Rep. Stevens: Legislative highlights and plans for another run
May 24, 2024 | By Rep. Tom Stevens As it always does, the Legislature came grinding to an end with a final vote on the Fiscal Year 25 budget. This year, we gaveled out at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 11. We worked long enough to miss seeing the Northern Lights when we were done!
I’m sure we will have a deeper and more thorough report on what bills passed and were signed (or not) in the coming weeks, but for now, a few highlights of the final weeks of the session as the House and Senate ironed out their differences and reached some compromises:
H.687 throughout the session was known as the “Act 250” bill in the House. By the time it arrived back in the House from the Senate, it contained many important elements of H.829 and H.639, which were two of our major housing bills. In the end, many positive reforms were made to Act 250 land use regulations. These changes should retain the principles of conservation while relaxing some zoning regulations in order to allow communities to build more housing units without hurting our anti-sprawl tradition. Housing sections included revisions to the recently created VHIP program, which allows property owners the ability to apply for funds to help renovate units, as well as funding for a series of pilot programs for upstream eviction prevention, which is estimated to prevent up to 400 evictions a year. Also included in H.687 were important flood risk disclosure provisions for owners selling their properties, created in response to the 2023 flooding.
H.121 is an incredibly important and well-crafted Data Privacy bill that includes elements of S.289, which was focused on privacy for children. H.121 was opposed by those who benefit by having access to your personal data in order to sell it — mostly the big companies like Google or Amazon.
H.887 is the usually sleepy “yield bill,” which is one of the “must-pass” bills we consider every year. The yield bill is basically the final word for the year regarding education spending. The state totals up the amount of money municipalities have voted to spend and divides it into the final statewide tax rate. The bill this year contained funding to “buy down” the tax rate. This is a rightfully controversial construct because it takes surplus funds and artificially lowers the tax rate in a way that must be paid for next year. This is because it is a one-time payment and not built into the funding structure. In essence, we’ll be starting next year “in a hole” with respect to the education fund and will have to account for this year’s spending then. In the short term, the average increase has been lowered to approximately 13.5% statewide. Very high, to be certain, but nearly 40% lower than feared earlier this year.
There is no question that this was a difficult year, especially financially. The massive amounts of pandemic-related assistance funds have dried up, and establishing a workable budget that allowed for some programs created over the last several years to be continued took a lot of work. The House and Senate as usual had different ideas about priorities and were able to work out those differences in a conference committee.
We are preparing for a veto session on June 17-18. We don’t know how many bills we will see vetoed this spring. Two longstanding bills with a lot of support in the House and Senate have been vetoed: one banning neonicotinoids on seeds and one setting energy standards in buildings — one of our several responses to needs moving forward to combat climate change. We expect several more in the coming days. A mild surprise was to see the FY25 budget signed on Thursday.
It has been a privilege to represent Waterbury, Bolton, Huntington and Buel’s Gore over the last 16 years, and I wanted to let you know that I’ll be submitting a petition to run for reelection. There remains so much to be done with the issues I’ve worked on — affordable housing, social and racial equity, wages, paid leave, landlord/tenant law, and labor law. I continue to ask for your support and your vote in the upcoming primary on August 13. Please feel free to reach out to me via my legislative email: tstevens@leg.state.vt.us.
Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury, is one of two state representatives in the Washington-Chittenden House district covering Waterbury, Huntington, Bolton and Buel’s Gore. He chairs the House General and Housing Committee.