Crunch time begins at the State House

by Anne Galloway vtdigger.org
The mad dash is on. It’s crossover week and lawmakers are in no mood to dilly-dally. After weeks of testimony, discussion and drafting, bills are suddenly getting the go-ahead or the kibosh with unusual resoluteness. That’s because by Friday any bill that hasn’t been vetted by committee will be dead for the rest of this biennium and won’t be taken up until 2015 and 2016. Lawmakers have one more week to get any money bills through either the Senate or House committees.
On Tuesday, they began to crank out dozens of bills. Plastic bag fee? Trashed in Senate Natural Resources. A proposal allowing doctors to prescribe long-term antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease patients? Passed, 140-0, in the House. Applying the same penalties for drugged driving that drunk drivers are subject to? On the House floor today. A proposal to raise the age for purchasing cigarettes from 18 to 21 was trounced 11-1 in House Human Services.
The decisiveness is characteristic of the spring fever that hits lawmakers at the halfway mark and intensifies as the weather (slowly) warms.
Also characteristic is a bit of fractiousness that typically develops between the governor’s office and the Statehouse.
Since last Friday, Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, has declared that his administration would not reveal any of its financing plans for a universal health care system to the Legislature this year as promised; he would use “magic” to lower the statewide property tax rate from 7 cents to some undisclosed new level; and he chose to support an increase in the minimum wage tied to the president’s proposal of $10.10 by 2017 over a paid sick leave bill that lawmakers have been working on for weeks.
Several key legislators, namely chairs of the money committees in the House, say they found out about the governor’s plans through news reports.
Last year, the governor proposed a suite of hollow revenue proposals that even the staunchest Democrats inside the Golden Bubble couldn’t pretend to like. Lawmakers spent months carefully preparing alternative revenue proposals and then Shumlin proceeded to jettison their plans over the last few weeks of the session.
Though the Fifth Floor has played nice this session so far, lawmakers are leery after last year’s experience.
Bringing the property tax rate down, for example, will involve a lot of elbow grease and very little pixie dust, lawmakers say. Rep. Janet Ancel, D-Calais, chair of House Ways and Means, says her committee is meticulously analyzing the property tax data and evaluating the options for lowering the rate. It helps that schools came in with a 3 percent increase in spending as opposed to 3.8 percent as expected, though the difference does not a penny on the tax rate make.
If worse comes to worse, Ways and Means can always go back to last year’s cutting table. The House approved a proposal last session to phase out the $7 million a year small school grant and looked to begin eliminating “ghost” students (students schools still count as enrollments have declined) from the rolls.
Lawmakers have assiduously taken testimony on potential financing sources for the governor’s universal health care plan, including the payroll tax. The Joint Fiscal Office, members of the Green Mountain Care Board, administration officials, medical providers and insurers have all trooped in to committees to present their take on the great unknown. Though lawmakers are not required to take action on the plans until 2015, they are engaging in a due diligence effort in advance because they are worried about possibly needing to find alternatives to the payroll tax as a source of revenue for single payer.
When reporters asked Shumlin to name two alternative sources of funding at a presser on Monday, he replied, “bubble gum and lollipops.” Michael Costa, Shumlin’s health care financing guru, has promised to show lawmakers what he is thinking, but now that the governor has insisted on keeping those lollipops and pieces of bubble gum under wraps, lawmakers now find themselves in the uncomfortable position of waiting, again, for the details they need to oversee and ultimately approve or reject the work of the governor’s office. The original deadline for the financing plan was January 2013.
On Tuesday it was apparent lawmakers got at least one of the memos from Pav 5, thanks to a presser on Monday. To wit, the governor doesn’t have any interest in supporting the paid sick leave bill and instead has chosen to back a minimum wage increase. Consequently, the two labor bills have become an either-or proposition.
That didn’t deter advocates and lawmakers, who seemed resigned to the political reality, from making an impassioned plea to the press (and the public) to attempt a resurrection of H.208, which now appears to be on life support in the House and Senate.
Gov. Madeleine Kunin, who appointed Shumlin to the House when he was just 24 years old, was in the Cedar Creek Room Tuesday and led the charge for perhaps one of the last public battles over paid sick leave this year. Progressive Democrats swelled the room as she and other business leaders spoke about how many Vermonters don’t have paid sick leave (60,000), and how difficult it is for workers who cannot take time off to get well themselves, or care for sick children and aging parents.
Many of the workers are women at the bottom of the pay scale who are raising children on their own, advocates said. Paid sick leave is a quality of life issue, they said, especially for the working poor.
Jennifer Kimmick, co-owner of the Alchemist Brewery, said paid sick leave is a “significant fairness issue for women.”
“Please let us strive to make the lives of low-wage earners a little better,” Kimmich said. “It’s time to say we care about the working class.”
Kunin summed up the resistance from businesses as a form of societal sexism. The workplace structure, she said, is based on a traditional, out of date assumption that “daddy works and mommy stays at home” and too often children stay home alone when they are sick.
“The reality is, nobody’s home,” Kunin said.
Photo: Vermont State House. Vermont Business Magazine photo.