May 30, 2025

Hello,

Well, the legislature temporarily adjourned late Friday night after many fits and starts. The good news is that we passed some excellent legislation on health care, housing, homelessness and support for flood impacted municipalities. I will be delving into these bills in a few days when I put out an end of session report. Many of these bills passed with strong bipartisan support, showing the hard work of the committees responsible for these topics.

Unfortunately, after staying an extra two weeks to deal with it, we will have to return to Montpelier on June 16th to tackle this session’s signature piece of legislation – education reform.

The big lesson from my first session: leadership matters.

The Senate (30 people) and the House (150), despite both being controlled by Democrats, are very different and communication is not always good.  There was a bizarre lack of leadership from the Senate Pro Tem on education reform from the beginning of the session. For a spot-on analysis of the conference committee implosion and the chaos in the Senate, read this short piece. For a more general look at the Education bill’s closing dynamics, read this Digger article.

Education reform has not been an ideal process from the beginning. While the Governor did present a framework of an idea for education reform early in the session, it took the administration a couple of months to present a full proposal with legislative language. Too late. The Governor and his team should have had a full-blown proposal ready for the legislature on day one.

The House did some excellent work on education reform. However, it was not as friendly to independent schools and rural districts as I wanted. Many of us were counting on the Senate to come to the table with a strong counter bill; this did not happen. It is good we adjourned without a bill as it clearly needs more time and work to get this right. I am still hopeful that a strong bill can be crafted in the next two weeks and we can move forward. But it is not at all certain. Stay tuned.

Back to leadership… even if we pass an excellent education reform bill, we will need a strong, fully staffed and engaged Agency of Education to implement the bill and support our local schools and new district boards. There will be a tremendous amount of work to do in this transition. The Governor has not invested properly in the Agency as many local and regional education professionals can attest. We will need your voices and more work next session to rectify this.

I don’t mean to pick on the Governor. I voted for him numerous times. But as I get closer to the reality of our state government, I see a lot of talk without the substance to move ideas forward. For instance, the biggest crisis we are facing (and this has been clear for years) is our health care system. Not only is it responsible for driving up costs in education, but across all sectors of society. We have hospitals, Blue Cross, and small primary care facilities teetering, literally on the brink of bankruptcy. Where has the leadership been on this? You could also ask why the legislature didn’t act more forcefully on health care when it had a super majority?

At any rate, we passed two health care bills that will have a substantial impact on our health care system in the coming years. It is not enough, but it is an excellent start. More on this in my end of session report.

A topic I would like you to think about: as the world gets more complex and change speeds up: is it still appropriate to have a citizen legislature where participation is severely limited by poor pay and no benefits? Where there are no professional staff beyond the legal and fiscal folks (who do an excellent job)? The system works fine in some instances, but is it equipped to meet the demands of the 21^st century in a robust and timely way? I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.

I will end by saying that it has been an honor to serve in the legislature. I have learned a great deal. We work hard and debate vociferously for the benefit of Vermonters. I appreciate your trust in me to fill this role.

Enjoy the summer,

Chris Morrow

cmorrow@leg.state.vt.us