This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
Amidst a wave of evictions from Vermont’s motel voucher program, pressure is mounting on Gov. Phil Scott to take action.
Dozens of service providers, advocates, and affordable housing organizations signed onto a letter Wednesday calling on the Republican governor to take executive action to halt the evictions of hundreds of vulnerable households from motels and hotels across the state, including families with children, elderly people, and people with severe disabilities.
“The thought that the state of Vermont is going to just let this happen is just unconscionable,” said Frank Knaack, executive director of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont, at a Statehouse press conference on Wednesday.
Because state lawmakers are not currently in session, the coalition called on Scott to either declare a state of emergency, direct the Agency of Human Services to find additional resources to provide shelter or call lawmakers back to the Statehouse to eliminate the recently-imposed program limits that have resulted in the evictions.
The group is pushing specifically to keep people sheltered in hotels and motels – because existing shelter space is maxed out, service providers are stretched thin, and, its members said, standing up more shelters with adequate services would take too much time to meet the urgency of the moment.
“The reality is, the best approach right now, especially for families and especially for folks with medical conditions, is to have access to space that is safe and appropriate for them,” said Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak at the press conference. “Going back into the motel program is the only solution at this point.”
The current mass exodus from the motel program is the result of new limitations on the program passed by lawmakers in this year’s budget, which Scott signed. A new 1,100 cap on the number of rooms available through the program took effect last week. Lawmakers also imposed an 80-day time limit on motel stays, which began kicking in last Thursday.
On Sept. 19 alone, 223 households reached their 80th night and had to exit the program – including 79 families with children, according to Joshua Marshall, communications and operations manager for the Department for Children and Families.
The department projects that more than 400 additional households will reach their 80th night by mid-October. (Those projections have lowered considerably over the last several weeks, suggesting hundreds of additional households have left the program in advance of hitting their 80th night.)
Both the room cap and the 80-day cap will lift for the winter months, beginning Dec. 1. But with shelters full and waitlists for affordable housing impossibly lengthy, some people exiting the program have no option but to camp or live in their vehicles in the meantime – including families with special needs children and people on oxygen.
Last week, municipal leaders called on state officials to immediately open up state-owned buildings as temporary shelters — an intervention the state implemented during a previous round of motel evictions in March — and to oversee sanctioned encampments on state land, among other requests.
At a regularly scheduled legislative meeting on Wednesday morning, Department for Children and Families Commissioner Chris Winters said standing up shelters for a couple of months, without a provider in place, could cost millions of dollars.
“That’s something that’s always on the table,” Winters said, “But I think we still may not know enough about the scope of people who are unsheltered at this moment,” he said, adding that the state will continue gathering information to get a sense of the scale of the problem.
But some high-ranking lawmakers pressed the state to use its resources to create temporary shelters as soon as possible.
“I would favor that course of action immediately. I don’t think we need to gather more data,” said Senate President Pro Tem. Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central. “And I would ask the governor to consider doing that on a very expedited basis.”
When the state stood up temporary shelters last March, few people made their way to them. At the time, service providers said many people leaving motels and hotels hadn’t been informed of the shelters’ existence, or lacked transportation to get there. But Scott’s administration has suggested that those losing their rooms had other places to stay.
Now, service providers favor keeping people in hotels and motels rather than shuffling them to congregate shelters. Cots lined up in a large space offer little chance for privacy, which they say makes for an inappropriate environment for many.
Amanda Wheeler, Scott’s press secretary, said in a written statement on Wednesday afternoon that Agency of Human Services teams “continue to monitor the shelter needs, and emergency shelters are always a tool we can deploy as circumstances dictate.”
But, she went on, “It is important to note, these types of shelters have historically had minimal to no occupancy and standing them up comes with significant costs and human resources that often aren’t available due to Vermont’s workforce shortage.”
Wheeler added that “the solution to this issue is more housing” while acknowledging that the new program limits “are, no doubt, difficult for those impacted.” She also said the state has been attempting to connect people leaving the motel program with other resources.
As they grasped for a course of action, lawmakers also grappled with the impacts of the limits on the program that they put into place. Rep. Diane Lanpher, D-Vergennes, who was a pivotal player in negotiations over the new limits this spring, openly held back tears.
“I understand that we co-negotiated these guidelines that you’re working with, and that I voted on them,” said Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro. “And that has left us with this fairly horrific Hunger Games type scenario for people getting rooms and really incredible suffering all over the state.”
Some pressed Winters on whether the state could make any exceptions to the new limits.
The answer, Winters said, was no. After people meet their 80-day limit, “there is no exception, there is no other route for people,” Winters said. The legal opinion he received indicated he does not have the authority to waive any rules or make any exemptions, Winters continued.
“The struggle that we would have if we did was – you decide, you’re playing god at that point,” Winters said. “You’re deciding who gets in at the expense of someone else who cannot get in.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Pressure builds for Phil Scott to intervene on motel program evictions.