“We don’t even get applicants.”
Matt Valerio, Vermont’s defender general, had reached the end of his slide deck, rounding out a morning of testimony before the House and Senate judiciary committees Thursday on “access to justice,” a fancy title for a discussion on the state’s persistent court backlog.
And though he’d devoted most of his allotted half hour to reviewing in great detail data on case types, dispositions and regional judicial trends, Valerio had only just arrived at his key point.
“We can’t fill the positions to do the work that needs to be done,” he said, “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
Public defender vacancies can stretch to 18-months, and the pool of Vermont attorneys is rapidly aging, Valerio said.
To make matters worse, the private firm that holds the public defense contract in Orleans County has given notice that it won’t renew it.
“I may be faced within the next month in saying, ‘I have to establish a staff office up there instead of a contract office,’” he said, noting a contractor has handled the county for more than 50 years. “But I don’t know how I’m going to hire anybody up there.”
Contractors handle public defender responsibilities in about half of the state’s 14 counties.
By some metrics, Vermont’s court backlog is improving. From July 2023 through June 2024, Vermont’s courts cleared 5% more cases than it took on, according to data from the Vermont Judiciary. And the state’s clearance rate in criminal court improved from 2023 to 2024.
That’s even though Vermont hasn’t seen the impact yet of some criminal justice policy decisions made by last year’s Legislature. Four new judges, for example — positions lawmakers created — have yet to take the bench, though they will next month.
New judge positions have “been a significant benefit” in the past, Thomas Zonay, Vermont’s Chief Superior Court Judge, told lawmakers. He expected similar results once the new positions take effect.
— Ethan Weinstein
In the know
Leaders of the state-run veterans’ home in Bennington are asking lawmakers for nearly $6 million of additional funding in this year’s annual budget tuneup to cover the cost of traveling workers, telling the House Appropriations Committee Thursday that they — not unlike the defender general’s office — continue to struggle to hire local staff.
Melissa Jackson, the facility’s CEO, said the home has delayed starting work on rebuilding part of its campus — which it closed due to aging infrastructure — because it doesn’t have enough staff, as is, to support the additional patients who would live there.
The home technically has space for 130 beds, but is currently only using 100 of them when accounting for the portion of the campus that’s shuttered, Jackson explained.
“We could have our building built tomorrow. But we made the prudent decision not to fill the beds because our (traveling) staff costs would have skyrocketed,” she said, adding that, “I mean, they’re already high to begin with.”
— Shaun Robinson
The federal government has given Vermont the green light to use funds from Medicaid to pay for housing programs for people experiencing homelessness who have high medical needs.
The approval, from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, allows Vermont’s Agency of Human Services to use Medicaid funds to cover six months of rent for certain Vermonters experiencing homelessness, as well as for medical respite services, which can provide housing-insecure people a place to recover from an illness or injury.
However, state matching funds are needed to pull down the federal dollars and next year’s agency budget does not currently allocate any, according to a deputy commissioner. Read more here.
— Carly Berlin
Top executives at the University of Vermont Health Network received bonuses worth a combined $3 million at the end of last year. That sum, which the network referred to as “variable pay,” was paid out to the network’s top 19 senior leaders.
The news comes as rising costs are straining the state’s health care system — and just after the network announced wide-ranging cuts to patient services.
Meanwhile, advocates and lawmakers announced plans Thursday for a bill to cap hospital executive compensation at no more than 10 times that of the hospital’s lowest-paid patient-facing workers. The bill would also require hospitals to make up-to-date financial information public and to limit hospitals’ ratio of administrative to clinical costs.
“Our health care system is not immune from the exponential widening of the inequality gap we are seeing nationwide,” Rep. Esme Cole, D-Hartford, said at a Statehouse press conference. “We have become so complicit in these trends, in fact, that when hospital budgets get tight, the suggested remedy is not a cut at the top — but rather in the programs that affect Vermont’s most vulnerable, such as our dialysis clinics or the residential psychiatric unit.”
Read the full story here.
— Peter D’Auria
In memoriam
A Bakersfield resident and transgender woman, Brenda Churchill was perhaps best known at the Statehouse for her advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights. She died on Jan. 13 at age 67 from natural causes, according to her family, outside of Syracuse, N.Y.
Friends said she was especially proud of her advocacy for a 2018 law mandating that all of Vermont’s single-use bathrooms in public spaces be labeled as gender-neutral and a 2022 law that allows Vermonters’ birth certificates to reflect their gender identity.
Churchill also pushed to add a third gender to Vermont driver’s licenses and identification, which occurred in June 2019. The following year, 400 residents changed their identity status.
“When I think of her, I think of a woman that never gives up, that finds a way to fight for her community,” said Esther Charlestin, chair of the women’s commission and a friend of Churchill’s. “She was just a ball of sunshine energy, always encouraging, always willing to support and show up, being there for her parents, being there for her partner, being supportive.”
Read more remembrances of Churchill here.
— Klara Bauters
Read the story on VTDigger here: Final Reading: Defender general warns public defenders are harder and harder to hire.