This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
A bill that would overhaul Vermont’s response to homelessness is headed to Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s desk, after a largely party-line vote in the House on Thursday evening. Scott and members of his administration have remained mum about whether they support its final iteration.
If Scott vetoes the bill, he could effectively kill it. Without a Democratic supermajority, lawmakers are unlikely to have the votes to override.
Asked at his weekly press conference whether he would greenlight the legislation, Scott said that he had not yet read the final version of the bill, but indicated that lawmakers “would have had to move a long ways” before gaining his signature. In a separate interview, Department for Children and Families Commissioner Chris Winters said administration officials were still combing through the details.
“We’ve started our deep dive to make sure that we understand the full impacts of this bill, and whether it’s possible to make transformational change this year,” Winters said on Thursday afternoon.
The bill, H.91, would shift Vermont’s homelessness response system from one centered on state government to one administered by private nonprofit organizations. The change would mark a fundamental pivot in how the state approaches homelessness, which has skyrocketed in Vermont in recent years amid a crushing housing shortage and rising housing costs.
The bill dissolves the statewide motel voucher system next July, and hands over funding and decision-making power for emergency shelter to five regional anti-poverty nonprofits and the statewide domestic violence organization. It also gives those groups authority over funds the state currently doles out to build and operate local shelters and run homelessness prevention programs. The state would retain an oversight role.
The new regionalized system would be dubbed the Vermont Homeless Emergency Assistance and Responsive Transition to Housing Program, or VHEARTH. Its supporters argue that it would create a more efficient and integrated support system for Vermont’s growing homeless population — and allow the state to stop relying on motel and hotel rooms to shelter the bulk of unhoused Vermonters, an issue that has become a perennial political football at the Statehouse.
“I think that this puts Vermont on a path forward that is going to be more focused on prevention, [and] reducing and hopefully eventually eliminating the use of the hotels in favor of shelter and more supportive services,” said Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, the bill’s chief architect.
Angling for Phil Scott’s signature
Scott has long called for the motel voucher program’s pandemic-era expansion to end, and administration officials this year have expressed general support for restructuring the state’s homelessness response system.
But they have sparred with lawmakers over key details of the proposed transition. Officials have raised concerns around the ongoing costs of the new initiative, and expressed a desire to speed up the shift of the motel voucher program to the new, localized system.
As House and Senate members hashed out their differences over the bill this week, gaining approval from Scott arose as a key concern around the negotiating table.
In a bid for his support, lawmakers cut down on a $10 million allocation meant to aid the transition to the regional system by axing $3 million earmarked for shelter development. They also struck provisions that expressed an intent to tie future emergency housing spending to recent years’ budgets, and included language requiring the use of motel rooms to decrease as shelter capacity increases and homelessness numbers drop.
Lawmakers also added a provision that “specific elements” of VHEARTH can take effect sooner than planned if state officials and community action agency directors come to an agreement before July of 2026. Some of those directors have balked at the prospect of a faster transition.
Winters pointed to some of these changes as positive steps, but did not indicate whether they would be enough to earn Scott’s signature. The administration had wanted lawmakers to add more vetting criteria for people entering the motel program in the coming fiscal year, including verifying their residency in Vermont, their income, and their lack of alternate housing options. Officials also hoped lawmakers would add language allowing them to prioritize the “most vulnerable” clients, rather than relying on a first-come, first-served system.
The purpose of those provisions would be to allow the state “to wrangle the [motel voucher program] down to a more manageable size,” Winters said.
How quick of a change?
The administration had also favored a phased transition to the new regional system, where the motel voucher system would get shifted first, and the funding for local shelter operations would transition in fiscal year 2028. But in a committee of conference, lawmakers aligned the timelines for both transitions to fiscal year 2027, which begins next July.
Some directors of local shelters have vehemently opposed transitioning the funding for their work in H.91 at all, arguing that the change could create conflicts of interest in spending decisions, and would destabilize the state’s shelter system at the exact moment federal funding for housing and homelessness programs could disappear.
Other critics of the regionalization effort have argued it amounts to an abdication of responsibility by state leaders for Vermont’s worsening homelessness problem.
When the Legislature and the administration have placed restrictions on the motel voucher program in recent years — resulting in wave after wave of evictions — “all of our emails light up,” Sen. Ann Cummings, D-Washington, told her colleagues on the floor last week.
Her concern, Cummings said, was that by shifting responsibility for emergency housing over to the regional nonprofits, pressure on state officials would wane — and people experiencing homelessness would disappear from public view.
“We won’t be the bad guys anymore. The administration won’t be the bad guys,” she said. “It will be very easy for these people to slip under the radar.” (Cummings ultimately voted in favor of the bill.)
