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.

The Education establishment provided mixed feedback on Governor Scott's education reform proposal this week. They generally focused on the need to provide "sufficient funds" for education and predictability in funding. Of course, the teachers union already took a shot at the Governor because they rightly concluded that cost-savings would be generated by staffing reductions (both teachers and administrators). We already know that a driving factor in Vermont education spending is our ultra small class sizes; it seems like others are also catching on. They also took the opportunity to attack the 3500 students in tuitioning districts who chose to take their tuition dollars to independent schools.

The bill aims to regulate the use of synthetic media (specifically deepfakes) in elections by requiring the disclosure of deceptive and fraudulent synthetic media within 90 days of an election.

What is the right way for our state to engage on climate change and environmental protection? As someone who considers themself an environmentalist, this is a question I have been asking myself frequently in recent years as we’ve started to see the impacts of climate change here in Vermont.

This week Governor Scott gave his budget address for FY2026 and we learned more details about his plan to overall Vermont's education system.

Governor Scott gave is budget address on January 28th, proposing a $9B budget for FY2026 with heavy investments in housing and other areas while simultaneously cutting taxes for the most financially vulnerable Vermonters.