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April 5, 2025
- morrowforvt
- Jul 22
- 2 min read
The most important bills being worked on in the legislature are focused on health care (which still gets little press time despite being THE major crisis for the state), education reform and the budget.
Health Care – Sorry for starting with the bad news, but this is an issue we all need to be aware of and involved in solving. The health care system, which is largely a disease and symptom treatment apparatus, is in crisis. Vermonters are paying way more than residents of other states for insurance and care. And all the major trends are going in the wrong direction as we face potentially massive cuts in Medicaid funding from the federal government, which will throw Vermont’s budget into chaos.
For a short (3 minute) video that sets the context for the state of our system and how we can move forward please watch this. And then sign up to get updates from vhc911.org. For a quick article on health care activity in the General Assembly, click here.
Education – The Senate Education Committee is working off the efforts of the Governor and the House to substantially change the education reform package. For those of you who really want to dig into this, the draft Senate bill is here, and some new funding formula modeling is here. This bill will move the Senate Finance Committee soon. Lots more to come on this bill!
Budget – The Senate Finance Committee added about $33 million to the budget for next year. Here is a summary of the Senate version compared to the House and Governor’s versions. The Governor, as far as I know, has not weighed in on the budget since it passed out of Senate Finance. Hopefully, all parties can come to agreement on this soon. In normal years, we would adjourn after passage of the budget. This year we are slated to stay in Montpelier through May to get the education reform package across the line. The legislature is likely to be back in session before the end of the year to deal with fallout from the federal budget and other cuts.
In my committee of Energy and Digital Infrastructure, we amended and passed Senate Bill 50, which will increase the size of ground mount solar arrays that qualify for expedited certification by the Public Utility Commission. This basically is just keeping up with the improvements in solar array technology.
We also heard from the Secretary, Agency of Digital Services about their efforts to streamline state IT and to bend the cost curve. This is a multi-year effort, but one which is desperately needed. The state spends a tremendous amount of money on IT and there has been weak oversight traditionally. We are also taking lots of testimony on the state’s energy code for residential buildings. Vermont is the only state not to have a building code for residential buildings! But we do have an energy code, with no enforcement mechanism. So we continue to build houses which will use unnecessary amounts of energy and cost more to operate.
I hope you are enjoying spring. Please get in touch with me if I can be of assistance.
Best,
Chris Morrow