This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
A bill that would radically restructure Vermont’s response to homelessness is headed for a full vote in the Senate Thursday. But Gov. Phil Scott’s administration has expressed continued concern about the legislation, making its path to becoming law uncertain.
Asked at a Wednesday press conference whether he would support the bill, H.91, Scott said he hadn’t seen its latest iteration. But he noted that he could not greenlight a bill that continues allowing the mass use of motel and hotel rooms for shelter, and maintains historically high spending levels.
“There’s a lot of conditions that have to be put into place before we do this,” Scott said.
H.91 would shift Vermont’s homelessness response system from one centered on state government to one administered by private nonprofit organizations. It passed the House in early April.
In its current form, the bill would make that transition in stages. Next summer, the statewide motel voucher program would end, and regional anti-poverty organizations would take over the task of providing emergency shelter under the banner of the newly-created Vermont Homeless Emergency Assistance and Responsive Transition to Housing Program. The state would maintain an oversight role.
The following year, a separate state program that doles out funding to build and operate shelters and run homelessness prevention programs would also dissolve and get folded into the new regional setup. Local shelter directors have pushed back against shifting this program’s current form, arguing the move could destabilize their work.
Legislators and state officials have generally agreed on the prospect of shifting the state-run motel voucher program over to the five regional community action agencies — something that was contemplated for years even before the COVID-19 pandemic put the safety-net program in the spotlight. Scott has long called for the program’s pandemic-era expansion to come to an end.
As outlined in the bill, the regional agencies, along with the statewide nonprofit focused on domestic violence, would undergo a planning process to figure out how best to use the funds that had historically gone toward the voucher program. But administration officials have expressed concerns that these groups might turn around and use the funds on hotel and motel rooms for unhoused people when traditional shelters are full.
Meanwhile, the Scott administration has pressed lawmakers to speed up the transition process. In a last-minute memo to a key Senate committee last Friday, Jenney Samuelson, secretary of the Agency of Human Services, wrote that “we cannot defer all reform” until fiscal year 2027.
She urged legislators to make more changes to the motel program in the fiscal year that begins this July, including “verification of residency, homelessness, and income,” prioritizing those most in need when motel capacity is limited, and shifting eligibility “to better target the most vulnerable.”
Without these changes, and others, “the administration will have a hard time supporting the bill in its current form,” the Friday memo read.
Members of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee bristled at officials’ eleventh-hour requests. But they acquiesced, to a point, by adding a study to the bill to consider shifting responsibilities to regional providers before next July.
It’s unclear whether this change will suffice. Scott administration officials did not make anyone available for follow-up interviews about the current status of the bill Wednesday, despite multiple interview requests.
Some directors of the nonprofit agencies that would take over the state’s homelessness response have balked at the prospect of a faster transition.
“It is hard to understand how we’re going to create a community-based system, have some innovation, and shift the system thoughtfully around homelessness if we don’t get the resources and the timing,” said Paul Dragon, executive director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, earlier this week. “It doesn’t seem like this latest version allows for that.”
The Scott administration has also taken issue with a $10 million allocation — anticipated in the already-signed state budget — intended to aid the transition to a community-based system. Samuelson’s memo demanded that funding “must be greatly reduced,” but did not provide specifics.
That $10 million in transition funding remains in the version of the bill set for a Senate vote Thursday. But after the administration said the bill directs too much spending in the long term, the Senate Health and Welfare Committee removed references in the bill to a roughly $82 million baseline for the new program’s first year.
Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, the bill’s architect in the House, took issue with that change — and expects the bill to land in a conference committee, where House and Senate lawmakers can hash out their differences.
If the two chambers can’t come to a place of agreement with each other — and the administration — by the end of the session, Wood said she doesn’t expect to put forward similar legislation next year. H.91 is the Legislature’s last-best shot at shifting away from the motel voucher program, she indicated.
“I just need to be clear that if we don’t have this, then what we have is the program as it stands right now — which nobody is satisfied with,” she said.
