Two legislative committees got a metaphorical bucket of cold water dumped over their heads today by people who are trying, and largely failing, to deal with Vermont’s crisis of homelessness. And then a pair of just plain ordinary folks took the stage and tossed an equally metaphorical grenade into the room with their real-life experiences of homelessness and the frustrations of dealing with social service bureaucracy.

Guys like Bryan Plant, pictured above, are rarely featured in legislative hearings, and that’s a damn shame. He’s smart, articulate, and his input is crucial. The absence of voices like his makes for myopic policymaking, with no attention to how the system affects those on the receiving end.

Plant and Rebecca Duprey were the two witnesses labeled as “Lived Experience” on the docket for today’s joint hearing of House Human Services and Senate Health & Welfare. The two committees were examining the implementation of Act 81, the extension of the motel voucher program hastily negotiated at the end of June by legislative leadership and the Scott administration.

Plant and Duprey told stories of encountering barrier after barrier: “a mountain of paperwork,” much of it incomprehensible and repetitive, an unresponsive bureaucracy, poor to nonexistent coordination between government programs, constant turnover among case workers (Plant was assigned to 11 different “service coordinators” in three years, so you can imagine how coordinated his services were). It all added up to, in Duprey’s words, a system of “inexcusable cruelty” to people in the direst of circumstances. “You have no idea how damaging this is to people,” Plant told the committees.

The topper: Plant and Duprey are two of the rare success stories of Act 81. Unlike the vast majority of voucher clients, they have managed to find good housing. They struggled their way through a system that seems more designed to frustrate its clients than to help them regain their footing in life.

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