Dear Editor,
How wonderful to return home after a week in Montpelier to find our hillside full of blooming daffodils and forsythia. And, on the ride home, I had noticed how, as I drove south, it got greener and greener. Spring must indeed be on the way.
We have hit a time in the session, about four weeks from adjourning, when everything is in play. As many of you have read, the education reform bill, H.955, has passed out of the House for consideration by the Senate. This is based on creating seven regional Cooperative Education Service Areas (CESA) out of the 119 school districts, designed to promote more efficient management of human resources, special education, professional services, and development, like what we have already established here in southeast Vermont. Voluntary mergers aimed at regionalizing our middle and high schools would then be encouraged within those CESA’s. Incentives to encourage these mergers are not fully agreed upon yet, but would probably include school construction support and other financial “carrots.”
But the Senate has its own education reform bill which has yet to make it out of committee, let alone pass the Senate floor, leaving the House almost no time to fully consider it.
The yield bill, H.949, which addresses how we pay for education, cleared the House with a 7% increase in the statewide education property tax rate. The Senate has worked to reduce the increase even further, to 3.8%. However, the Senate’s bill also includes a reduction of the excess spending threshold from 118% to 112%, which would have very tough consequences for our area schools.
Other work very much in the mix is the update to parts of 2024’s Act 181, which included several Act 250 reforms designed to spur housing development. It identified tiers for a range of development and required that our towns set housing targets and create maps identifying which areas they wanted to develop and which areas they wanted to protect. Two aspects of the original bill have drawn stiff opposition from our rural communities: the Road Rule, which requires that any road longer than 800 feet get Act 250 review, and Tier 3, designed to limit development on our most ecologically sensitive lands. The updates are in a Senate bill, S.325, which is now being considered in the House. And, while the bill recognizes these two aspects of Act 181 need more work and extends the time frame to work on them, it now appears that these provisions will be repealed and replaced with a negotiated compromise.
In addition, there are many other bills and issues in play: efforts to improve the eviction process for landlords and tenants, improving data privacy, closing the $33 million gap in the Transportation Fund, reducing health care costs, building more homes, improving firearm safety, protecting consumers with improving data privacy, reducing ticket resale scams, and reducing our alarming rise in teenage nicotine addiction. So much is still being negotiated, and so much needs resolution before we adjourn in May.
I appreciate hearing from you. I can be reached by email at aclarkson@leg.state.vt.us, by phone at the Statehouse, Tuesday-Friday, at 802-828-2228; or by phone at home, Saturday-Monday, at 802- 457-4627. To get more information on the Vermont Legislature and the bills which have been proposed and passed, visit the legislative website, legislature.vermont.gov.
Sincerely,
Sen. Alison Clarkson
Windsor District