Vermont’s system of child care and early childhood education has been broken for a long time. I was proud to support a strong child care bill that provides a blueprint for fixing that system of care. The bill we passed on a bipartisan vote makes a significant investment in our kids, our families, our educators, our economy, and our communities.

The bill increases state-funded financial assistance for families with children in child care while increasing reimbursement rates for the crucial community, home-based, and family child care providers who serve so many children in our rural towns. It expands the number of families who will not have any co-pay to make sure their children have the care they need while also significantly expanding co-pay subsidy eligibility for middle-income Vermonters. This legislation will have a profound and lasting impact on our families and our economy, and it means that Vermont will lead the nation in how we care for and support young children and their families.

It’s clear that Vermont’s workforce requires support across many critical sectors. That’s why strengthening our workforce was woven throughout several bills this session. The legislature’s budget contains a $47 million package to attract and retain workers where we’ve seen severe and chronic worker shortages, such as nursing, dental hygiene, teaching, and the trades. It invests in proven scholarship programs, forgivable loan programs for folks who receive their training in Vermont and stay to work here, adult education, and certificate programs.

We’re investing in the rural corners of our state by committing to growing the workforce particularly needed in regions like ours: teachers, skilled tradespeople, mental health practitioners, EMT, nurses, and the arts. I’ve heard time and time again about the issues with teacher recruitment and retention in our area. In response, we’re funding educator workforce development through expanded grants for support, mentorship, and professional development for prospective teachers; suspension of provisional teacher licensure fees; and the creation of a $2.5 million Vermont Teacher Forgivable Loan Incentive Program.

Finally, we’re dealing with Vermont’s shortage of essential health care workers and the resulting lack of access to care by passing several bills that will allow providers to join interstate licensure compacts. These allow health care providers to use their Vermont license to practice in other compact member states, and providers in other member states to practice in Vermont (both in-person and via telemedicine). These compacts apply to mental health counselors, physical therapists, speech-language pathologists, audiologists, and psychologists. They will help provide pathways for practitioners to work in Vermont while increasing access to much needed care.

Vermont faces a housing crisis. It is deeply connected to the intersecting crises in our child care system and our workforce. There is a lack of housing that is affordable to residents across the income spectrum. In order to solve this crisis and work toward communities where working Vermonters can afford to live, we need to make simultaneous investments in construction, renovation, and services. If we intend to solve it in a way that protects the forests, farmlands, and waterways we all cherish, we need to make those investments while enacting strategic reform to land-use policies and zoning to encourage livable downtowns and village centers.

That’s exactly the path we’ve taken this session. In this session’s comprehensive housing bill, the legislature made updates to Act 250 to encourage growth in designated downtowns, village centers, and neighborhood development areas and eliminated caps on housing units in priority housing projects in those same areas.

We invested over $100 million to build more housing and expand access and affordability. This includes commitments to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board to help build more housing stock, the Vermont Housing Improvement Program to rehabilitate currently offline apartments and build Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), funds for manufactured housing repairs, and expansion of long-term care facilities. We also invested over $100 million for emergency shelter and support services for unhoused Vermonters, recovery housing, and the Vermont Land Access and Opportunity Board, which will improve access to farmland and home ownership for Vermonters from historically marginalized and disadvantaged communities. Taken together, these historic investments and targeted regulatory reforms will help guide us out of the current crisis.

Health care professionals who provide reproductive and gender-affirming care have increasingly faced threats of criminal, civil, and regulatory penalties based on new laws in other states in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. At the same time, patients seeking reproductive health care, and transgender people seeking simply to exist, face restrictions and prohibitions.

Not in Vermont. After the passage of two “shield laws” during this session, we now lead the nation in protecting health care professionals who continue to follow our own state’s standards of care from facing criminal and civil penalties and ensuring our health care providers will not lose their licenses and certifications because of draconian laws passed in other states.

In each of the past few years, Vermont has set a new and tragic record in fatal overdoses. This epidemic requires real, compassionate intervention from many different angles. We responded with powerful, bipartisan legislation that will help to reverse the trend.

We increased access to recovery housing, removed barriers to treatment for Vermonters on Medicaid, and modernized our state laws to increase access to life-saving medication like Naloxone (Narcan). We also appropriated funds from the settlements against the three largest pharmaceutical manufacturers to establish statewide systems for drug-checking to detect the presence of deadly substances in drug supplies. These are significant steps in our ongoing work to save lives and end the opioid epidemic that has devastated so many families and communities. We have more work to do to bring an end to this crisis, and I’m committed to continuing to make progress next year.

Vermont’s rate of suicide is 50% higher than the national average. Nearly 60% of suicides being completed in Vermont involve a firearm. 90% of all gun deaths in Vermont are suicides. A child living in a home with a gun has a staggering 440% higher chance of suicide than a child in a home without one. This is a public health crisis that calls us to action, and this session’s legislation will save lives by reducing access to lethal means.

The new provisions are part of a common-sense strategy to reduce gun violence and death. The bill requires a 72-hour waiting period for gun sales, a reasonable time period that will slow the impulsive actions that often lead to suicide. It creates penalties for negligent storage of firearms, meaning that children will be less likely to find unsecured guns. Finally, it expands the so-called “red flag law” to allow household members (in addition to law enforcement personnel) to petition a judge for an Extreme Risk Protection Order so they may remove guns from a home when someone is in crisis.

To confront gun violence in other ways, we created the Community Violence Prevention Program, which will award grants to new and existing community programs with a focus on municipalities that have experienced a rise in drug-related violence. The bill will allow communities to explore the best means to protect all residents. Finally, it explicitly prohibits the removal of a gun’s serial number as well as “straw purchases” or the purchase of a gun for a person who is prohibited from owning or purchasing one.

The Affordable Heat Act was certainly the most talked about bill of the session. Unfortunately a lot of that talk was driven by misinformation. This was done to stoke fear among Vermonters and it’s not based in reality.

What the bill actually does is simply begin the process of designing a clean heat standard to be presented to the legislature for review and potential action in 2025. It does nothing to change the price of fuels and requires no changes on the part of Vermont businesses or consumers.

Over the next two years, there will be public input, stakeholder engagement, and check-back reports to the legislature. The Public Utility Commission (PUC) will develop a plan for how we can make this transition in a way that works for everyone, with particular focus on Vermont’s most vulnerable and marginalized residents.

The required check-back reports include a study of the logistics and potential constraints of implementation (including workforce shortages and supply chain issues, upfront costs to consumers, ongoing costs to consumers, etc., and recommendations on how to adjust the program implementation in light of the results of this study) and economic impact studies which will deliver analysis on the estimated costs and savings for consumers. These will include real analysis of the potential increases in prices for oil and propane, potential savings in heating costs, and the overall cost of the program.

Then, in 2025, after this work has been done and reported back, the legislature will receive the PUC's findings and program draft. The legislature will then have to vote again if it wishes to enact the program at that time. The program cannot and will not be put into action unless and until the legislature votes to do so in 2025, after the work of the PUC over the next two years.

Crucially, if all of this happens, and then a difficult market condition appears that impacts implementation (such as an undue or unanticipated financial burden on consumers) there is a "circuit breaker" provision. This would allow the program to be slowed or paused for as long as 36 months in order to respond to those market conditions.

Finally, it is important to know that this legislation does not propose the establishment of any new fees or taxes, but rather is entirely designed around a system of consumer incentives. It is intended to provide consumers - particularly low and moderate income Vermonters who cannot otherwise afford weatherization or heating system changes - with the opportunity to access the changes that make sense for them. We know that many of those who can afford to move away from unpredictable and increasing costs of heating with fossil fuels are already doing so. This bill is designed to give everyone that same opportunity. It also provides a pathway for heating fuel dealers, many of whom have already chosen to diversify their businesses by offering weatherization and installation of non-fossil fuel heating sources, to continue to grow thriving businesses in a rapidly changing global thermal economy.

During one long evening of debate on the House floor in April, I stood to remind my colleagues of the unfortunate truth that we have been talking about climate change for my entire life. Real action is long overdue. This session, with the knowledge that we’re already feeling the impacts of climate change here in Vermont through drought, flood, unpredictable storms, and climate migration, we took a number of actions that will help make sure we leave no one behind as we make the necessary transition toward adaptation and mitigation.

The Affordable Heat Act is just one of many bills passed to address climate change this session. In addition, we took a big step forward on the crucial task of protecting biodiversity by passing the “30 x 30” bill. It funds an updated inventory of Vermont’s conserved lands, estimated to stand at approximately 26% today, and charts an inclusive path to achieve permanent conservation of 30% of Vermont’s landscape by 2030 and 50% by 2050. This will include both working lands, which are an important contributor to the overall conservation picture in Vermont, and forests targeted to return to old growth status.

There are also a number of climate change adaptation related initiatives found in next year’s budget. It invests a combined $24 million in a state match for the federal Drinking Water and Clean Water State Revolving Funds program, assessment and cleanup of contaminated “brownfield” sites, and addressing septic, water, and energy needs of Vermont’s older housing stock. Finally, it also provides stabilization funding to the state aquatic invasive species prevention program and invests in incentivizing the replacement of high global warming potential refrigerants.

We worked to protect public health and the environment by requiring manufacturers of household products containing hazardous substances to take responsibility for the costs of collection and proper disposal, rather than burdening our towns with collection responsibilities. Finally, while there is much work left to be done on the emerging issue of PFAS contamination (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances: commonly referred to as “forever chemicals”), we provided funding to support groundwater remediation efforts this year. There is work underway to limit new PFAS contamination by restricting the sale of products that contain the chemicals, and I expect to be able to share more on that next year.

I heard from many of you expressing deep concern about two bills that were introduced this year and the impact they would have had on the unique system of school choice that has existed in our rural region for many decades. First, I can report that those bills did not see movement in either body this session. And while the House passed another bill that included some relevant language with regard to school admissions processes, that bill did not receive a vote in the Senate. This means that while your local delegation was able to advocate for avoiding the worst case scenarios this year, we have more work to do.

One thing I’ve come to appreciate during my first months in Montpelier is that many colleagues from other parts of the state don’t necessarily understand the way our system works here in Southwestern Vermont. Many conflate specific conversation about the way we are able to ensure excellent quality education for all students in our communities with the broader national conversation about school choice. Regardless of where you stand on that broader conversation, it is simply not the same as the conversation we’re having about the system in place to deliver high school education here in our region.

Of course, the reason this topic has taken on such importance this year is because of the Supreme Court’s decision in Carson v. Makin, which says that if public dollars are going to be used for independent schools, the state cannot refuse to send such tuition payments to religious schools. This requires solving for a legitimate issue: we do not want our public dollars being used for discriminatory purposes, such as delivering anti-LGBTQIA+ instruction.

Getting this right is deeply personal and important to me. Since arriving in this area and making it my home, I’ve come to recognize the incredible quality of education offered at BBA, Long Trail, and other schools. I’ve also seen firsthand their commitment to equity and inclusion. And I know where my constituents stand, too. On Town Meeting Day, there was a vote in the nine Taconic & Green towns (none of which operates a public high school) that saw 91% of voters say they support ensuring that public tuition dollars do not go to schools that discriminate and that they believe the current education landscape in our region provides high quality, equitable educational opportunities for all of our students and should be maintained. Making sure these school communities can continue to thrive and offer kids in rural Vermont opportunities otherwise unavailable to them, while also ensuring that public dollars are not used in the name of discrimination, is what’s best for our kids, our communities, and our state. I’ll keep working hard to make it happen.

For the past three years, universal school meals have been in place in Vermont, first with federal funding, then with one-time state funding for the current school year. Universal school meals help us meet the basic needs of our kids during the school day. While our Committee on Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry considered the bill that would make universal school meals permanent in Vermont, we were briefed on studies showing that providing universal school meals improves students’ mental health, reduces anxiety and depression, improves students’ readiness to learn, improves school social climates, improves overall family food security, and is tied to improved performance in reading and math.

In addition to the health and education benefits universal school meals offers our kids, it also means more predictability for schools in meal planning and purchasing and increased partnerships with local farms. Across the state, schools report that providing free, healthy meals has boosted nutrition, health, and behavior. The bill includes new strategies to access federal dollars to help pay for the program. It requires that schools maximize their federal drawdown, meaning the program will come at minimized cost to the state. This is unique to Vermont’s program, which is now being looked at as a model by other states. In addition, because of the way schools qualify for maximized federal support, this bill will also lead to increased access to after-school and summer snacks and meals for the kids who need them.

Finally, as part of this bill, I successfully advocated in our Committee for a tweak to the existing local food incentive grant program that previously allowed only public schools to qualify for grants based on the amount of food they sourced from Vermont farmers. Those grants will now also be available to independent schools that qualify for the universal school meals program. That means more dollars flowing into our Southern Vermont regional economy, more local food in our school cafeterias, and more support for our farmers.

Vermont’s organic dairy farms are often featured in paintings and postcards. They are mostly small and medium sized farms, with healthy cows on green pastures. They are essential to our environment, our rural communities, and our state’s economy. And for a few years now, they have been in crisis.

At the end of 2020, there were 169 organic dairies in Vermont. By early February, when the legislature was first debating whether to provide these farms with an economic lifeline, there were 136. The number has decreased even more since then. The crisis impacting these farms was brought on by factors far outside of their control, including drought, inflation, and war. Those uncontrollable factors have led to organic dairy production costs that far outpace milk prices.

The federal government operates an insurance program called Dairy Margin Coverage to address exactly this problem. Vermont supports farms that enroll in that program by paying their premiums. However, because that program was created with conventional dairy markets in mind, it is largely unhelpful for our organic dairy farms. For a long time, they didn’t need the help. They need it now.

Farms don’t exist in a vacuum, and these numbers aren’t abstract. Each farm lost means another veterinarian, mechanic, feed store, or milk hauler without a customer, and another community without a steward for its pastures. That’s why I’m happy to report that in the FY24 budget, the legislature has included funding for organic dairy farms to help cover the difference between their 2022 cost of production and the price they were paid for milk.

This one-time appropriation will not make these farms whole on its own. But it will bridge the gap. It will help farmers pay the bills they’ve kept on the kitchen counter for months or hold off on selling their herd. It will help stave off the most drastic and imminent collapse of one of our state’s most cherished industries.

We also know that this is too little, too late for some farms. For those farms that have already sold off their herds or can’t see a future that includes organic dairy cows, our House Committee on Agriculture worked hard this session to create a new program to help them, too. The Small Farm Diversification and Transition Program, which I co-sponsored, creates a grant program specifically tailored to small farms looking either to transition from one form of farming to another or to add new farm products to their business. It could help a dairy farmer purchase processing equipment to make value-added products, diversify with vegetables and a farmstand to sell directly to their neighbors, or transition to a different kind of farming altogether.

Both of these programs will help keep Vermont’s farmland in farming, which is crucial as we consider long term goals of community food security and food system resiliency. As this legislative session comes to a close, I’m looking forward to spending the summer engaging with farm and food system stakeholders, with an eye toward a future in which Vermont farmers who work tirelessly to care for our land and feed our families aren’t in crisis, but can thrive.

Another bill we worked on in the Agriculture Committee this session was the “Right to Repair.” It provides consumers and independent repair shops with the tools, parts, and information necessary to repair their own agriculture and forestry equipment.

The right to repair, or “fair repair” is a growing movement here in Vermont and across the country that basically says: we should have the right to fix our stuff when it breaks. Currently, when a piece of equipment stops working, the farmer or logger often has no choice but to use a manufacturer-approved dealer to make repairs or reset computer codes. The time it takes to acquire service from a dealer can be costly to the farmer, particularly in such time-and weather-sensitive industries. In addition, repair services come without reasonable price constraints given the lack of competition. This bill would allow customers to make their own repairs, use an independent repair service, or continue to use the dealer. Similar legislation has been proposed in at least 11 states with strong bipartisan support. This bill passed the House after the cross-over deadline this session, and will be taken up by the Senate next year.

As we took testimony in crafting this bill in Committee, we heard the powerful voices of Vermonters - farmers, loggers, and mechanics - telling us about the positive impact the right to repair will have for them and for our rural communities. I was proud to do this work on their behalf.