency housing program, taken up briefly today by the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee. (It was one item on a packed agenda, with a mere 30 minutes allocated for multiple witnesses.) There’s something ironically apropos about those remote figures in an ornate room discussing the state’s failure to provide adequate shelter for our neediest Vermonters.

But enough philosophizing. The subject at hand was how the Scott administration is implementing Act 143, the Legislature’s attempt to create a better emergency housing system. In the eyes of advocacy groups, the administration has taken a heavy-handed approach and fast-tracked a new system without much input from outside the boundaries of its own sphincter.

This process has triggered an impassioned response from advocacy groups and helping agencies, up to and potentially including legal action for what they see as the administration’s deliberate flouting of Act 143’s intent. A small next step took place today before JFC, with more hearings to come in the near future. (The Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules is expected to take up the new process on October 1, and there will be a joint hearing of he House Human Service and Senate Health & Welfare Committees on October 9.) Nothing was settled today, but the lines are drawn a bit more clearly now.

Not that that will help anyone caught in the chaos — planned or otherwise — of a situation that seems to have been easily avoidable except that the Scott administration has rarely acted in good faith when it comes to sheltering the homeless. The constant preoccupation is with cost and with making recipients prove they are worthy, instead of meeting a simple basic human need. Or, to put it another way, doing the right thing.

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I Saved the Worst for Last: The Meanest, Absurdest, Most Ridiculous Thing Anyone Said at That Joint Fiscal Hearing

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The gent pictured above, bowtie rakishly askew, is Todd Daloz, Deputy Secretary of the Agency of Human Services. In a Tuesday hearing of the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee, he staunchly defended Scott administration policy on emergency housing. I covered some of his remarks in my previous post, but there was one passage so incredible, so morally bankrupt, so blithely dismissive of basic calendrical logic, that it deserved a piece all to itself.

As you may recall, the single worst idea in the Legislature’s latest iteration of an emergency housing extension was the imposition of a motel voucher rate cap — to take effect on March 1 — of either $75 (House version) or $80 (Senate). That’s a drop of more than $50 from the current average rate. May I remind you that March 1 is a mere two days away.

It’s ridiculous. It’s absurd. It’s heartless. And extra bonus points, it’s just plain impossible in terms of governmental process. This is a provision in the FY2024 Budget Adjustment Act that still has to pass the House and Senate and gain Gov. Phil Scott’s signature, which is far from a sure thing.

I don’t see how all that can happen by March 1, much less all the necessary steps to implement the idea.

And yet, on Tuesday Mr. Daloz made a point of insisting that the March 1 rate cap must stand.

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The Official in Charge of Human Services Would Like You to Ignore the Humanitarian Crisis She Helped Create

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You’d think the head of the biggest and most complicated agency in state government would have quite enough on her plate without dipping her toe into housing policy. But somehow, Human Services Secretary Jenney Samuelson found time in her busy schedule to co-write an opinion column — you know, those things nobody reads? — that addresses our housing crisis without ever mentioning our ongoing humanitarian disaster of unsheltered homelessness.

Samuelson co-wrote the piece with Commerce Secretary Lindsay Kurrle, whose job description actually includes housing supply issues. I’ve got no problem with Kurrle promoting the Scott administration’s housing push. But Samuelson? Coming from her, the piece comes across as dishonest and disengenuous.

The biggest howler comes right near the top, where the two secretaries boast that “we’ve been successful in transitioning an unprecedented number of Vermonters out of homelessness” this year.

Great, congratulations. What they don’t mention, of course, is that the unprecedented need for shelter was triggered by THE SCOTT ADMINISTRATION’S INSISTENCE ON ENDING THE MOTEL VOUCHER PROGRAM.

Nope, not a word of that. Shameless.

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A Thoroughly Grim Outlook on Vermont’s Housing Crisis

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If the above image looks a little fuzzy, thank the limitations of the Legislature’s system for recording and livestreaming its hearings. But it reflects the situation we face on housing: Our public leaders seem small and indistinct when discussing the enormity of Vermont’s housing shortage, and their explication of the crisis was long on broad pronouncements and short on specifics.

The Scott administration’s A-team, pictured above, appeared before the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee and delivered a gloomy overview that has to rank as one of the most depressing events I’ve experienced in my 12-ish years following #vtpoli. Doesn’t quite top Peter Shumlin’s surrender on health care reform or his near defeat at the hands of Scott Milne, but it’s not far behind.

The big takeaway: The housing crisis is even worse than we thought. From top to bottom, end to end, from the most basic of living spaces to the most extravagant, we don’t have nearly enough. Oh, and the epidemic of unsheltered homelessness that Our Leaders assured us was all taken care of last winter? That’s going to get even worse before it has a hope of getting better. And the “getting better” is going to take years.

And the interim solution, if they can manage to pull it off, is a massive increase in emergency shelters, most likely of the congregate variety. That, for a population ill-suited for such arrangements.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

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We Still Can’t Wind Down the Motel Voucher Program

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The Scott administration has published its monthly report on the GA emergency housing program (as mandated by the Legislature), and it’s nothing but bad news.

The report is downloadable (look for “Pandemic-Era Housing Reporting – October”) from the website of the Legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee, which will take up the report at its meeting on Tuesday, November 7. I suspect we’ll be in for more earnest expressions of concern, sad head-shaking, and fresh statements of determination to find answers.

The numbers tell a story of stasis. Barely any discernible progress in creating new housing or shelter, only the slightest dent in the number of people staying in state-paid motel rooms, and only a relative handful who managed to find alternative housing in October. This, despite an evident push by administration officials to move people out of the prgram, as reflected in the continuing efforts by former gubernatorial candidate and housing advocate Brenda Siegel, who just received the ACLU of Vermont’s David W. Curtis Civil Liberties Award. Her Twitter feed continues to feature stories of people who are obviously and painfully needy, but who are nonetheless losing their eligibility for motel vouchers.

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