This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
After state leaders signed off on new restrictions to Vermont’s motel voucher program last year, over 1,500 people experiencing homelessness were pushed out of hotels and motels. The mass wave of evictions last fall left many Vermonters in precarious situations, some sleeping in tents — including families with young children — and prompted public outcry from service providers, municipal officials, and even some legislators who helped craft the law.
Now that lawmakers have returned to Montpelier, they have their first chance to shift course.
Without intervention, a replay of the fall is primed for this spring. That’s because the motel program’s rules are currently loosened for the winter months, allowing hundreds of people who had left the motels to reenter them. On April 1, however, the 80-night limit on motel stays and 1,100-room cap that prompted the recent evictions will kick in again.
But key members of the House are seeking to halt that. Through a mid-year budget adjustment bill, the House Human Services Committee has moved to waive those limits through the end of June. It has pegged the cost at about $1.9 million.
Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, who chairs the committee, said the idea is to buy more time for lawmakers to advance a bill to reform the state’s emergency shelter program.
“We wanted to be able to focus on that, and not on, you know, an emerging crisis of people leaving the hotels on April 1,” Wood said in a Thursday interview.
Miranda Gray, the deputy commissioner of the Department for Children and Families’ economic services division, said Friday that she was “not surprised” that lawmakers were seeking the extension. But she sees the move as running “contrary to the law” and to the goal of unwinding the program’s pandemic-era expansion. The future of the motel program has become bitterly contentious since federal funding tied to Covid-19 dried up in 2023 and the state began picking up the tab. All the while, Vermont’s homeless population has grown exponentially.
The proposed change is far from guaranteed — the full House would need to agree to it over the coming weeks, as would the Senate and, ultimately, Gov. Phil Scott. But legislators are beginning to look beyond the next few months of the program’s future.
Among the decision points: how long people should be allowed to stay in motels and whether the program’s rules should be up for debate every year.
A legislatively-mandated task force recommended that lawmakers tie the program’s time limits to how long it takes people experiencing homelessness to find housing. Right now, task force members said, the average housing search lasts well over a year. Meanwhile, vouchers are currently limited to 80-days per year, outside of the winter months.
“As we build housing and can move people out of homelessness faster, that number will go down,” said Frank Knaack, director of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont and a member of the task force. “Hopefully the goal will be — in five, 10 years, we’ll be at a much smaller number. Maybe it is 80 days, maybe it is 50 days. But it needs to be based on actual data, and not just, you know, making the number up.”
The Department for Children and Families has pushed back on changing the motel voucher time limits, citing budgetary concerns and the lack of rooms available at participating hotels and motels. Instead, the department wants to maintain the program’s status quo this year.
Gray said the department can do so even while lowering the appropriation for the program in the next fiscal year. The Scott administration’s recommended budget, which the Republican governor rolled out earlier this week, contains about $38.5 million to continue the motel program — down from about $44 million budgeted for the current fiscal year. That budget ask is lower based on a forecast of various factors, Gray said.
Legislators are starting to dig into the task force’s report, along with the administration’s recommended budget, as they get to work on bills. Wood’s committee has revived a bill from last year that would shift the motel program from a “benefit” negotiated through the budget process into a full-fledged program, a move she hopes will create more “defined expectations” of state government and increase transparency.
With that bill as a starting point, Wood said she hopes to take a more global look at Vermont’s shelter system this session. It isn’t fair, she said, that chance decides whether someone ends up in a community-based shelter, where they stay for as long as they need without having to pay a dime, or in the motel program, with its strict time limits and income-contribution requirements.
Wood wants to shift to a system that works more comprehensively to move people from homelessness into permanent housing. But, she acknowledged, boosting services could come at great expense.
“We may have to help a smaller number of people each year,” she said. “That’s a trade-off. And then it’ll be up to the body, and, you know, the Senate to decide whether that trade-off’s worth it.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: After hundreds of motel evictions, some Vermont lawmakers are hoping to set a different path.