Lawmakers on Tuesday suspended their rules to pass, in a matter of mere hours, an 11th-hour deal that will keep roughly 2,000 unhoused Vermonters sheltered in motels until April 1, 2024, unless state officials can find alternate placements.
Gov. Phil Scott is planning to give the measure his stamp of approval. After a meeting between the Republican governor and legislative leadership on Friday, administration officials worked through the weekend to collaborate on the legislation’s final language.
His press secretary, Jason Maulucci, confirmed Tuesday morning that, “barring unforeseen changes,” the governor would sign the bill.
The move is an about-face for Democratic leaders in the Legislature and Scott, who have argued forcefully for months that, absent federal dollars that once underwrote the effort, Vermont could not afford and needed to end a pandemic-era program which sheltered most of its unhoused population in motels.
But recent moves by the administration suggest even they believe they could use the extra time. Officials made the surprise announcement in late May that some would get extensions anyway.
“I would like to personally and publicly thank the governor for his part in producing what you see in front of you,” Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, told his Senate colleagues on the floor Tuesday. “We are here on the first day of this veto session looking to adjourn by dinnertime because the House, the Senate and the governor together saw this need, understood that it would require more time and a more fulsome process than was currently in place.”
Legislative leaders, meanwhile, were also under pressure from a block of Democrats and Progressives in the House who had banded together to demand that the program be at least temporarily and partially extended. That group of dissidents wielded powerful leverage: the votes legislative leaders needed to override Scott’s veto of the state budget.
With that deal in hand, Democrats in the block agreed to support the $8.5 billion budget. Lawmakers on Tuesday also overrode the governor’s budget veto by a vote of 105-42 in the House and 25-5 in the Senate.
“A month ago, we were in a much different place with concern to those who were vulnerable in regards to housing,” Rep. Mari Cordes, D-Lincoln, an organizer in the Democratic block, said on the House floor Tuesday before declaring her intentions to vote for the budget.
Maulucci said it “wasn’t lost” on the governor that he likely helped lawmakers override his own veto. But he said Scott had decided it was the “right thing to do.”
“Including the provision that folks are eligible until they’re offered a suitable alternative — the governor felt that that was a reasonable ask and workable and, in good faith, decided to move forward,” he said.
The motel program has become the subject of public outcry. The day started with a small group of protestors chanting “Keep 2,000 Vermonters sheltered” in the House gallery.
“You are voting to kill people,” one placard read.
And Vermont’s decision to end its pandemic era-supports, at a time when its rates of homelessness are among the worst in the nation, has also attracted the attention of national media outlets.
The new motel legislation was tacked on as an amendment to H.171, a bill overhauling Vermont’s adult protective services. It will not re-enroll the approximately 800 people who lost motel benefits in June when the state narrowed eligibility. And it will not apply to those who fall into homelessness after July 1. Those people will have to ask for help under the state’s much-stricter pre-pandemic rules.
It will apply only to the roughly 2,000 people who entered the program before June 30 andwho met certain eligibility criteria laid out in a mid-year spending package enacted into law this March.