As legislators returned to Montpelier this week we saw some of the hastiest decision-making this year. To be fair, that is usually the case as the cross-over deadline looms large over committee work.

Action Alert!

A bill was rushed out of the House Government Operations Committee this week that would allow legislators to exempt themselves from ethics oversight!

This was a busy week in the legislature as the Town Meeting Day break loomed and the sorting of what bills will make the critical mid-session crossover deadline began in earnest. This is the milestone by which a bill must be voted out of one chamber (House/Senate) in order to be considered by the other before the end of the legislative session.

The annual "yield" bill sets the statewide property tax rates for the following year (in this case FY2026).

A bill gained traction this week in the House Government Operations Committee that would be a step backwards from a statewide comprehensive ethics framework. The bill, H.1, proposes to exempt the House and Senate Ethics Panels from the requirement to consult with the State Ethics Commission regarding any complaints referred to them by the Commission.

Close your eyes. Imagine: What do you think education will look like in five years? How about in ten years?

For most of us, education, while having undergone incremental changes, has mostly stayed the same. We picture students sitting at desks with a teacher at the front of a classroom in a brick and mortar school. Students are grouped into grades largely by age. They may take yellow school buses to and from their homes. Minus the laptops, smart phones, and a few other tech gadgets, the environment would not be totally alien to someone from many decades past. We have an opportunity to change all of that and afford students an individualized learning experience that meets them where they are, regardless of age or grade level. And we can do it for little to no cost (maybe even with some cost savings).

We heard from developers, both subsidized and market rate, this week that things need to change if we are going to hit our target of 7,000 new units of housing annually. It's not one thing, it's all the things. Lengthy appeals processes delay projects and drives up costs. The cost of materials skyrocketed during Covid and has not come back down. The shortage of labor is really impacting both the cost of doing business as well as construction times. Cost of financing development is also too expensive, particularly for developers as they can face interest rates double that of homeowners to cover construction costs.

The bill proposes to exempt the House and Senate Ethics Panels from the requirement to consult with the Executive Director of the State Ethics Commission regarding any complaints referred to them by the Commission. It includes a repeal of a prior ethics oversight legislation and amends the procedure for accepting and referring ethics complaints. A new draft of the bill would also exempt the judicial branch and executive branch attorneys from the purview of the Ethics Commission.