MONTPELIER — The Vermont House on Friday passed its version of an annual bill to true-up state spending midway through the fiscal year — and, at least for now, appears to have far more common ground with Gov. Phil Scott over its proposal than not.
Still, House budget-writers faced sharp pushback on the floor this week, largely from Scott allies in the Republican Party, over a decision to tack on funding that would keep more people eligible for the state’s motel voucher program into the warmer months.
The floor debate, after which one House member apologized for some of her remarks, underscored just how contentious the motel program continues to be in Montpelier.
Scott’s “budget adjustment” proposal for the 2025 fiscal year, which his administration presented to lawmakers last month, would bump up state spending from about $8.58 billion (the total of the state budget he signed last May) to about $8.73 billion — a $146 million increase that’s possible because the state has brought in more revenue than it expected to. Vermont’s 2025 fiscal year began in July 2024, and it ends this June.
The House has now made tweaks to the administration’s proposal and put its proposed changes into a bill, H.141, that would increase 2025 spending by about $161 million — $15 million more than the governor’s proposal called for. House members granted initial approval to the bill Thursday on an 87-51 vote, before formally passing it Friday on a voice vote.
The House-passed version will now head to the Senate for its consideration. After that, the two chambers would need to reconcile any differences before sending the bill to the governor, who could approve or reject it. The process typically wraps up in March.
(Lawmakers have already begun work on the state budget for the 2026 fiscal year, which starts in July, but the bill passed Friday largely impacts 2025 spending.)
Many of the spending changes lawmakers are considering would leverage the recent revenue upgrade the state received for the current fiscal year to help mitigate cost pressures on state government, administration officials said in recent weeks. High on that list, Scott officials have told lawmakers, are the rising costs of health care.
H.141 makes numerous changes to state spending that come as lawmakers reevaluate how and where resources should be allocated with part of the fiscal year elapsed.
For instance, it would reduce — by about $13 million — the funding available through June for a state child care subsidy program. Rep. Robin Scheu, D-Middlebury, who chairs the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee, said the program has gotten less use than lawmakers and the administration had been expecting.
The House included the vast majority of Scott’s proposed changes in its tune-up bill.
“We found common ground with the governor on more than 99% of what he proposed,” Scheu said when laying out details of the bill on the House floor Thursday afternoon.
But it was the remaining fraction that appeared to be a line in the sand for many House members ahead of the bill’s initial approval. Among those changes is an additional $1.8 million for the motel voucher program that would keep certain eligibility restrictions, which are currently on pause due to the cold weather, from kicking back in until June 30.
As it stands, an 80-night limit on motel stays and a 1,100-room cap — restrictions that prompted a mass wave of evictions last fall — are set to take effect again on April 1.
The House drew that money from a $14 million appropriation Scott had proposed for state Treasurer Mike Pieciak’s office that Pieciak later testified to lawmakers he did not currently need. Also included in the House’s version, using that money, is about $11.5 to build out new housing capacity, including for adults with developmental disabilities.
The House would also use $850,000 of that money to upgrade security and other infrastructure at courthouses around the state, according to Scheu.
Rep. Tiff Bluemle, D-Burlington, the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, said on the House floor Thursday that the $1.8 million for the voucher program would extend housing eligibility for at least 457 households past the start of April.
“Let us avoid the chaos and cruelty of unhousing so many of our neighbors at a time when so much in our communities and at the national level is in flux,” Bluemle said.
Several House members, from both the Democratic and Republican parties, said they were opposed to the measure that would extend eligibility for the program, or to the fact that the policy change was included in the budget adjustment legislation at all.
Rep. Will Greer, D-Bennington, voted in favor of H.141 but said by extending the motel program protections, the House was continuing to “erode the principles of personal responsibility over one’s own choices,” adding that in his view, lawmakers “cannot continue to help people that will not help themselves.”
Meanwhile, Barre Town Republican Rep. Gina Galfetti charged that her Democratic colleagues had “taken over what should be a simple act of balancing out the budget” by using the budget adjustment process “as a vehicle to make hasty policy” as well.
“Has the majority become so nefarious that they need to slide policy through in the (budget adjustment process)?” she asked during Thursday’s floor debate.
On Friday morning, Galfetti apologized on the House floor for her Thursday comments and appeared to partly walk them back, saying that “the use of my word ‘nefarious’ was over the line for the decorum that we have in this chamber.”
Scott said at his weekly press conference on Wednesday that he was opposed to the House’s move to extend cold weather eligibility rules in the budget adjustment bill, saying instead that any such funding should go toward increasing the state’s congregate shelter capacity.
The motel voucher program, he told reporters, “has proven to be a failed policy.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont House passes mid-year budget tune-up after debate over shelter program.