This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
Advocates for unhoused Vermonters are calling on lawmakers to remove restrictions on the state’s motel voucher program in the coming year’s budget, including an 80-night limit on voucher stays and an 1,100 cap on available rooms during the warmer months.
“The caps are not grounded in any reality,” said Frank Knaack, executive director of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont, at a Statehouse press conference on Tuesday.
It often takes many months for someone experiencing homelessness to find permanent housing, Knaack said. The politically contentious voucher program plays a critical role in keeping unhoused people indoors, he added, pointing to a glaring mismatch: Vermont has about 5,000 people experiencing homelessness, according to current tallies by service providers, and space for about 670 households in traditional shelters.
Lawmakers’ draft budget would continue the limits on the motel voucher program that were enacted last year, resulting in the evictions of hundreds of people — including young children — over the course of the fall.
Many lawmakers lambasted the caps as their impacts became clear, and as recently as March, Democratic leaders in the Legislature attempted to lift the restrictions to avoid another wave of evictions. A heated disagreement with Republican Gov. Phil Scott over the extension tanked a midyear spending bill, which never passed.
This go-around, however, both the House and Senate have agreed to a budget containing the caps, at a price tag of about $38 million – matching what Scott’s administration recommended for the program earlier this year.
As representatives from both chambers meet over the next few days to hash out their differences over the budget, they’re unlikely to tinker with the motel program piece, according to Rep. Robin Scheu, D-Middlebury, the lead budget writer in the House.
But Scheu was quick to point out that a bill that would overhaul the state’s homelessness response is also making its way through the Statehouse.
The current iteration of that reform bill, H.91, envisions shifting the state’s homelessness response to regional agencies in 2026, with a year for those groups and state officials to plan how to implement a new locally-based system.
But if service providers must react to another mass exodus from the motel program this fall, they will have little capacity to engage in the rigorous local planning process H.91 lays out for the coming year, said Sarah Russell, Burlington’s special assistant to end homelessness.
“We cannot do that if we are continuously responding to the crisis of the motel exits,” she said at the press conference.
H.91 still has a ways to go in the Senate. It does not make changes to the voucher program in the coming fiscal year, which begins on July 1, though members of Scott’s administration have urged lawmakers to hasten the transition away from the state-run motel system.
Homelessness advocates also pushed lawmakers to funnel additional money into building new affordable housing, and to put state dollars toward a pandemic-era program that pays for case workers who help people maintain housing. Knaack said the program will soon run out of federal funding.
At a vigil on the Statehouse steps later on Tuesday, Jessica Russell told a crowd that she has lived at a hotel for the last several months. She lost her Barton home to flooding in 2023, and has struggled to find an apartment she can afford since. Now, she is trying to prove to state officials that the chronic illness that affects her veins should qualify her as “medically vulnerable,” earning her the ability to keep a motel voucher until the end of June.
“I’m hoping and praying that there’s some sort of turnaround for all of us,” she said. “Living outside…we wouldn’t do that to our animals.”
