The start of a new biennium brought changes to the jurisdictions of some House and Senate committees this year — and now, some lawmakers want to create a new committee entirely.
A new House bill, H.67, would stand up a “Joint Government Oversight and Accountability Committee,” made up of eight members split between the two chambers and tasked with keeping tabs on major state spending and whether key laws prove effective long-term.
The committee would, like other joint panels, be able to meet outside of the regular legislative session. It would, the bill states, “examine the possible reasons for any failure of government oversight” and then make “tangible recommendations” on how to avoid those failures.
Some House Democrats have been vocal about a need for more oversight across state government this week. Rep. Matt Birong, D-Vergennes, pointed reporters at a press conference Tuesday to the billions of dollars lawmakers have appropriated in recent years of federal Covid-19 era emergency funding — and the myriad of ways it has been used.
“Part of the intent is to, essentially, do a performance review on how these dollars and these charges are being executed,” he said, adding that if the money isn’t being used in the way lawmakers intended, the joint oversight panel could “reevaluate those appropriations.”
The House Government Operations and Military Affairs Committee, which Birong chairs, took up the bill for the first time Thursday. Its lead sponsor is Rep. Chea Waters Evans, D-Charlotte, who is also the panel’s ranking member.
Waters Evans said one of the oversight committee’s roles would be to review the litany of reports the executive branch and other organizations file with the Legislature each year, meant to keep lawmakers apprised of the state’s progress toward implementing many policy changes. In her and her cosponsors’ views, she told her colleagues Thursday morning, lawmakers aren’t doing their “due diligence” reviewing many of those reports and studies right now.
She and the bill’s other sponsors declined Thursday to name specific laws or state programs they felt warranted more scrutiny. But she argued there is appetite for forming the new committee, pointing to how a similar proposal passed the House in last year’s session.
(The proposal did not make it over the finish line after crossing over to the Senate.)
Gov. Phil Scott, for his part, did not seem especially keen on the idea of standing up a new legislative committee when asked about it Wednesday at his weekly press conference.
“I don’t believe that we need another entity to oversee everything,” the governor said, adding that he thought the House had sufficient oversight power as it stands.
— Shaun Robinson
In the know
Gov. Phil Scott’s education proposal would allow every student to opt into a school choice lottery system within their regional school district.
Thursday’s testimony in the House Education Committee from Education Secretary Zoie Saunders was the first public explanation of how school choice would work in Scott’s “transformation” plan.
“It’s very provocative,” Rep. Peter Conlon, D-Cornwall, the committee’s chair, said during the hearing, “and we need provocative.”
In Vermont’s current system, many towns offer school choice if their local school districts do not operate public schools for all or certain grades, sometimes offering specific options and other times allowing total choice.
In Scott’s proposed system, every student would be assigned by their district to a public elementary, middle and high school, according to Saunders, with limited exceptions. Each student could also apply for a lottery to attend a “school choice school.”
Those choice options could be magnet public schools or private schools, and each school district would decide which and how many schools to designate, though every district would need to designate at least one school choice school. Officials did not indicate whether religious schools could receive public funding as they do in Vermont’s existing system.
Read more about how school choice would work in the Scott administration proposal here.
— Ethan Weinstein
Vermont could join close to two dozen other states this year in regulating how certain artificially-generated content, often called “deepfakes,” can be used online in the leadup to elections. But there are key questions for lawmakers over whether, or to what extent, the proposal could hinder people’s rights to free speech.
A new bill sponsored by a tripartisan group of state senators, S.23, would require some people who publish “synthetic media” that makes it appear as though someone did or said something, even when they really didn’t, to also publish a disclosure that the media is fake. To be subject to the bill, a person would either have to know, or be in a position where they should have known, the media was misleading — and, critically, be planning to publish it within 90 days of a local, state or federal election.
The bill would not actually prevent people from publishing fake content, no matter how convincing it is. But S.23 calls for fines, ranging from $1,000 for a first offense to up to $15,000 for repeat offenses, for failing to publish a disclosure when it’s required. Read more about the legislation here.
— Shaun Robinson
Read the story on VTDigger here: Final Reading: House lawmakers propose a new ‘government oversight’ legislative committee.