By LOLA DUFFORT/VTDIGGER
MONTPELIER—Gov. Phil Scott on Thursday signed legislation that should allow about 2,000 people to keep receiving state vouchers to live in motels until April, unless the state can find alternate shelter or housing for them.
H.171, which became law only two days before July 1 — when those roughly 2,000 individuals were initially told they would be evicted — represents a partial but nevertheless startling reversal for Democratic legislative leaders and the Republican governor. With federal money that once underwrote the pandemic-era program now gone, both had insisted for months that the program was too expensive and needed to end.
The bill that Scott signed, which lawmakers passed during a special veto sessionlast week, does technically end the program. But, it also effectively extends it for current participants, who will be able to remain where they are until the spring if they contribute 30% of their income toward their stay. (However, an unhoused individual or family who seeks shelter from the state after June 30, when pandemic-era rules expire, will be excluded from the deal but able to apply for a motel voucher according to pre-pandemic rules, which much more tightly restrict who can get them and for how long.)
“For the first and only time this session, legislative leaders were willing to negotiate with us and pass a bill that gave us tools to ease this transition and address the issue of permanent housing at the same time,” Scott told reporters at his weekly press conference Thursday, after announcing he’d signed the legislation.
The 11th-hour deal appeared to be a concession to a bloc of Democrats and Progressives in the House who had banded together to demand that the program be at least partially extended. That group wielded powerful leverage: the votes legislative leaders needed to override Scott’s veto of the state budget.
But it’s also not that simple. That group of dissidents was told by House leadership in no uncertain terms, after the Legislature first adjourned in May, that their demand was impossible, lawmakers told VTDigger. They were even warned that leaders might work with Republicans, not them, to get a budget deal across the finish line.
The dam appeared to break, according to Rep. Caleb Elder, D-Starksboro, one member of the group, when the Senate — whose leaders were widely viewed as the most resistant to extend the program — changed its mind.
“I think as soon as they gave any daylight to House leadership, House leadership was like ‘Well, getting our people back on board and not having the override go down is way better,’” he said.
To explain their change of heart, legislative leaders in the House and Senate alike have pointed the finger back at the administration, arguing that recent actions made clear that they weren’t prepared for a July 1 exit date.
Reached by phone this week, Sen. Jane Kitchel, the influential chair of the chamber’s budget-writing Appropriations Committee, reiterated these arguments. After the Legislature initially adjourned, the administration began regularly briefing a small group of lawmakers. In the Caledonia Democrat’s telling, that’s when they learned that state officials had released a request for proposals for emergency shelter just days before June 1, when a first round of 800 people were set to lose motel benefits. That struck her as “kind of late in the process.”
And the other late-breaking announcement by administration officials that some would get an extension anyway “was kind of a signal that the administration was recognizing the need for more time,” she said.
The motel deal signed Thursday only applies to those who meet certain eligibility criteria — including families with children, the elderly, domestic abuse survivors, and those on federal disability. (Those who didn’t meet that criteria, according to state officials’ assessment, lost their motel housing in June.) And advocates had spent the session flooding lawmakers’ inboxes with tales of motel residents on oxygen, in wheelchairs, and recovering from surgery.
Even so, Kitchel said that while she knew that there were people who were elderly and disabled in the motels, she hadn’t known until recently just how acute some of their needs were.
“I would never have thought we had nursing home-level people being housed in motel rooms,” she said, adding that it wasn’t clear the state knew either.
The motel program deal written by lawmakers is also notable for the reporting requirements it imposes on the Agency of Human Services as it transitions participants out of the program. State officials will have to update lawmakers monthly — including in the off-session — on their progress finding new placements for those who still live in motels.
“One of the things I think we acknowledged was that our level and degree and depth of oversight and data collection and accountability was not at the level it needed to be,” Kitchel said.
Scott’s director of communications, Rebecca Kelley, said the governor’s office disagreed with the notion that its recent actions suggested it hadn’t adequately prepared.
“We’ve been working towards managing the transition while it’s in flux and a little bit uncertain. — that can be challenging. And sometimes particular needs arise when they arise. And the RFP, I would say the (Agency of Human Services) might be able to better speak to the timing, but that’s something where we identified a need and we acted,” she said.
And she argued that the extension announced in late May was not actually a reversal, but something the governor had planned to offer all along — although she did not dispute that lawmakers had once been told just the opposite.
“If there was miscommunication or misunderstanding with the Legislature, then we’ll take the blame for that,” Kelley said, adding that maybe administration officials had “gotten wires crossed along the way.”
By coming to Scott after the regular session to hammer out a new plan for the motel program, Kelley noted, lawmakers also gave the governor one last chance to push for his top housing priorities.
“Tools that we have been asking for during the session specific to expediting permanent housing, in the areas that specifically target rehousing homeless families, was something we were able to get in this negotiation,” she said.
Tucked inside the deal is a key change to the ‘HOME’ bill that was enacted into law earlier this month, significantly moving up when certain changes will take effect. The legislation made a suite of state and local regulatory reforms aimed at increasing the supply of housing, but most municipal reforms, including one that legalizes duplexes statewide, didn’t take effect until December 2024. That’s now been changed to July 1 of this year.
The bill also makes changes to how $40 million in one-time money directed to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board for affordable housing construction will be divvied up. Now, 30% — instead of 15% — of its projects will need to target those exiting homelessness. And $5 million has been redirected to the Vermont Housing Improvement Program, which offers landlords grants of up to $50,000 to get derelict units back online or create new units in an existing building. (This comes in addition to $10 million set aside for VHIP in the state budget.)
Anne Sosin, a policy fellow at the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College, who advocated for the program’s continuation, argues there’s a simple reason why the powers that be altered their course.
“Very early in the session, we identified what was going to happen if we didn’t fund this program, So the facts had been there all along,” she said. “What changed was that there was a campaign of sustained public pressure.”
But if Democratic leaders reversed themselves so too did the bloc of left-wing Democrats and Progressives that ultimately pushed them to do so. Members of that group initially backed a state budget proposal, which passed out of the House in late March, that would have entirely ended the pandemic-era motel program.
Rep. Jubilee McGill, D-Bridport, a member of the bloc, said she and some of her colleagues didn’t fully understand the implications of what they were signing off on. “I was kind of trusting the process and I didn’t really know the questions to ask,” she said.
Cooped up in Montpelier during the legislative session, lawmakers are somewhat insulated from the rest of the world — and very few have first-hand experience of poverty or homelessness. But when they went back to their districts, they heard directly from their neighbors and constituents.
“I think it really was hard to conceptualize what this kind of mass un-sheltering would actually look like,” McGill said. “I think going back to our communities, it really kind of hit home.”
One advocate also played an outsized role in driving the public narrative: Brenda Siegel. The activist and two-time candidate for governor offered blistering critiques of legislative leaders, visited the hotels to film testimonials from the people who lived there, and even brought motel residents to the Statehouse to confront lawmakers face-to-face.
“I think without Brenda’s advocacy, Mari and our group probably don’t do it,” Elder said, referring to Rep. Mari Cordes, D-Lincoln, who organized the bloc of renegade Democrats. But Elder also speculated that Siegel’s brand of relentless, confrontational activism might have both enabled and delayed the final outcome.
“There were certain people that didn’t want to do this because they were pissed off people like Brenda were calling them all sorts of things they didn’t think they earned,” he said.
Elder said Siegel’s role also stood out for another reason: She wasn’t a professional advocate, employed by an institution — nonprofit or otherwise — that regularly lobbies lawmakers for funding. Because that cadre of advocates has so much at stake, their approach with the Legislature is far more “polite,” he said. And he suggested that each group’s anxiety about their individual appropriation sometimes muted their support for a program whose funding they worried might imperil their own.
“There’s sort of behind-the-scenes support, but there’s also the knowledge that like, ‘Hey, if we advocate for this, is it going to come out of our end?’” he said.
Mike Maughan, a former motel resident now living in his car — who will not be sheltered as part of the deal — came to the Statehouse last week as lawmakers were voting on the motel legislation and expressed “mixed feelings” to a reporter at the time. He was glad for the new oversight of the Agency of Human Services, which he called “god f-cking awful” at administering programs, but he also expressed frustration at the partial extension’s very late arrival.
Maughan speculated that Vermont’s political leaders were simply doing “damage control and saving face.”
“It looks very bad, morally and politically, if you are actually going to take disabled people and push them out of their current shelter, out into the streets with no other options,” he said.
He also argued that all the political uncertainty had taken a toll on those staying in motels.
“I just don’t understand why they had to let our most vulnerable population wait until, like, a nail-biting veto vote to just find out if they had housing or not,” he said. “It’s not appropriate.”
