This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

An annual tally of Vermonters experiencing homelessness showed a modest decrease between January of 2024 and 2025, the first downward trend in the data since before the Covid-19 pandemic began.

But the data shows a growing share of Vermont’s homeless population is living “unsheltered,” meaning people are sleeping in a vehicle or outside. Advocates say it’s not time to celebrate a turn of fortune in the state’s efforts to curb its homelessness problem.

“While this year’s numbers are sobering, they have remained relatively stable compared to last year. But stability doesn’t mean that the crisis is easing,” said Taylor Thibault, associate director of homelessness prevention initiatives at Champlain Housing Trust and co-chair of the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance, at a press briefing revealing Vermont’s latest homelessness metrics on Wednesday. 

Vermont’s 2025 point-in-time count — a yearly, federally mandated effort to to tally every person experiencing homelessness on a single night each winter — registered 3,386 people this past January. 

That’s a decrease of 72 people, or 2%, since January of 2024, according to a report released Wednesday by the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont and the two regional organizations that oversee the count.

Yet the share of unhoused people living without shelter rose dramatically year-over-year. This January, the count registered 270 people who were “unsheltered,” which the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines as having a “primary nighttime location” like a vehicle or the streets. That’s a nearly 63% uptick since the 2024 tally.

That figure is considered a significant undercount. On the night of the annual census, the city of Burlington was operating an emergency cold-weather shelter as the city faced frigid temperatures. That meant more than 70 individuals who used the shelter were counted as having a place to sleep indoors, even though the shelter only operated for a few nights. 

“Historically, Vermont has had very low rates of unsheltered homelessness,” said Sarah Russell, special assistant to end homelessness for the city of Burlington. “Now, that is really not true.”

The point-in-time count is generally regarded as a low estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness: accurately counting people sleeping outdoors is notoriously difficult, particularly in Vermont’s rural setting. The count only captures people who spoke with outreach workers conducting the January tally, and it doesn’t include people who are couch-surfing or doubling up with relatives.

But service providers and advocates now have what they say is a more accurate and up-to-date method for counting Vermonters experiencing homelessness throughout the year. And its results reveal an even larger population struggling to maintain stable housing.

Across Vermont, homeless service providers use a system called “Coordinated Entry” to streamline assistance for unhoused people. Earlier this year, the two entities that oversee that system throughout the state synced up their datasets for the first time.

The combined data shows that there were 4,588 unhoused Vermonters in June 2025, according to the report released Wednesday. That figure includes 1,041 children under the age of 18.

“What we’re talking about is our neighbors,” said Paul Dragon, executive director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, at the press conference. “The family with children sleeping in their car, driving around trying to find a safe place to park … it’s not unusual. It’s quite common.”

Advocates say even the Coordinated Entry numbers represent an underestimate, since the data only reflects people currently connected to services. The system also excludes people receiving shelter via the state’s sexual and domestic violence nonprofits to shield their privacy. (The Coordinated Entry data does use a slightly broader definition of homelessness than the point-in-time count, encompassing people who will lose their housing imminently.)

The Coordinated Entry data also offers a window into how long Vermonters remain unhoused. Only about a quarter of people experiencing homelessness were able to find housing in less than three months, according to data compiled in June. For more than 30% of people, finding housing in Vermont’s tight market took more than a year.

As the number of Vermonters experiencing homelessness registers in the thousands, capacity at homeless shelters numbers in the hundreds. Even as many organizations have added more shelter beds in recent years, the state has space for only 602 households in traditional shelters, according to a state report released in late June.

When those beds are full, the state relies on the motel voucher program, which state leaders have sought to curtail since pandemic-era funding ran out two years ago. Their cost-cutting measures have resulted in multiple waves of evictions, including one in early July that primarily impacted families with children and adults with severe medical needs. Hundreds of people have run out of their allotted 80 days in the program and will need to wait months to regain eligibility if they haven’t found another housing option.

Though state law says the Department for Children and Families can currently use up to 1,100 motel rooms at a time, only 662 are now in use, according to state data updated on Monday. 

At Wednesday’s press conference, advocates linked the long-running scaleback of the voucher program to the rise in unsheltered homelessness in Vermont.

“Defunding shelter programs such as the motel program does not decrease rates of homelessness. It only sets back the timeline for stability for these households and prevents them from being able to access those basic human needs,” said Russell, from the city of Burlington, who also co-chairs the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance.

In prior years, this annual homelessness report has highlighted a stark racial disparity in Vermont’s homelessness population. This year, however, the report’s authors excluded metrics on racial background. 

Advocates worried that noting such information in a report submitted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development could jeopardize federal housing and homelessness funds that flow to Vermont, given the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“We had to delete a large portion of this report due to the fear of retribution,” said Mary Gerish, an administrator at the Bennington Housing Authority and a co-chair of the Vermont Balance of State Continuum of Care, which tracks homelessness data.

A VTDigger/Vermont Public analysis of Coordinated Entry data from June shows that while Black people make up about 1.2% of Vermont’s population, 7.4% of people who are unhoused are Black.

To ease homelessness in Vermont, the report’s authors called on Gov. Phil Scott and state legislators to make greater investments in affordable housing, shelters, and services, enact more robust protections for renters, and to expand drug treatment options and harm reduction programs, among other demands.

“Every year we fail to invest meaningfully in our community, this crisis gets worse,” said Kim Anetsberger, executive director of the Lamoille Community House and the other co-chair of the Continuum of Care. “We cannot keep delaying this investment.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Unsheltered homelessness spikes in Vermont as need outstrips safety net .

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Communities impacted by the devastating floods that swept through Vermont in July 2023 can now apply for a cut of long-term federal disaster aid.

State officials have opened the application process for nearly $68 million in federal recovery money allocated to the state late last year. Officials hope to funnel the majority of the funding toward housing development outside of flood-prone areas.

“We recognize that housing is a crisis across the whole state, and especially in these flood areas,” said Nate Formalarie, deputy commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development, which is administering the federal block grants. “If future storms are to come, we need to have places to put people.” 

A state analysis found that Vermont has over $350 million in unmet flood recovery needs tied to the 2023 storm alone, with the bulk of that need stemming from costly damage to public infrastructure like power, wastewater and transportation systems. 

But state officials plan to direct more than 60% of the federal disaster aid — over $41 million —  toward housing development. Smaller portions of the block grant will be set aside for infrastructure projects, flood-mitigation efforts, future planning and program administration, according to a state action plan approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Asked why officials opted to channel much of this funding toward housing specifically, Formalarie emphasized the state of Vermont’s extraordinarily tight housing market — and the loss of homes to flood damage and property buyouts. The pot of money available to the state pales in the face of the overall need, he said.

“There is a need to replenish some of these housing options in these communities that are getting flooded year after year,” he said. Applications for infrastructure that supports new housing development will get considered as part of the housing category for funding decisions, he added.

The feds’ rules dictate that the majority of the disaster funding must flow to Lamoille and Washington counties, which were both particularly hard hit by the flooding two years ago. State officials have earmarked the remaining funds for unmet flood recovery needs in Caledonia, Orleans, Rutland, Windham and Windsor counties. The funding must primarily benefit low- and moderate-income residents.

This type of federal funding isn’t a given after a disaster strikes. Unlike immediate relief funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which can start flowing right after the president declares a disaster, Congress has to take action to appropriate these more flexible, long-range funds. The money allocated to Vermont came out of a disaster aid package that federal lawmakers passed in December.

This form of disaster aid also offers a rare opportunity to build new housing outside of the floodplain. While FEMA’s aid programs generally tie a homeowner to rebuilding on the site of their damaged home, for instance, or buy them out with no guarantee of an available home to move into, these more flexible funds can allow a community to create homes where they didn’t exist before.

Barre City, which has been hit repeatedly by major floods in recent years, has a long list of housing projects it’s considering as it puts together an application for the disaster funding, said City Manager Nicolas Storellicastro. One major priority is financing the infrastructure for new homes at the proposed Prospect Heights development, an undeveloped site near the city’s downtown.

The city also wants to jumpstart the revitalization of the flood-prone North End neighborhood, using some of the funding to build affordable homes at a park outside the floodplain, Storellicastro said. Redeveloping a long-vacant downtown building and funding more home elevations are also on the list, he added.

Between all of those projects, the city plans to apply for around $30 million from the federal funding pot. As Barre loses dozens of homes — and property tax revenue — to buyout-takers and lingering flood damage, the funding could make a meaningful difference, Storellicastro said.

“That would be a big step forward, not just to address the housing crunch, but to help the city’s tax base,” he said.

State officials are asking municipalities and local organizations interested in a shot at the funding to submit pre-applications by Aug. 5, with full applications due in late September. A citizen board will review them according to a rubric and make recommendations to Lindsay Kurrle, secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, and Gov. Phil Scott, who will have a final say on application decisions. 

The state hopes to begin awarding funding before the end of 2025.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Applications open for nearly $68 million in federal flood recovery funding for Vermont.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Montpelier city officials have ordered the removal of a downtown encampment that had grown in recent weeks.

Elizabeth Byam, 44, had set up camp in a small park near Montpelier’s riverfront bus station after her state voucher expired at a motel in nearby Barre on July 1, she said on Thursday afternoon. 

On Wednesday, Montpelier City Police officers arrived at the encampment with notices indicating that the campers would need to leave within 24 hours, Byam said. If they didn’t vacate, their belongings would be taken and stored off-site, out of town, Byam recalled the notice saying.

The next morning, Byam packed up her things before city officials arrived to clear the area. She remained at the site shortly after officials had left, along with a handful of other campers. Her family’s belongings were piled into shopping carts.

Byam estimated that about eight to 12 people had been staying at the encampment recently. She had been living there with her sons and her pregnant daughter-in-law.

“We have a bunch of stuff because she’s got to get ready for a baby,” Byam said. “But we don’t want her outside, either. We want her into a place.”

Montpelier’s acting city manager, Kelly Murphy, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. The Montpelier City Police Department also did not respond to multiple interview requests. (Meredith Warner, deputy director of local homelessness nonprofit Good Samaritan Haven, confirmed the timeline of events relayed by Byam.)

Camping overnight at public parks is prohibited in Montpelier, though city leaders said last summer that they generally look the other way as long as campers haven’t caused issues. 

The city has a separate policy that guides how it handles encampments on other property, focused on diverting camping away from “highly sensitive areas” like grounds near a school or cemetery. The policy also lays out public health and safety issues that can prompt officials to ask campers to leave, including criminal activity and excessive amounts of waste, among others. Montpelier City Council plans to revisit its encampment policy next month, according to recent reporting by WCAX.

The area where the encampment was located, dubbed Confluence Park, garnered half a dozen calls to the police between June 30 and July 6, according to the Montpelier Police Department’s most recent call log.

One log, dated July 2, noted that an encampment was being set up at the location, along with “persons with open containers of alcohol.” Another log the following day noted: “community member very unhappy with homeless people on the bike path at Confluence Park.” An assault in the area last week impacted members of Byam’s family, she said.

The encampment removal is not the first undertaken by the city in recent memory. Last August, Montpelier officials ordered the removal of an encampment at a former country club after a pattern of “threatening behavior” developed. The move prompted a protest led by one of the unhoused people displaced from the site, demanding city officials indicate where people could camp safely.

The city’s move this month comes in the wake of the most recent round of evictions from the state’s motel voucher program, which Gov. Phil Scott has sought to cut back since its pandemic-era expansion. The July 1 exits primarily impacted families with children and people with acute medical needs who had been shielded by an executive order that expired on that date.

In the past, the Scott administration has set up temporary shelters in the wake of evictions from the state’s motel system. This time, however, the Republican’s administration has not indicated it will take such a step.

In the meantime, people living outdoors in Montpelier have few other options. Local service provider Good Samaritan Haven plans to open a long-awaited year-round shelter in the city later this year.

But that won’t come soon enough for Byam. As of Thursday afternoon, she had packed up her camping gear. She planned to sleep outside a nearby church, where she’d heard she would be allowed to stay.

“That’s probably where we’ll be tonight,” Byam said. “And then focus tomorrow on if we’re going to stay there again tomorrow night, or if we’re going to find a spot.”

Warner, from Good Sam, said small municipalities and nonprofits alike are strained by the impact of rising homelessness in Vermont – particularly as both state and federal resources retreat.

“I’m honestly just tired of talking about camping as if it’s a reasonable solution to this problem,” she said. “It is an inhumane response to a person who needs a place to live.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Montpelier moves to clear encampment near downtown bus station.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

PEACHAM — The green clapboard house where Jenny Mackenzie lived for over two decades sits boarded up and ghostly along a narrow gravel road in the Northeast Kingdom. Late one night last July, the brook that once snaked lazily around the property frothed into a raging river, jumping course. Mackenzie’s family of four escaped before their home was inundated. They haven’t lived here since.

On a sunny morning nearly a year after the flood, Mackenzie returned with a shovel and a trunk full of empty flower pots. She was here to salvage some of her once sprawling gardens. Much of what had bloomed here had simply disappeared; the lawn had collapsed into the brook, leaving a gaping hole. Yet Mackenzie was determined. She scaled down the steep ledge above the water, hanging onto a root for balance.

“Operation rescue!” she called out, grasping for a piece of a mallow plant. “Just one little piece, but it’ll spread.”

Last summer’s flood wasn’t the first to hit the property. In 2011, Tropical Storm Irene compromised the home’s foundation. So the family poured over $100,000 into flood-proofing the house, fortifying its base, along with replacing its electric and heating systems and repairing its well. Federal disaster grants and loans helped cover some of the costs, but Mackenzie didn’t recall any officials suggesting her family apply for a buyout. She painstakingly replanted her flower gardens. 

This time around, there would be no returning to the house — for the Mackenzies, or anyone else. FEMA had recently approved the family’s buyout application, meaning that some day, the government would compensate the Mackenzies for this place, and knock it down. The lot would be held as open space in perpetuity. 

But as far as Mackenzie knows, that day is still far in the future — another year from now, at least. Hands covered in silt and dirt, she paused to consider the long task ahead.

“I guess I get another summer to come dig things out,” she said.

‘On the edge of a knife’

After historic flooding swept through Vermont in 2023 and 2024, hundreds of property owners applied for buyouts to try and get compensated for homes and businesses they would likely struggle to sell.

Vanishingly few have happened yet. State officials are currently overseeing 264 FEMA buyout applications. Of those, only eight property owners have gotten their payouts so far. Zero demolitions have occurred as of mid-July 2025, according to data provided by Vermont Emergency Management.

“It feels like a very low number, two years out,” said Stephanie Smith, the state hazard mitigation officer for Vermont Emergency Management.

FEMA’s buyout process is notoriously slow and arduous, requiring local and state and federal officials to all work together. 

But Smith’s team, which manages federal buyout applications on behalf of Vermont cities and towns, had worked hard to speed things up, she said. Streamlining the application process on the state’s end helped cut down FEMA’s review period from a year and a half to about three months, as of this past winter, Smith said.

Soon after President Donald Trump took office, though, roadblocks started to arise. In February, applications that Smith expected FEMA to greenlight relatively quickly sat idle for months. Meanwhile, the Trump administration began reviewing the efficacy of FEMA programs; more than $100 billion in FEMA grant payments were frozen, and grant approvals stalled, according to reporting from the New York Times. (FEMA’s press office declined an interview request for this story, and did not answer detailed questions from VTDigger/Vermont Public).

This spring, FEMA started sending out approval letters again. But then came the next hurdle: It began quietly changing its rules for authorizing buyout applications, raising the bar on which projects it approves, Smith said. In early April, the agency, at the direction of the Trump administration, altered which projects it views as cost-effective, according to a mid-June press release.

“We were like … OK, here’s a giant brick wall. Deep breath, what do we do?” Smith said. “We don’t want to have to tell people that they’re not going to get buyouts. We told them they were going to get buyouts.”

Asked why the agency opted to make this change, FEMA’s press office said in a statement – attributed to an unnamed spokesperson — that hazard mitigation decisions are “policy informed.” The Trump administration is monitoring the approval of hazard mitigation funding, “with states’ ability to execute those funds,” the statement said.

“To date, we are observing large unobligated balances across the board. We are working with states to assist them in identifying projects and drawing down balances in a way that makes the nation more resilient.”

When state officials learned of the cost rule change in late May — prior to its official announcement — they scrambled to rework all the applications they were getting ready to send to FEMA, along with ones currently under the agency’s review, Smith said. 

Almost 100 retooled applications later, all are still in the pipeline, for now. But Smith doesn’t feel relieved. If an already-approved application were to need any kind of tweaking, it would suddenly need to comply with different rules. For people still awaiting a decision from FEMA, that lengthy undertaking has slowed down. And given the Trump administration’s calls to eliminate FEMA and devolve its functions to states, everything seems precarious.

“It feels like we’re on the edge of a knife a little bit, and toggling … and just trying to keep everything balanced,” Smith said.

‘We’re all nervous’ 

Hundreds of Vermonters are caught in that balance. Many are waiting to hear whether FEMA will advance their applications. Many others have cleared that step, but are biding their time before the money finally arrives — and navigating tricky financial decisions in the meantime.

Peter Anthony, a former state representative for Barre City, had owned his home on Scampini Square for nearly 50 years. The July 2023 flood totaled it, and more flood damage came a year later, he said. Anthony and his wife have lived in a small downtown apartment since August 2023, which FEMA rental assistance helped pay for until January. 

Two years after applying, Anthony recently received indication that his buyout is finally near the finish line. He expects to sit down and sign the closing paperwork later this summer. 

Yet he doesn’t expect the payout to solve his financial woes. Anthony wants to buy another home in Barre. But the appraisal he received through the buyout process — which is pegged to the home’s pre-flood value — is $175,000, Anthony said, an amount that would “maybe buy half a house” in the current market. And he isn’t getting any younger.

“How many mortgages can you get when you’re 81 years old for a house that you want to buy?” Anthony said.

To the east in Peacham, Rachael Moragues is also waiting on the money. She lived next door to the Mackenzies with her two sons, and they’ve bunked up at a friend’s house in neighboring Barnet since the flooding in 2024 rendered their home uninhabitable. Each month, Moragues still makes a mortgage payment on a house she’ll never live in again, she said. 

She’s keeping an eye on the fate of FEMA. If for any reason her buyout doesn’t go through, she’d need to file for bankruptcy to pay off the house, she said.

“We’re all nervous because FEMA is one of those agencies that may or may not receive funding in the future,” Moragues said.

‘A really big risk’

Looking at her old, boarded-up home, Mackenzie said she worries about what Trump’s calls to cut FEMA will mean for families like hers across the country. But she knows she’s relatively fortunate.

Friends crowdsourced enough money for her family to pay off the mortgage on their Peacham home after the flood, along with the loan they had to pay for the flood-fortification work post-Irene. They had just enough left over to put a down payment on a home in Craftsbury, she said.

The new house is over 30 miles away — and their monthly mortgage payment is close to triple what it had been for the old house. The home is too expensive for Mackenzie and her husband, both teachers, to afford long-term, she said. They took the leap even before they learned they’d gotten the buyout approved, to ensure their 16-year-old twins would have a place to call home before they move away for college.

“It was a really, really big risk for us to move there,” Mackenzie said. “The buyout is completely necessary in order to refinance, to get our mortgage to a level around where this one was.” 

Mackenzie flipped open the trunk of her car, and filled it with daffodil bulbs and irises. She took off down the narrow gravel road. It was time to start planting at her new home.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Since the historic floods of 2023, few Vermont residents have buyout money in hand.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

The city of Burlington decided on Thursday to “indefinitely pause” a sanctioned parking area for people experiencing homelessness before the initiative had even begun.

The “Safe Overnight Parking pilot project” at Perkins Pier along the city’s waterfront was slated to begin on Friday, July 4. City officials announced its creation on Tuesday, as a response to a round of evictions from the state’s motel voucher program that has primarily impacted families with children and individuals with severe medical needs.

But on Thursday afternoon, city officials decided to halt the project, in response to “substantial community feedback, and out of concern for the safety of program participants based on threatening comments made by members of the public on various online platforms,” according to a city press release.

Joe Magee, deputy chief of staff for Burlington Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, said city officials received a significant number of concerned messages from “residents, and businesses, and folks who have boats docked” near the Maple Street lot. 

Social media posts expressing hostile sentiments about the project also led city officials to worry about the safety of unhoused people staying there, Magee said. The police department planned to do additional patrols of the area, Magee said, but the parking lot would not have had a “stationary overnight security presence.”

The city had received two inquiries from people who had wanted to park overnight in the lot, which was supposed to have space for twelve vehicles, Magee said. Officials had not yet approved any registrations for it.

Between June 23 and July 1, state officials anticipated 140 adults and 61 children would lose access to the motel voucher program in the Burlington area. The current wave of evictions from the program is in large part the result of an executive order expiring that had protected families with children and people with acute medical needs, like those who are homebound or receiving cancer treatment. 

Burlington officials estimate that hundreds of people are already sleeping outdoors or in vehicles in the city, with tents tucked along the waterfront bike path an increasingly common sight.

“The city does not have the resources or staff to be able to … address the shortage of shelter alone,” Magee said. “We really need state partnership to come up with more tangible solutions.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Burlington abruptly halts plans for overnight parking for unhoused people.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin and VTDigger reporter Greta Solsaa, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Chris Duprey was looking for a tent. One large enough to shelter his fiancée, his toddler and his 6-year-old kid.

It was time to check out of the Motel 6 in Colchester, where the family had lived for the better part of a year. The motel voucher that had allowed them to stay here was expiring.

“I’m hoping for a prayer right now,” said Duprey, 47, as he lingered in the motel parking lot on Tuesday morning. Packing up the room proved too painful. “We need a prayer.”

This latest round of evictions from the motel program has specifically targeted families with children and people with acute medical needs, like those who are homebound or receiving cancer treatment. It is the result of the expiration of an executive order that extended motel stays for those groups, deemed by Gov. Phil Scott’s administration as the most vulnerable to harm if they lost shelter.

Over 800 people — including nearly 300 children — were slated to exit the program on Tuesday, according to data provided by the Department for Children and Families. (An additional 138 people were scheduled to exit the program between June 23 and July 1 because their vouchers had timed out, according to the department.)

A back injury Duprey suffered after a fall while on a construction job had left him unable to work — and addicted to painkillers. He and his partner, Jessica Delary, 31, each had a criminal history stemming from a period when both struggled with substance use disorder, which proved a barrier to getting an apartment, he said. 

But for over a year, both Duprey and Delarey had been in recovery. They were focused on staying clean for the sake of their kids. Last month, their toddler had celebrated his first birthday at the motel where he’d spent most of his life, with a little party under the trees at the edge of the asphalt. They had recently landed a rental voucher, and were waiting to hear if a landlord they’d spoken to would accept it, but nothing was final.

By 11 a.m., the couple had decided to pay $80 out of pocket to stay at the motel one more night. They’d been calling around to service providers trying to find a tent, and hadn’t landed one yet. Purchasing one themselves would eat into the $900 a month they survive on from state welfare funds. And then there was the cost of paying for a campsite with water and electricity during the peak summer season.

“We can’t even afford a campground,” Duprey said.

State action 

The executive order, signed by Gov. Scott in late March, granted a three-month extension for families with children and people with acute medical needs who were sheltered in motels “to allow time for DCF to ensure” they have access to services and supports needed to transition to a long-term housing, shelter, or health care placement.

Without the order, those groups would have faced eviction when the motel program’s more flexible winter rules ended for the season in April. Democratic leaders in the Legislature had sought an extension for everyone sheltered through the program at that time, but Scott, a Republican, twice vetoed their effort — opting instead to protect a much narrower cohort his administration deemed most vulnerable. 

Yet homelessness advocates had not anticipated a mass exodus upon the executive order’s expiration. Because the order stated that existing time limits on motel stays “shall be waived” between April and June, they expected people would have more days left to use after the order lifted, forestalling the next wave of evictions until later this year.

But DCF sent out notices in early June specifying that nights sheltered under the order would in fact count towards each individual’s 80-day clock.

In recent days, service providers, Burlington city leaders and several lawmakers have issued letters to Scott imploring him to rescind those early-June notices, effectively giving motel residents more time in shelter. They have also called upon the governor to declare a state of emergency and direct officials to create shelters for people exiting the motels, among other demands.

So far, Scott has not taken action. A spokesperson for his office told VTDigger/Vermont Public in mid-June that he did not intend to extend the executive order.

Miranda Gray, deputy commissioner of DCF’s economic services division, said in an email that the department is encouraging people slated to lose their motel rooms to connect with local housing agencies. State employees and contracted case managers “have been working with the households housed under the (executive order) to identify plans for July 1st,” Gray said. 

DCF has not provided data on how many households it has helped ensure alternative accommodations for past June 30.

Last fall when Vermont saw a wave of families evicted from motels, the state opened a new family shelter at the Waterbury Armory. State officials shut it down on June 13. Asked if officials are considering reopening the shelter, Gray said that “all potential opportunities, including those involving existing facilities, are considered as part of this ongoing effort to expand safe and appropriate shelter capacity.”

Overnight parking and tents 

In at least one instance, a municipality is preparing to offer a sanctioned location for people to park their vehicles and sleep overnight.

On July 4, the city of Burlington will begin allowing up to twelve vehicles to park overnight at Perkins Pier, at the foot of Maple Street along the city’s waterfront. Individuals will need to get a permit from the city by noon on the 3rd in order to begin using the site the following day, said Sarah Russell, Burlington’s special assistant to end homelessness.

Those interested in using the site can reach out to Russell directly at 802-829-6326 or srussell@burlingtonvt.gov Monday-Friday. People will need to vacate the lot during the daytime. The city plans to install an ADA-accessible porta-potty onsite, but the site does not have access to electricity or running water. 

Russell called the sanctioned parking area a “pilot” project and a “harm reduction strategy.” Last fall, the city offered campsites at North Beach to families exiting motels, but now the popular campground is booked for the season, she said.

In Burlington and elsewhere, service providers are handing out tents to people in need.

At the Econo Lodge in Rutland Tuesday morning, Brenda Siegel, executive director of End Homelessness Vermont, offered supplies for people exiting the motel voucher program like tents, sleeping bags, blankets and tarps that the organization had purchased.

End Homelessness Vermont and other emergency providers have been “repetitively drained” after each motel exit, Siegel said. The need around the state far outweighs the resources the organization has available to give to the unhoused, she said.

“Their likelihood of survival is not high. I think they should at least have the right to get to and through a fair hearing to appeal this,” Siegel said. “Our system is failing, because it really means that it’s impossible for people to argue for their rights, and that’s not what should be happening right now. We should have a system that works.”

Casey Stevens, 38, of Rutland, said she had been staying at the Econo Lodge for six months after staying at hotels through the motel voucher program intermittently for a year and half. 

Stevens said she finds it unfair to be required to exit the hotel without sufficient time to figure out her plan. She did not know where she would be staying the night Tuesday, she said, but had reached out to BROC Community Action to inquire about shelter for the next few days. 

Stevens gained sobriety with the help of the organization Better Life Partners in Rutland and was in the process of interviewing for jobs, she said. She was planning to earn her bookkeeping certificate, but exiting the hotel may jeopardize her progress on those goals, she said. 

“Being able to be here has helped me become sober. I secured my plan. I actually signed up to go back to school this fall,” Stevens said. “I fear losing it all again.”

Editor’s note: Information about Chris Duprey and Jessica Delary’s family being affected by flooding has been removed from this article because it could not be verified to meet editorial standards.

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘We need a prayer’: As executive order ends, hundreds of Vermonters exit motels.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Advocates for unhoused Vermonters pleaded with Gov. Phil Scott Tuesday to prevent the evictions of over 300 highly vulnerable households from the state’s motel voucher program on July 1.

At a press conference on the Statehouse steps, a small group of advocates called on the Republican governor to extend an executive order he signed earlier this spring – which allowed families with children and people with acute medical needs to remain in motel rooms. The order is set to expire June 30, and a spokesperson for Scott has indicated that he does not plan to continue it.

“Every one of the people being exited is in a category that the governor himself has deemed would struggle to survive outside,” said Brenda Siegel, executive director of End Homelessness Vermont. “These are people who are homebound, who require assistance from a wheelchair or walker to leave the house.”

Scott signed the executive order in late March, days before the motel program’s loosened winter rules were set to expire for the season. At the time, lawmakers had sought a three-month extension for everyone sheltered in motels to head off a mass-eviction. Scott, a frequent critic of the motel program’s cost and effectiveness, opposed their effort, twice vetoing a midyear spending bill over the disagreement. 

But he then took executive action to extend stays for a narrow group of people, writing at the time that “we have an obligation to protect children and Vermonters who are most vulnerable.” The order granted three-month extensions for families with children, pregnant people in their third trimester, and people who met specific medical criteria, like requiring home-based nursing services or receiving active cancer treatment.

The order also stated that an 80-day cap on motel stays during the warmer months “shall be waived” between April and June for people sheltered in these priority groups “to allow time for DCF to ensure” they have access to services and supports needed to transition to a long-term housing, shelter or health care placement.

Many service providers interpreted that language to mean people sheltered under the executive order would not accrue days toward their 80-day limits, affording them more time in emergency housing after the order’s expiration. But the Department for Children and Families issued notices earlier this month saying the opposite. 

Advocates on Tuesday said the department’s move amounted to an abrupt change of course that has not allowed clients and service providers to adequately prepare.  

“We are in the midst of a housing crisis. There’s nowhere for people to go,” said Maryellen Griffin, a staff attorney with Vermont Legal Aid. “People will be camping in sidewalks, parks, river banks, empty lots.”

DCF officials said last week that 348 households currently housed under the order will reach the end of their eligibility period if they don’t transition out of the motel program beforehand. A spokesperson said officials had “intensified efforts” to support clients who were willing to accept the help, but declined to provide data on how many households they had helped ensure alternative accommodations for past June 30.

“The state has not made good on its promise to make sure that these months were used to make sure people could find long-term housing – in part because there is no long-term housing out there for many people,” Griffin said.

Advocates declined to answer a question about whether they planned to take legal action against the state. Instead, Griffin encouraged individuals facing an impending eviction from the program to appeal to the state’s Human Services Board. Multiple people have done so, Griffin said, though none of the cases have been decided yet.

The emergency housing program has been defined in the last several years by tightening eligibility requirements and waves of mass evictions, as Scott and Democratic leaders in the Legislature have battled over how best to wind down its pandemic-era expansion. All the while, Vermont’s homeless population has ballooned, more than tripling from pre-Covid levels.

The coming exodus in July comes days after Scott vetoed lawmakers’ most comprehensive attempt at reform, a bill that would have devolved the motel voucher program next year and given funding and decision-making power over emergency shelter to regional, private nonprofits. Scott contended the legislation would “not adequately reduce the size or cost” of the motel voucher program.

“The governor has presented no plan to end homelessness in Vermont,” Griffin said. “Abruptly turning people out of emergency housing without a short-term or a long-term plan for where people should go is cruel and fiscally irresponsible.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Advocates plead with Gov. Phil Scott to extend motel eligibility for families and those with acute medical needs.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Over 300 highly vulnerable households will lose eligibility for Vermont’s motel voucher program by the end of June.

That’s because an executive order that extended motel stays for families with children and people with acute medical needs is set to expire June 30. A spokesperson for Gov. Phil Scott confirmed this week that the Republican governor does not plan to extend the order.

By July 1, 348 households currently housed under the order will reach the end of their eligibility period if they don’t transition out of the motel program beforehand, according to Monika Madaras, director of communications and legislative affairs for the Department for Children and Families’ Economic Services Division.

“It’s probably going to be very similar to what we saw last September,” said Miranda Gray, the deputy commissioner of the division. Last fall, over 1,500 people were evicted from motels — including families with young children who resorted to camping — prompting widespread public outcry.

The impending expiration was a surprise to some organizations and local officials who serve unhoused Vermonters, because of widespread confusion about how the program’s time limits would work.

Current law says people can receive 80 nights of emergency housing per year. But any motel stays during the winter months — December through March — do not count toward that time cap.

Scott signed the executive order in late March, just as that winter eligibility period was slated to end. Lawmakers had sought an extension for everyone sheltered through the program at that time to halt another mass eviction, but Scott fiercely opposed the effort, twice vetoing a midyear spending bill over the disagreement. Instead, he took executive action to extend stays for a narrow group of people, writing at the time that “we have an obligation to protect children and Vermonters who are most vulnerable.”

The order states that “the 80 day maximum shall be waived” between April and June for eligible households, “to allow time for DCF to ensure” they have access to services and supports needed to transition to a long-term housing, shelter, or healthcare placement.

DCF communication to providers after the order came down in March stated that the order “lifts the 80-day limit,” allowing eligible people to remain housed through June 30, 2025. It did not specify that days during this period would count toward the cap.

Many service providers understood the phrasing to mean that people sheltered under the executive order would not accrue days toward the 80-day limit. But DCF recently sent notices to clients stating the opposite.

“Your household is part of a special group covered by Executive Order No. 03-25, which may allow you to get more than 80 days of housing assistance through June 30, 2025,” states a draft notice, dated June 3, posted on the department’s website. “However, any days you use under this executive order still count toward your 80-day limit.”

The notice caught many off guard.

Sarah Russell, Burlington’s special assistant to end homelessness, believed households covered under the executive order group would have their 80-day clocks essentially frozen until June 30. 

“My assumption originally was that this was an extension of the adverse weather conditions,” she said, referring to the winter exception period. “I think that was a pretty universal assumption among providers.”

Russell did not think there would be another mass eviction until the fall.

But department officials interpreted the executive order to mean that enforcement of the 80-day limit would be paused for these households between April and June, allowing people to stay put even if they had surpassed that cap.

Gray said officials sent out the notices earlier this month after they realized there was a misunderstanding.

“When it became clear that there was confusion, then we wanted to make sure that it was clear for people,” Gray said. 

Madaras, the DCF spokesperson, said the Agency of Human Services has ramped up its efforts to support people in the executive order group who are willing to accept services.

Asked how many households the state has helped ensure alternative accommodations for past June 30, Madaras declined to provide a number.

“The Department does not systematically collect data on clients’ living arrangements after they exit the program,” she said. 

If the past is any indication, however, at least some of those households will pitch tents come July 1.

To Brenda Siegel, an advocate with End Homelessness Vermont, the state’s effort to winnow down which unhoused people count as the most vulnerable was already unconscionable. But evicting this group that officials have deemed the most at risk of harm if unsheltered is worse.

“After identifying them, the first next move is going to be to send them to live outside,” Siegel said. “That is just horrifying for our state to do.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Hundreds of ‘most vulnerable’ households to lose emergency shelter as governor’s order expires.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Gov. Phil Scott has signed this year’s housing package into law, creating a new financing tool for infrastructure that supports housing construction and enshrining stronger fair housing protections for immigrants.

The marquee policy in the bill, S.127, is the Community and Housing Infrastructure Program, which is intended to help cover costly infrastructure upgrades that are needed to make residential development possible.

Essentially a smaller-scale version of Vermont’s existing tax increment financing program, CHIP will allow municipalities and developers to borrow money for infrastructure like roads, sidewalks and sewers for a housing project – and then use the increased property tax revenue from the homes to help pay back the debt. 

If developers and municipalities take advantage of CHIP to its full extent, the program has the potential to unleash $2 billion in infrastructure spending over the next decade – a level of investment that proponents believe could help move the needle on Vermont’s severe housing shortage. 

The bill’s passage was far from assured. The new infrastructure program was the subject of prolonged -– and at times acrimonious — debate among lawmakers before most went home in late May. House Democrats pushed hard for more guardrails to the new initiative. Their primary concern was that any new development that might have occurred even without help from the tax incentive would result in foregone property tax revenue to the overstretched Education Fund.

The Senate — and the Scott administration — had pushed for fewer rules, arguing that a more flexible version of the initiative would help add more homes to the statewide grand list and spread out the burden of rising education costs. A new coalition of housing advocates, Chamber of Commerce lobbyists and the Vermont League of Cities and Towns also pushed for a less strict version of the initiative.

Lawmakers ultimately landed somewhere in the middle – significantly raising a yearly tax increment cap favored by House Democrats, but retaining a version of a controversial “but for” test to determine whether a project would have happened without the public financing boost. 

That proved enough to earn the Republican governor’s signature. But the infrastructure financing program is the only significant piece of Scott’s housing agenda that lawmakers followed through on this year. 

The Scott administration had vied for changes to the municipal appeals process for housing projects. But legislators failed to agree on reforming how and when neighbors can challenge housing developments in court, vowing to return to the issue next year once they’ve received a report back from the board that oversees Act 250. Scott had seen more room to amend the statewide development review law – which lawmakers overhauled last year – but legislators showed little interest in revisiting the subject this session.

S.127 also contains new housing protections for immigrants living in Vermont who lack legal status.

It adds citizenship and immigration status to the list of protected classes in Vermont’s fair housing laws, prohibiting discrimination on those grounds when someone is seeking to rent or buy a home. 

The legislation also mandates that a landlord needs to accept a range of forms of identification on a rental application in order to conduct credit and background checks – not only a Social Security number. Several immigrants testified at the Statehouse this session that landlords have frequently passed them over when they couldn’t provide the identifier. The advocacy group Migrant Justice pushed for the new protections.

The eclectic legislation also includes measures aimed at streamlining development on contaminated brownfield sites, a future study that would look at creating a statewide land bank for buildings that have fallen into disrepair, and a report on housing needs for people with developmental disabilities.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Gov. Phil Scott signs housing package into law, creating new infrastructure program.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Gov. Phil Scott has vetoed a bill that would have regionalized and privatized Vermont’s homelessness response system.

In a message to the Legislature explaining his decision late Wednesday, Scott argued that the bill “does not adequately reduce the size or cost” of the motel voucher program. The five-term Republican has called for the downsizing of the emergency housing benefit for years.

“Rather than continuing to fund a program that isn’t good for those in it, I believe we should focus on real solutions like building additional shelter capacity and requirements to engage in work, training, and treatment for those who need it,” Scott wrote.

The bill, H.91, would have in fact dissolved the statewide motel voucher program as it currently exists. After a year of planning, it would have handed over funding and decision-making power for emergency shelter to five regional anti-poverty nonprofits and the statewide domestic violence organization. 

Those same groups would have had authority over funds the state currently doles out to build and operate local shelters and run homelessness prevention programs. The state would have retained an oversight role.

The change would have marked a fundamental pivot in how Vermont approaches homelessness, which has increased by more than 300% since before the Covid-19 pandemic began amid a crushing housing shortage and rising housing costs. 

The bill’s Democratic supporters in the Legislature argued it would have created a more efficient and integrated support system for Vermont’s growing homeless population — and allowed the state to stop relying on motel and hotel rooms to shelter the bulk of unhoused Vermonters, an issue that has become a perennial flashpoint at the Statehouse in the years since pandemic-era federal aid for shelter dried up.

Scott, a Republican, has long pushed for the motel voucher program’s expansion to end, arguing that it is too expensive – and ineffective – to continue on the state’s dime. Lawmakers have haltingly agreed to winnow down its scale over the last few years, setting new restrictions on eligibility that have resulted in relentless waves of evictions. 

H.91 was the closest lawmakers and officials had come to overhauling the motel voucher system – and the broader state apparatus for responding to homelessness.

Early on this legislative session, officials from Scott’s administration had expressed general support for the restructuring H.91 envisioned. In some ways, the proposal to shift the motel voucher program to regional community action agencies mirrored a push the Scott administration had made right before Covid-19 hit.

But in the waning weeks of the session, officials and lawmakers found plenty of details to argue about, from concerns around the costs of the new regionalized approach to disagreements over how quickly it should happen. 

Legislators attempted to make concessions to the administration as they finalized the bill, lowering an appropriation meant to aid the transition to the new system this year and striking provisions that expressed an intent to tie future emergency housing spending to recent years’ budgets – creating a possibility for the state to spend less in the future.

Those changes weren’t enough to earn Scott’s signature. In his veto message, Scott claimed “this bill proposes we spend millions of dollars more” than the $44 million budgeted for the motel program last year. He noted that, by comparison, the state appropriated $5 million for motels in 2019. 

Advocates for unhoused Vermonters decried Scott’s decision.

“Throughout the coming years, Vermonters will lose access to their permanent housing vouchers due to upheaval in Washington and inhumane policies,” wrote Brenda Siegel, executive director of End Homelessness Vermont, in a statement. “Governor Scott has left vulnerable Vermonters with no options, no solution and no hope.”

Both the House and Senate passed the final versions of H.91 with party-line votes. Without a Democratic supermajority, lawmakers are unlikely to have the votes to override the governor’s veto. Staff for legislative leadership did not offer details on their next steps forward Wednesday evening.

Scott’s decision leaves the motel program operating at its status quo – with strict time-limits on motel stays for all participants and a cap on the number of rooms in use during the warmer months of the year – for the foreseeable future.

And it leaves Vermont’s political leaders that much further apart on addressing the state’s worsening homelessness problem.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Gov. Phil Scott vetoes motel program overhaul .

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

There was a moment last fall, a few months after moving into her new three-bedroom apartment, when Hannah Patten felt like she was finally at home. 

The 37-year-old single mom had been homeless with her two middle-school-aged children for ten months after Patten left her ex-husband, who she said was abusive. The family of three secured the rental with a short-term housing voucher last June. When Halloween came around, her kids rolled their eyes at making jack-o’-lanterns, but they indulged her. Patten had the sensation that she was watching the scene from above.

“It was just really nice to sit around the table and carve pumpkins and just … be free like that,” she said. “That’s the best way to explain it – is free. We’re just free, we’re happy, we’re healthy, we’re secure.”

Patten’s temporary rental aid from the state – slated to end this summer – was intended to act as a bridge toward long-term federal assistance. She had banked on obtaining a Section 8 voucher to help her family stay put. Patten wanted to remain in the apartment to see her kids graduate high school. 

She had gone through round after round of applications with the Vermont State Housing Authority, advancing her status over the course of months. By May, it seemed like she would be granted her ticket to permanent security any day.

But late last month, she got a phone call that rocked her. Patten’s caseworker told her that the housing authority was putting her back on their waitlist – and she had little chance of getting off of it. A recent federal funding reduction meant the housing authority had halted issuing new vouchers. Hers had been on the brink of getting rubber-stamped, a letter from the Vermont State Housing Authority later confirmed.

As the news sank in, Patten burst into tears. She had dutifully submitted each and every document required of her. She had spent months scouring rental listings to find this apartment. So much had to go right to get here, and now, it was unravelling.

“I am doing anything and everything,” Patten said. “Then you’re just … you’re giving it to me and then taking it right away.” 

No new vouchers

The nine housing authorities that administer federal rental vouchers in Vermont are reacting to a collective loss of roughly $11 million for the remainder of 2025. That cut is the result of three factors: a recent funding reduction from Congress, the absence of a typical inflation boost to keep up with rising rents, and a clawing back of reserve funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that could have been used to support more vouchers, according to Kathleen Berk, executive director of the Vermont State Housing Authority. 

The result: the state’s largest housing authorities have ceased issuing new vouchers off their lengthy waitlists, and have rescinded vouchers from 144 households who had been searching for a place to use them.

Most of the eight regional housing authorities in the state – along with the Vermont State Housing Authority, which covers areas that don’t have a local agency – are now attempting to shrink the number of vouchers on their rolls by not reissuing them when tenants give them up.

Cumulatively, the nine agencies estimate that they will need to shelve 991 vouchers by the end of 2025 to get within budget, according to data aggregated by the Vermont State Housing Authority. That amounts to about 14% of the 7,122 vouchers in use as of late May.

“It’s dramatic,” Berk said. “We’re trying to solve an affordability housing crisis, while at the same time, Congress continues to not adequately fund one of the most basic successful programs that [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] has ever made available to low income folks across the country.”

Over half of Vermont renters are considered cost-burdened. Federal housing vouchers are one of the state’s most critical tools to help move people out of homelessness and sustain housing for Vermonters who struggle to afford market-rate rents. Section 8 voucher recipients pay a third of their income toward rent; a local agency administering the federal program pays for the rest. 

While the recent funding cuts are largely the result of budget decisions made by Congress, the Trump administration has signaled its desire to see steeper reductions to federal rental aid and new time constraints and work requirements for tenants who receive it.

A motel to a home

For Patten, losing her shot at a voucher undid nearly two years of effort to gain stability. 

In September of 2023, Patten and her two children fled their home, after she had endured physical assaults from her former partner for about six months, she said. Before that, Patten had served as his caretaker following an injury; the family relied on state support. Soon after Patten and the kids left, the family entered the state’s motel voucher system. The family moved from motel to motel; Patten’s kids switched from school to school. (VTDigger/Vermont Public are not including Patten’s location to protect her safety.)

All the while, Patten sent in applications to housing programs, a task that amounted to its own job. She broke down in the lobby of a Motel 6 when her caseworker informed her that she had been granted a year-long housing voucher through a little-known program administered by the state’s Department for Children and Families – meant to tide her over to longer-term aid.

“I started bawling right in the middle of the motel, because it was like – I’m almost there,” she said.

But she still needed to find an apartment where she could use the subsidy, a task that took another four months, since the unit needed to be big enough for her family and was required to rent for under $1,400 a month. Available rentals are so scarce in Vermont that the majority of people who do secure a Section 8 voucher – roughly 60% – end up forfeiting the help because they cannot find a suitable apartment before their time runs out.

Finally, a landlord Patten met through an online listing offered to lower the price of a roomy three-bedroom apartment so it would fit within her allotted budget. He also offered her a job at a local business, where she still picks up a few shifts each week. Patten rented a U-Haul and moved in a few weeks later.

Now, a year onward, she’s faced with the prospect of moving out.

A bottleneck

The federal cuts to Section 8 have begun to send ripple effects through Vermont’s homelessness response system.

Earlier this spring, Patten secured an extension on her short-term voucher, which is now slated to expire in August. The Department for Children and Families has historically awarded more time when recipients of its 12-month Vermont Rental Subsidy program have appeared on the brink of securing longer-term help, according to Miranda Gray, the deputy commissioner of DCF’s economic services division. 

Further extensions now appear unlikely.

“We need to see what makes the most sense – understanding that there might be bigger barriers,” Gray said. “It’s not just a matter of if they need a little more time to get through the process.”

DCF has already shifted its internal policy around the program, in light of the Section 8 cuts. In late May, the Department stopped granting new short-term rental vouchers, Gray said, because officials do not know whether they will be able to bridge the 60 households currently in the program to long-term assistance.

She worries that the Section 8 funding reduction will tighten a bottleneck in the state’s efforts to house Vermonters experiencing homelessness.

“It’s just going to add strain to a system that is already really strained,” she said.

A chance to dream

When Patten moved into the apartment a year ago, she set herself a goal. Within two years, she’d be off state assistance – she’d have landed a job that would allow her to cover the rent herself. After that, she imagined buying land and building herself a house.

“This apartment gave me the chance to kind of dream of our futures and what it could be,” she said, sitting in her living room on a late spring afternoon. “And that’s all gone now.”

As the end of August creeps closer, Patten worries that she will need to again seek a state-funded motel room to assure her family’s shelter – if one is available. A motel voucher would come at significantly greater expense to the state than the DCF subsidy that helps pay for the rental. 

“To me, it’s going to be a very gloomy summer,” she said.

But there was a shred of hope to hang onto. As a reporter packed up her car, Patten ran down to the sidewalk. She had just received a call for a job interview. A position with the state, to help families like hers navigate the byzantine benefits programs meant to offer them stability.

Maybe it could deliver the security she sought.

Read the story on VTDigger here: For one Vermont family, losing their shot at a housing voucher could mean reentering homelessness.

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).

Read the story on VTDigger here: Phil Scott remains silent on session’s biggest homelessness bill as it heads to his desk.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

After an hours-long debate on Friday afternoon, the Vermont House advanced a major housing package that would set up a new financing tool for infrastructure that supports new residential development.

The largely party-line vote over S.127 comes after more than a week of discord among House lawmakers over the marquee infrastructure program, and it follows the Senate’s passage of a separate housing package a day prior. That makes the path to a final product uncertain as the Legislature inches closer to adjourning.

The debate in the Democrat-controlled House centered on what guardrails lawmakers ought to place on the Community and Housing Infrastructure Program, a new initiative aimed at allowing municipalities and developers to use the increased tax revenue from new housing projects to pay back debt for infrastructure like water lines, sewers and sidewalks.

After advancing the bill out of committee last week, House lawmakers faced blowback from Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s administration, senators and housing advocates, who said House members had made access to the program too restrictive, particularly for smaller towns. 

In response to that criticism, key committee leaders put forward an amendment to ease some of those rules, like taking away geographic criteria for where projects could go and adding a pathway to exceed an annual cap on tax increment a state board can approve each year, at the discretion of the governor.

But many House members felt those concessions did not go far enough. Members of the tripartisan rural caucus brought forward an additional amendment on the House floor on Friday which would, among other measures, strike a controversial “but for” test included in the legislation.

The test, a common feature for tax increment financing programs elsewhere in the country, essentially requires that a development can only be approved for the program if it wouldn’t happen “but for” the public financing boost.

Proponents of the test said it would play a critical role in protecting the state’s overstretched Education Fund.

“If the development would have occurred anyway, or would have occurred somewhere else, then the retention of the statewide education property tax to pay for it is effectively foregone revenue from the Education Fund, which could actually end up increasing property taxes for all Vermonters,” said Rep. Charlie Kimbell, D-Woodstock, on the House floor.

But opponents argued that the test amounts to an added barrier to housing development amid Vermont’s acute shortage of homes. The state needs upwards of 24,000 additional year-round homes by 2029 to achieve a healthy housing market, according to a report released last year. 

“The ‘but-for’ test is bureaucratic red tape,” said Rep. Monique Priestley, D-Bradford. “The need for housing is self-evident.” 

The amendment to scrap the test failed, even after gaining the support of some rural Democrats, in addition to Republicans – 53 members voted for it, and 86 voted against. Some members who voted for the shot-down amendment ultimately voted in favor of the overall bill, expressing a desire to see it tweaked yet again in a committee of conference between the House and Senate.

But it’s still unclear which housing bill will make it to that near-final step. As senators watched the House delay a vote over S.127 on Thursday, its members took the dramatic step of suspending all rules to get their version of a housing package, H.479, to the finish line – a move that required cross-party support. That bill contains a version of CHIP with fewer rules attached.

Staff for legislative leadership indicated late Friday that they did not yet know which bill would be the ultimate vehicle. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Divided lawmakers keep housing bill hobbling toward finish line .

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Facing a reduction in federal funding, the Vermont State Housing Authority will stop issuing new rental assistance vouchers to low-income households on its lengthy waitlist, and has begun rescinding vouchers from about 50 Vermonters currently searching for an apartment to use them.

“We have a plan to curtail our spending and to protect families that are receiving rental assistance,” said Kathleen Berk, executive director of the Vermont State Housing Authority, the state’s largest administrator of the federal Section 8 program. 

The housing authority faces a roughly $1 million funding reduction for the remainder of 2025, Berk said, which came as something of a surprise earlier this month. That funding gap is the result of a budget cut to a specific voucher program that serves disabled individuals, along with the lack of an annual inflation increase to keep up with rising rents, which Berk said had historically been included in yearly appropriations for rental assistance. 

That means VSHA’s $39 million annual budget for vouchers won’t go as far. The funding loss means the housing authority must trim about 489 vouchers from its rolls, Berk indicated. That’s about 12% of the 3,897 vouchers the housing authority currently administers. 

Because future funding is generally tied to past spending, Berk fears this year’s reduction in vouchers could lead to a “downward spiral” in the number of Vermonters getting rental aid in years to come.

As Vermont sees housing prices escalate and homelessness increase, federal housing vouchers play a key role in sustaining housing for low-income people who can’t afford market-rate rents. Voucher recipients pay a third of their income toward rent; a local agency administering the federal program pays for the rest.

The need is great. At 3,379 applicants, the state housing authority’s waitlist for vouchers nearly matches the number of households who currently have them. The waitlist has been closed since late January, when the housing authority first anticipated federal cuts. 

The housing authority does not plan to take away vouchers from people who currently have them, Berk emphasized. Instead, it hopes to reduce its load primarily through attrition – by not giving out new vouchers when someone retires one. It is taking a few additional steps to hasten that process, as outlined in a memo to community partners sent out on Wednesday. 

The authority will stop taking referrals for special rental assistance programs for veterans, young people exiting the foster care system, and families at risk of separation because of their lack of housing. It will also pause an initiative that allows people who live in homes where a subsidy is attached to take their voucher and move elsewhere after a year. (The housing authority does plan to keep moving new tenants into these subsidized units when they become vacant).

That move struck Jess Horner, program director at John Graham Housing and Services in Addison County, as particularly alarming. John Graham has 18 of these subsidy-attached apartments, which they often rent to people who are “hard to house,” she said. The organization offers wraparound support to help these renters become successful, and then the tenants can take their housing subsidy and move elsewhere.

Cutting off their ability to move their voucher creates a bottleneck, Horner said.

“These units are going to be occupied by the folks who are in them now until voluntary exit, death, or eviction,” she said. “Which means that there aren’t any opportunities for other people to try their hand at an affordable unit.” 

Some of the state housing authority’s cost-cutting measures mirror moves taken by the Burlington Housing Authority in January, after HUD first signalled a possible funding reduction. BHA acted proactively, suspending vouchers from some 70 households looking for housing and taking a staunch stance against allowing rule-breakers second chances.

Now, the Burlington Housing Authority – the state’s second largest, behind VSHA – is not making additional policy changes, according to executive director Steven Murray.

“I’m patting myself on the back, because we got a lot of heat for what we did,” Murray said.

Berk said she does not wish the state housing authority had taken action sooner. In the past, she has secured special funding from HUD to help fill shortfalls when voucher costs have increased unexpectedly – something she might pursue again, she said.

But given that the Trump administration has signalled its desire to essentially end the Section 8 program as it currently exists – cutting federal rental aid by about 40% and diverting that money to states to spend as they see fit – she isn’t sure she ought to trust the past.

“There are unprecedented times,” Berk said. “To what extent prior experience helps is questionable – but we’ll continue to fall back on that.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s largest provider of Section 8 housing subsidies will stop issuing new vouchers.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

A bill that would radically restructure Vermont’s response to homelessness is headed for a full vote in the Senate Thursday. But Gov. Phil Scott’s administration has expressed continued concern about the legislation, making its path to becoming law uncertain.

Asked at a Wednesday press conference whether he would support the bill, H.91, Scott said he hadn’t seen its latest iteration. But he noted that he could not greenlight a bill that continues allowing the mass use of motel and hotel rooms for shelter, and maintains historically high spending levels.

“There’s a lot of conditions that have to be put into place before we do this,” Scott said. 

H.91 would shift Vermont’s homelessness response system from one centered on state government to one administered by private nonprofit organizations. It passed the House in early April.

In its current form, the bill would make that transition in stages. Next summer, the statewide motel voucher program would end, and regional anti-poverty organizations would take over the task of providing emergency shelter under the banner of the newly-created Vermont Homeless Emergency Assistance and Responsive Transition to Housing Program. The state would maintain an oversight role.

The following year, a separate state program that doles out funding to build and operate shelters and run homelessness prevention programs would also dissolve and get folded into the new regional setup. Local shelter directors have pushed back against shifting this program’s current form, arguing the move could destabilize their work.

Legislators and state officials have generally agreed on the prospect of shifting the state-run motel voucher program over to the five regional community action agencies – something that was contemplated for years even before the Covid-19 pandemic put the safety-net program in the spotlight. Scott has long called for the program’s pandemic-era expansion to come to an end.

As outlined in the bill, the regional agencies, along with the statewide nonprofit focused on domestic violence, would undergo a planning process to figure out how best to use the funds that had historically gone toward the voucher program. But administration officials have expressed concerns that these groups might turn around and use the funds on hotel and motel rooms for unhoused people when traditional shelters are full.

Meanwhile, the Scott administration has pressed lawmakers to speed up the transition process. In a last-minute memo to a key Senate committee last Friday, Jenney Samuelson, secretary of the Agency of Human Services, wrote that “we cannot defer all reform” until fiscal year 2027. 

She urged legislators to make more changes to the motel program in the fiscal year that begins this July, including “verification of residency, homelessness, and income,” prioritizing those most in need when motel capacity is limited, and shifting eligibility “to better target the most vulnerable.”

Without these changes, and others, “the administration will have a hard time supporting the bill in its current form,” the Friday memo read.

Members of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee bristled at officials’ eleventh-hour requests. But they acquiesced, to a point, by adding a study to the bill to consider shifting responsibilities to regional providers before next July.

It’s unclear whether this change will suffice. Scott administration officials did not make anyone available for follow-up interviews about the current status of the bill Wednesday, despite multiple interview requests.

Some directors of the nonprofit agencies that would take over the state’s homelessness response have balked at the prospect of a faster transition.

“It is hard to understand how we’re going to create a community-based system, have some innovation, and shift the system thoughtfully around homelessness if we don’t get the resources and the timing,” said Paul Dragon, executive director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, earlier this week. “It doesn’t seem like this latest version allows for that.”

The Scott administration has also taken issue with a $10 million allocation – anticipated in the already-signed state budget – intended to aid the transition to a community-based system. Samuelson’s memo demanded that funding “must be greatly reduced,” but did not provide specifics. 

That $10 million in transition funding remains in the version of the bill set for a Senate vote Thursday. But after the administration said the bill directs too much spending in the long term, the Senate Health and Welfare Committee removed references in the bill to a roughly $82 million baseline for the new program’s first year.

Rep. Theresa Wood, D-Waterbury, the bill’s architect in the House, took issue with that change – and expects the bill to land in a conference committee, where House and Senate lawmakers can hash out their differences.

If the two chambers can’t come to a place of agreement with each other – and the administration – by the end of the session, Wood said she doesn’t expect to put forward similar legislation next year. H.91 is the Legislature’s last-best shot at shifting away from the motel voucher program, she indicated.

“I just need to be clear that if we don’t have this, then what we have is the program as it stands right now – which nobody is satisfied with,” she said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Just before a key vote, Scott administration’s position on motel program overhaul is unclear.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

A marquee infrastructure financing program that’s meant to spur housing in smaller towns has passed a key hurdle in the Legislature – but Gov. Phil Scott, senators and housing boosters say House lawmakers have added too many restrictions for the program to work.

“It’s just much too complicated for anyone to understand, and will not be utilized by small communities,” Scott said at his regular Wednesday press conference. “It’s taking a step backwards.”

The initiative, called the Community and Housing Infrastructure Program, would allow municipalities or developers to borrow money for infrastructure like water lines, roads and sidewalks for a particular housing project – and then use the increased tax revenue from the development to pay off the infrastructure debt.

Proponents say it provides a new avenue to pay for costly public infrastructure – without the Legislature or municipalities needing to cut a check, or developers baking the cost into the price of housing. 

Critics have argued the tax incentive’s benefits don’t outweigh the foregone property tax revenue to the state’s overstretched Education Fund.

In that vein, the House Committee on Ways and Means placed a $40 million cap on the amount of education property tax increment dedicated to housing project debt that an oversight council can approve annually. That figure represents the amount of lifetime tax increment retained that can be greenlit for each year’s approved projects. The tax-writing committee added the measure before advancing the bill on Wednesday. 

But housing advocates say that cap severely limits the number of homes that could be built through the program amid Vermont’s acute housing shortage.

“Why do we want to cap the ability to see that housing growth happen, especially if we’re using this program to incentivize it in smart-growth areas, whether that’s rural or urban?” said Megan Sullivan, a lobbyist for the Vermont Chamber of Commerce.

The tax-writing panel also added a test that would occur as part of each housing project application to determine whether a project would not have occurred without financing from the program. 

“There’s actually development happening all over the state,” said Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, who chairs the committee. “We want to make sure that we aren’t putting public dollars towards projects that would happen regardless.”

Yet CHIP’s proponents point out that Vermont is currently building less than half the homes needed annually in order to meet demand, ease housing vacancy rates and make progress on eliminating homelessness, based on several recent projections.

House lawmakers also added a host of other rules to the program, including floor-area minimums for housing, location criteria, affordability incentives, and additional layers of oversight. Their version of the bill also sunsets Vermont’s existing tax-increment financing program in 2028, a move intended to assess its usefulness going forward, Kornheiser said.

Taken together, the CHIP’s proponents say the House’s direction curbs access to the program too severely.

“We would probably say they have put maybe so many guardrails in place that it keeps people out of being able to participate,” said Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast. 

The housing package that contains CHIP still needs to clear the House floor. After that, Ram Hinsdale said she expects the bill to ultimately land in a conference committee, where House and Senate lawmakers can hash out their differences of opinion.

“This is by far the most significant housing action in front of the Legislature this session,” said Miro Weinberger, former Burlington mayor and executive chair of Let’s Build Homes, a new housing advocacy group that has thrown its weight behind the CHIP proposal. If lawmakers fumble the policy, he said, it “would just be a breathtaking legislative failure.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the mechanics of the $40 million cap.

Read the story on VTDigger here: This year’s main Vermont housing policy gets mired in legislative disagreement .

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Lawmakers are nearing the finish line on a wide-ranging housing package.

The eclectic omnibus bill, S.127, does everything from creating new programs to finance infrastructure for housing, altering who can appeal housing permits, putting in new fair housing protections for immigrants, and directing a raft of reports.

“It’s really got apples, oranges, bananas and pears in it,” said Rep. Marc Mihaly, D-Calais, who chairs the House Committee on General and Housing. 

Legislative leaders have indicated that S.127, which passed the Senate in late March and is currently winding through the House, will be the central housing bill in 2025. But at the same time, the Senate is continuing to work on a separate version of a similar bill, H.479, muddying the path to the final product.

Here’s a look at the top changes this year’s housing package would make – including where lawmakers are still debating the details and where Gov. Phil Scott’s administration stands.

Financing infrastructure 

The hallmark piece of S.127 is a new initiative aimed at financing infrastructure for housing, particularly in smaller towns. The Community and Housing Infrastructure Program, or CHIP, is essentially a scaled-down version of Vermont’s longstanding tax increment financing program. 

The goal is to allow municipalities or developers to borrow money for infrastructure like water lines, roads and sidewalks for a particular housing project. Then, the increased tax revenue from the new development would pay off the debt for the infrastructure.

Advocates for municipalities and housing boosters have pushed hard for the new initiative, and developers big and small have said the new financing tool could help make more housing projects pencil out. 

Critics have argued that if some development aided by the program would have still happened even without it, the initiative does not justify the foregone property tax revenue to the state’s overstretched Education Fund. The House’s tax-writing committee is contemplating restrictions on the proposal, including a test to determine whether a project would have occurred anyway, along with affordability rules and geographic boundaries.

Getting the CHIP proposal passed is a main priority for Scott’s administration, said Alex Farrell, commissioner of the Department of Housing and Economic Development. But he cautioned against narrowing who can take advantage of it too much.

“It’s concerning to me when we try to solve every problem with a single program,” he said.

This year’s budget also directs $10 million in loans and grants for infrastructure projects that support housing.

Changing who can challenge new housing

Right now, if a person has an issue with a new housing project and wants to take its developer to court over a local permit, they have to meet one of a few key criteria: they must be a direct neighbor, or they can gather 19 other people to sign a petition to trigger an appeal.

Many housing proponents have argued that these provisions make it too easy for “not in my backyard”-style legal challenges to interfere with badly-needed new homes. 

The House has advanced a change that would scrap the “abutter” and “petition” appeal options, as they’re often called, with a different legal standard: an opponent must show they will be personally harmed by the development. 

Mihaly, a champion of the change, sees it as narrowing the scope of who can lob an appeal. If an individual is concerned about stormwater runoff from a new building, for example, “I would have to show that runoff comes onto my property, or I actually swim in that water or drink it, or something like that,” he said. 

But Farrell and members of the Senate’s housing committee have expressed concerns that the House’s change could in fact open a new avenue for opponents to appeal, without any geographic bound on where an appellant lives. That committee has advanced language that maintains a proximity requirement, which must now get vetted by the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee. 

Immigration protections 

Lawmakers have incorporated a bill that seeks to expand housing access for immigrants without legal status into the omnibus package. The legislation would amend the state’s fair housing laws to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of citizenship or immigration status when someone is seeking to rent or buy a home. 

S.127 also spells out that a landlord needs to accept a range of forms of identification on a rental application in order to conduct credit and background checks – not only a Social Security number. That follows testimony from immigrants who’ve told lawmakers that landlords have frequently passed them over when they couldn’t provide the identifier. But lawmakers took a step back from an outright ban on landlords asking for Social Security numbers that advocates had originally pushed.

In a move to assuage landlords and lenders spooked by the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement, the bill also spells out that federal laws and regulations take precedence over the state’s protections. 

Farrell said on Wednesday that the administration does not yet have a position on the new protections.

Spending debates

In parallel with the housing packages, lawmakers have finalized their state budget proposal for the coming fiscal year.

The budget gives about $15 million to two pandemic-era housing development programs that had since run out of funds, one that provides low-interest loans to developers of rental housing for people with moderate incomes, and another that gives subsidies to builders of homes for purchase by “middle income” buyers.

That’s less than half of what Scott advocated for the pair of programs at the outset of the legislative session, prompting Scott to say several weeks ago that the cut was one of his chief gripes with lawmaker’s budget proposal.

The budget also gives $4 million to the Vermont Housing Improvement Program, which provides modest grants to rehabilitate rental housing that has fallen into disrepair. But because that funding is one-time and not designated as an ongoing expense, as the administration had requested, the unpredictability may jeopardize maintaining staff positions into the future, Farrell said.

Lawmakers also directed about $27 million to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board for deeply-subsidized housing, far less than what affordable housing advocates have said is needed to fill a backlog of projects.

Odds and ends

S.127 also takes steps to streamline remediating contaminated brownfield sites for future development, directs the state to look at what it would take to create a land bank to buy up abandoned properties, and sets up studies looking into accessibility standards for residential buildings and housing options for people with developmental disabilities. 

Notably, the bill does not take up further reforms to Act 250, a subject where Scott saw more room to push after last year’s major overhaul. Some of his asks got taken up in a late-in-the-game land-use bill that has thus far seen little action.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Lawmakers piece together housing bills that take on permit appeals, immigrant protection and funding.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Advocates for unhoused Vermonters are calling on lawmakers to remove restrictions on the state’s motel voucher program in the coming year’s budget, including an 80-night limit on voucher stays and an 1,100 cap on available rooms during the warmer months.

“The caps are not grounded in any reality,” said Frank Knaack, executive director of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont, at a Statehouse press conference on Tuesday. 

It often takes many months for someone experiencing homelessness to find permanent housing, Knaack said. The politically contentious voucher program plays a critical role in keeping unhoused people indoors, he added, pointing to a glaring mismatch: Vermont has about 5,000 people experiencing homelessness, according to current tallies by service providers, and space for about 670 households in traditional shelters.

Lawmakers’ draft budget would continue the limits on the motel voucher program that were enacted last year, resulting in the evictions of hundreds of people — including young children — over the course of the fall. 

Many lawmakers lambasted the caps as their impacts became clear, and as recently as March, Democratic leaders in the Legislature attempted to lift the restrictions to avoid another wave of evictions. A heated disagreement with Republican Gov. Phil Scott over the extension tanked a midyear spending bill, which never passed.

This go-around, however, both the House and Senate have agreed to a budget containing the caps, at a price tag of about $38 million — matching what Scott’s administration recommended for the program earlier this year. 

As representatives from both chambers meet over the next few days to hash out their differences over the budget, they’re unlikely to tinker with the motel program piece, according to Rep. Robin Scheu, D-Middlebury, the lead budget writer in the House.

But Scheu was quick to point out that a bill that would overhaul the state’s homelessness response is also making its way through the Statehouse.

The current iteration of that reform bill, H.91, envisions shifting the state’s homelessness response to regional agencies in 2026, with a year for those groups and state officials to plan how to implement a new locally-based system.

But if service providers must react to another mass exodus from the motel program this fall, they will have little capacity to engage in the rigorous local planning process H.91 lays out for the coming year, said Sarah Russell, Burlington’s special assistant to end homelessness.

“We cannot do that if we are continuously responding to the crisis of the motel exits,” she said at the press conference. 

H.91 still has a ways to go in the Senate. It does not make changes to the voucher program in the coming fiscal year, which begins on July 1, though members of Scott’s administration have urged lawmakers to hasten the transition away from the state-run motel system. 

Homelessness advocates also pushed lawmakers to funnel additional money into building new affordable housing, and to put state dollars toward a pandemic-era program that pays for case workers who help people maintain housing. Knaack said the program will soon run out of federal funding. 

At a vigil on the Statehouse steps later on Tuesday, Jessica Russell told a crowd that she has lived at a hotel for the last several months. She lost her Barton home to flooding in 2023, and has struggled to find an apartment she can afford since. Now, she is trying to prove to state officials that the chronic illness that affects her veins should qualify her as “medically vulnerable,” earning her the ability to keep a motel voucher until the end of June.

“I’m hoping and praying that there’s some sort of turnaround for all of us,” she said. “Living outside … we wouldn’t do that to our animals.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Advocates denounce lawmakers’ decision to keep motel program limits .

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

A Vermont Superior Court judge has issued a temporary restraining order against the Agency of Human Services, requiring that the state give motel voucher program recipients adequate notice before ending their benefits — and give them enough time to appeal.

The order, issued by Chittenden County Superior Court Judge Samuel Hoar on Thursday, says that state officials must provide due process before terminating emergency housing benefits. 

That means officials must tell motel program participants in writing why their benefits are ending, deliver that notice in a way the person will likely receive, and provide the decision “in advance of any termination to afford a reasonable opportunity to dispute the termination,” Hoar wrote. The notice must also tell individuals they have a right to seek an expedited appeal.

“For many people, access to emergency housing is literally a matter of life and death,” said Maryellen Griffin, a staff attorney at Vermont Legal Aid, which is representing service providers and motel program participants in the ongoing case. “This allows people to understand what is happening to them before it happens to them.” 

The order is the latest ruling in a long-running suit that Legal Aid brought over a year ago, when the organization sought to halt the evictions of motel program participants at the end of the 2024 winter-weather eligibility period. 

Legal Aid wanted the state to pause evictions at the time in order to adequately screen unhoused people for continued eligibility granted by a newly-passed law, which expanded who counted as having a disability. A judge denied their preliminary injunction last March. 

The case picked up steam again this spring, Griffin said, as the latest round of evictions from the motel program began on April 1 after a prolonged political battle at the Statehouse.

In some instances, state employees told motel program participants that they were ineligible to remain sheltered the very same day that they needed to leave, Griffin said.

Susan Merchant, a 53-year-old with severe osteoarthritis who had been living at the Hilltop Inn in Berlin, attested in a court filing that one morning last month, she received a call saying that her voucher was being terminated “and I needed to leave my room.” The day prior, a Department for Children and Families staffer had told her that her voucher had been approved for seven days, according to the filing.

Merchant believed she should still be eligible to remain in the program. “I don’t understand what the problem is, and they could not explain it to me,” she attested in the filing.

Legal Aid ultimately helped Merchant through the state’s appeal process, Griffin said, and discovered she was simply a missing document. Once that was provided to the Department for Children and Families, Merchant’s voucher was renewed.

Thursday’s order gives people a chance to challenge their voucher terminations in instances where they are incorrect, Griffin said. The notices must be provided in writing, not given over the phone, and must be specific to the individual’s case, she said. That differs from a common practice DCF uses when motel program rules change: directing motel owners and service providers to slip general notices under peoples’ doors.

For people whose vouchers are terminated for legitimate reasons, the order provides more time to plan their next steps, she added.

The order applies to people who have received motel vouchers since September 2024 and either continue to receive the benefit or were “subsequently terminated, not renewed, or informed that they were ineligible.” (The temporary order does not outline retroactive relief for people who have already lost their vouchers, though the court could consider future action.)

Brenda Siegel, executive director of End Homelessness Vermont, said the order is a victory.

“This is a huge win for people who are in the hotel/motel program, and certainly for our clients who have been being denied without notice and exited pretty regularly in the last couple of weeks,” she said.

The Department for Children and Families did not provide a response to questions on Thursday afternoon.

The order will remain in effect for two weeks, until the next hearing in the case on May 16. At that point — if state officials have not proposed a plan to comply with the order that the plaintiffs have agreed with — the judge will decide how to proceed, Griffin said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Judge orders state to give motel voucher recipients more notice before evicting them.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Soon after floodwaters inundated Montpelier in July 2023, the city tasked its Parks and Trees Department with running a central hub for flood response. That meant Marek Zajac, an AmeriCorps member serving with the department, spent long hours under a tent in the capitol’s downtown. The now 32-year-old kept track of which neighbors needed their homes mucked and gutted — and dispatched available volunteers. 

With City Hall flooded, “there was nowhere to go to interact with the city — except for us,” Zajac said. “We became both an emotional support…and a way to find help.”

Now, Zajac’s job — which involves managing street trees and a community farm when the city isn’t experiencing a disaster — is on pause. That’s due to the latest round of federal cuts to the independent government agency that funds the service position they have held for nearly three years.

Last week, AmeriCorps began terminating nearly $400 million in grants across the country that funded thousands of jobs like Zajac’s, including about $2.4 million in funding for service positions in Vermont. 

An April 25 grant termination letter sent to Philip Kolling, the executive director of SerVermont — which oversees the bulk of the state’s AmeriCorps members — said the state’s grant “no longer effectuates agency priorities” and demanded that recipients “immediately cease all award activities.” 

The $2.4 million in terminated Vermont grants funded positions that focused on “everything from housing placement services, food security, to job training, to after school programming — and then, importantly, these days, flood recovery,” Kolling said. The grants flow through five state entities, including the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps, and the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation. 

The terminations impact about 200 AmeriCorps positions, Kolling said. About 70 are currently filled, with many slated to begin this spring and summer, he said. Some are government positions, like Zajac’s, and many others are at nonprofits. 

Several days after that notice arrived, Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark joined a multi-state lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s termination of AmeriCorps grants and positions. The suit, filed on April 29, argues that the administration’s efforts to gut the congressionally-created agency violate the separation of powers enshrined by the U.S. Constitution. 

“I’m suing to stop the Trump Administration from dismantling AmeriCorps — which the executive branch lacks the authority to do — and prevent the further degradation of Vermont’s workforce and housing,” Clark said in a statement on Tuesday.

The funding cuts constitute about 40% of the roughly $6 million Vermont receives annually for AmeriCorps programs, Kolling said. Positions that focus on anti-poverty initiatives and programming for seniors are not impacted by the terminations, he added.

A separate AmeriCorps program, focused on affordable housing and disaster recovery, dismissed its members earlier this month, ending their service terms early and sending them home. SerVermont does not oversee that program.

The corps members under the SerVermont umbrella have not been officially let go. 

“None have been exited from service yet,” Kolling said. “We’re assessing the impacts, and in the meantime, they’re on pause.”

AmeriCorps members receive a modest living stipend while they serve. Zajac relies on food stamps and a federally-funded phone program to get by, they said. While they wait to return to work, they’re worried about being able to make rent.

“Already, housing can feel impossible to figure out, especially for someone without much means,” they said. “The commitments that I’m in in terms of a lease agreement…I don’t know how I’m going to be able to meet without being able to count on that regular living stipend.”

For Jill DeVito, 51, who serves at the Bonnyvale Environmental Education Center in West Brattleboro, the main concern is maintaining health insurance if her teaching position disappears.

“Each of us has our own personal lives upended in different ways,” she said.

Erin Riley, the AmeriCorps program director for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, said the pause in service will have an immediate impact on the daily operations of the organizations where members work. But the federal cuts are also emotionally devastating for the dozens of Vermont AmeriCorps members, many of whom have relocated here and have dedicated themselves to giving back to their host communities. 

“To have that ripped away, I think, is just heartbreaking and, honestly, infuriating,” Riley said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Feds cut more AmeriCorps programs, jeopardizing 200 positions in Vermont.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

COLCHESTER – Sixty-five new permanently-affordable apartments are opening up at Fort Ethan Allen in Colchester, with 15 set aside for people exiting homelessness.

The Champlain Housing Trust project is among the wave of affordable housing developments buoyed by the COVID-era influx of federal funds into Vermont. Now, affordable housing providers are looking at a much more austere funding landscape: one where they fear deep federal cuts to housing programs are soon in store.

“Federal resources will likely no longer be available in the future, and low-income people who rely on a very shaky safety net will soon see that net cut into pieces,” said Michael Monte, the CEO of the housing trust, at a ribbon-cutting event on Monday.

Vermont’s housing sphere has seen the initial impacts of the Trump administration’s sweeping staffing and spending cuts, from clawbacks of grants for anti-discrimination work and the sudden terminations of voluntary corps workers building homes. Neighborworks, a congressionally-chartered nonprofit that helped fund the Colchester apartments, has recently come under the security of the Department of Government Efficiency. 

But housing leaders worry that deeper federal cuts to affordable housing funding and rental assistance programs could be coming – and they fear the state wouldn’t have enough capacity to backfill potential cuts. 

Nearly a third of the Colchester project’s $31.6 million price tag came from pandemic-era federal funds, said Nancy Owens, president of Evernorth, a co-developer of the project. Amid Vermont’s worsening levels of homelessness, she implored state leaders to find new funding sources for subsidized housing.

“We need to secure more substantial permanent resources to fund housing – for the production of new homes in Vermont. If we don’t, really, the pace of this development will come to a standstill,” Owens said.

The three buildings that house the 65 apartments have a long history. During the early 20th century, they served as barracks to one of the first Black U.S. Army regiments in peacetime after the Civil War – who were deployed to clear western lands of indigenous people. The entryways of the buildings have signs documenting that past. More recently, the buildings served as dorms and offices for nearby St. Michael’s College. 

Studio apartments will rent for $1,100, and one-bedrooms list for $1,250. Eighteen of the apartments have deeper subsidies from the Burlington Housing Authority, meaning rents will be capped at one third of the tenant’s income. (Median rent plus utilities in Chittenden County in 2023 was about $1,600).

The first tenants moved into the buildings earlier this year, and the last will move in next month.

A recent statewide housing needs assessment found that Chittenden County needs to add between 7,300 and 10,500 homes before the end of the decade in order to normalize the housing market and eliminate homelessness. Only 125 of the 720 homes built in Vermont’s most populous county in 2023 were considered affordable, falling short of housing leaders’ goals. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Affordable apartments open in Colchester as housing leaders fear federal cuts.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Jonah Richard wants to build a new neighborhood in Bradford, an Orange County town of about 2,800. Richard envisions 15 small “starter home” cottages tucked off the town’s main drag. His hope is to sell them at a price point that has become vanishingly rare in Vermont: under $300,000.

But it would only work, he says, with water and sewer system financing from an initiative under consideration at the Statehouse – the Community and Housing Infrastructure Program, or CHIP.

“Without CHIP, this project doesn’t move forward. With CHIP, it does,” said Richard, founder of the Upper Valley-based developer Village Ventures.

If the proposed program can bring in half a million dollars to help cover infrastructure costs – about 10-15% of the project’s total estimated price tag, Richard said – it could make the neighborhood, currently in its pre-development stage, pencil out.

CHIP is essentially a small-scale version of Vermont’s longstanding tax increment financing program, or TIF, which allows municipalities to borrow money for public infrastructure like roads, sidewalks, and wastewater projects in an area where they want to see growth – with the expectation that new infrastructure will spur new development. The increased tax revenue from the new development then pays off the debt for the infrastructure.

The complexity involved in managing large TIF districts means that only Vermont’s larger cities and towns have used them. CHIP is designed to use the same tax increment financing concept, but at the scale of a single property. 

“CHIP allows communities – especially, I think, our smaller communities – to say, ‘What’s that one project? What’s that one piece of infrastructure that we could put in, that we would bond for once, that could be a catalyst for housing development?’” said Megan Sullivan, a lobbyist for the Vermont Chamber of Commerce and a former executive director of the Vermont Economic Progress Council, which oversees the TIF program. 

Developers big and small have voiced their support for CHIP, and the new housing advocacy group Let’s Build Homes, of which Richards is a board member, has thrown its full weight behind it. Gov. Phil Scott’s administration proposed a similar program at the outset of this year’s legislative session and officials have indicated their continued support. The housing package that contains CHIP cleared the Senate last month and is currently making its way through the House. 

Advocates for Vermont municipalities say the program offers a critical new option for cities and towns to spur housing development and grow their grand lists. 

Right now, to fund new infrastructure, municipalities have to raise property taxes or water rates, said Samantha Sheehan, a lobbyist for the Vermont League of Cities and Towns. Or municipalities can go to the state for a grant – an option that only exists when funding is made available through the state budget. 

The other way municipalities get new infrastructure, Sheehan said, is when housing developers pay for it themselves – and bake the cost of infrastructure into the price of housing.

“That raises rents or homeownership for whomever moves into that housing development first,”
Sheehan said. CHIP aims to move away from that model. 

CHIP is not the first “project-based TIF” program to circulate around the Legislature in recent years, Sullivan said. Prior versions haven’t made it to the finish line because of concerns that plague the TIF program more broadly: that development that has occurred in TIF districts would have happened even without the financing mechanism, and therefore hasn’t justified the foregone property tax revenue to the state’s overstretched Education Fund.

CHIP has garnered similar critiques. State Auditor Doug Hoffer, a frequent critic of Vermont’s TIF program, has become the CHIP initiative’s most vocal detractor in recent weeks. In an interview, Hoffer emphasized that the Legislature’s nonpartisan financial analysts have not been able to determine the fiscal impacts of CHIP due to a host of unknown factors: the scope of the program’s eventual utilization, the size of future projects, and “the amount of development that would occur absent the program,” according to a Joint Fiscal Office memo from early April.

Hoffer also challenged whether the CHIP program as currently envisioned would provide an adequate public benefit, if it ultimately gives an incentive to the builders of market-rate homes. He argued that CHIP should include an affordability requirement for the housing it helps finance.

“Otherwise, you’re going to have developers doing what they do. They’re going to seek to maximize profit – and that’s capitalism,” he said. “But if that doesn’t serve a really serious public need, then I’m asking myself, why do we need this program?” 

Affordable housing funders have echoed the need to incentivize income-restricted housing as part of the program. Because financing capacity would be a function of property value, higher-value homes would bring the largest benefits under the CHIP program, Gus Seelig, executive director of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, told lawmakers on Thursday.

“It pushes against building more modest homes because it’ll produce a smaller tax base upon which you’d be able to pay off the infrastructure,” he said.

But other proponents of CHIP have argued that its flexibility is key to its ultimate success.

“The reality is that in order to achieve 36,000 homes in five years, we need policy that is housing-type agnostic,” Sheehan said, referring to a recent statewide housing needs assessment. “We need housing types of all kinds that are built in every community at the density that’s appropriate for that community.” 

The House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development is currently considering changes to the bill, like honing in on what types of infrastructure improvements can qualify, where CHIP projects will be allowed, and how much housing a proposed project must have, versus commercial space. 

“We want to make sure that we’re doing due diligence – we have, you know, good guardrails around the program. But not hampering it so much that they won’t be able to do anything,” said Rep. Michael Marcotte, R-Coventry, the committee’s chair.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Proposed infrastructure financing program would allow even small Vermont towns to incentivize housing.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

This spring, a dozen young adults from across the country decamped to southwest Vermont to help build sorely-needed new homes. They were beginning their year of community service with a federal volunteer program focused on supporting disaster response and building affordable housing. 

But last week, the group’s stint volunteering with Bennington County Habitat for Humanity came to an abrupt end. On April 15, the nonprofit received a call from the federal AmeriCorps agency informing them that their crew of volunteers was being “demobilized,” according to the organization’s executive director, Cindy Luce. 

Early the next morning, the 12 corps members hit the road back to their central campus in Iowa, Luce said. By the end of last week, they were put on planes to their hometowns and notified that their contracts would be terminated at the end of the month, according to Luce.

“There was a lot of tears,” Luce said.

The Bennington volunteers were just a few of several hundred young service members dismissed in mid-April as a result of the Trump administration’s push to shrink the federal workforce. Roughly 750 members of AmeriCorps’ National Civilian Community Corps program were placed on administrative leave last week, and were told their service terms would terminate at the end of April, according to the New York Times. The move came a day before broader staffing cuts to the independent government agency.

Corps members with the NCCC travel to different volunteer sites over a 10-month period while earning a modest stipend. The group serving with Bennington Habitat only had about a week left there before they were scheduled to move onto their next assignment when the termination came, Luce said. 

Still, the group’s early discharge could set back the nonprofit’s construction schedule. They had been building a home for a single mother and her son, Luce said.

“If we don’t get additional help from other volunteers to keep the momentum…it’s going to delay when we sell the house,” she said. “If hers is delayed, the next one is delayed, and then the next one is delayed.” 

At least one other Habitat chapter in Vermont has been impacted by the AmeriCorps program’s rollback. Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity had been expecting to host a team of volunteers in May and June to help wrap up construction on a duplex in Randolph.

But last week, the organization’s director, Zachariah Watson, received an email informing him that AmeriCorps NCCC “is working within new operational parameters that impact the program’s ability to sustain program operations.” All corps members were currently being returned home, the email said, in alignment with the Department of Government Efficiency’s cost-saving priorities.

Central Vermont Habitat had planned for the AmeriCorps group to lay down flooring and put up siding at the Randolph home, so the organization could finalize the sale this summer. The loss of the volunteer labor jeopardizes the project’s timeline, Watson said. Any delay could drive up the project’s costs, particularly if the nonprofit ends up needing to buy materials after tariffs kick in.

“Most of our lumber and insulation and building materials come from Canada,” Watson said. The nonprofit’s lumber supplier has informed them that they anticipate “at least a 14% increase in lumber and in cellulose” when tariffs go into effect, he said.

Aside from Habitat for Humanity, at least one other AmeriCorps group volunteering in Vermont was recalled last week: a team serving with the Federal Emergency Management Agency at their field office in Williston. Crews of service members have been a regular presence there since FEMA stood up the local office in the wake of devastating flooding across Vermont in July of 2023.

The current group only had about two weeks remaining at their assignment in Vermont when they were terminated, according to Doug Farnham, Vermont’s chief recovery officer. FEMA is working to close the Williston outpost — a move Farnham described as “relatively routine” at this stage in the state’s recovery process — and the early termination of the AmeriCorps crew will have a “minimal” impact, he said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Habitat for Humanity programs lose AmeriCorps volunteers after federal cuts.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

A bill that would fundamentally overhaul Vermont’s response to homelessness is making its way through the Statehouse. H.91 provides a potential off-ramp to the state’s mass use of motel rooms as a primary form of shelter – and could spell an end to the political battles over the voucher program that have become a yearly ritual. 

“We’ve become stuck in a cycle of using band-aids with no real path out of this crisis,” said Rep. Jubilee McGill, D-Bridport, to her colleagues on the House floor in early April. Building the housing the state needs to ease homelessness will take time, she said. “In the meantime, we must make responsible use of our resources to ensure our vulnerable neighbors can thrive.” 

H.91 would dissolve the motel voucher program as it currently exists next summer. In its stead would be a new initiative: the Vermont Homeless Emergency Assistance and Responsive Transition to Housing program. Funding and decision-making power over the state’s homelessness response would shift to five regional anti-poverty nonprofits. 

These community action agencies, along with the statewide organization serving people fleeing domestic violence, would also receive funding the state currently doles out for building and running local shelters, and would decide how to distribute it. The state would play an oversight role.

The bill’s backers contend that a homelessness response system centered on the community level – rather than one that relies on the state as the central actor – will offer a better way to spend state money and serve unhoused people and those at risk of becoming homeless.

Its critics argue that such a change would remove accountability from state government to care for Vermont’s homeless population, eroding its current function as a backstop when shelters are full.

The bill passed the House earlier this month, and now sits in the Senate. Members of Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s administration – frequently at odds with Democratic lawmakers over the future of the motel voucher program – have expressed some concern about the bill’s cost, but have signaled their approval of the overall direction H.91 takes. 

“There’s a lot of merit, we think, to the idea of bringing this sort of service and decision-making closer to the local communities that are most impacted,” Department for Children and Families Commissioner Chris Winters told lawmakers Thursday. He urged the Senate Health and Welfare Committee to consider speeding up the transition contemplated in the bill.

Leaders of the community action agencies, meanwhile, have pleaded with lawmakers to pump the brakes. But the regional directors say they are up for taking on the responsibility the bill entrusts to them – if they’re given an extra year to plan and implement the new system, and if it’s properly funded in the long term. 

“Hopefully this will mean that we don’t have this cycle of people in hotels under these different categories that suddenly have to leave,” said Paul Dragon, executive director of the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity. “That’s going to take the communities coming together to decide how we want to do this differently.” 

Yet others have pushed back forcefully against the bill – including many directors of local shelters. In interviews and in public testimony, they have questioned the efficacy of funneling money through the five community action groups, an arrangement they fear could create conflicts of interest and ultimately cost more administratively, leaving less funding available for direct services.  

A decentralized system could create disparities in services in different regions, critics said. And the move could destabilize the state’s shelter system at the exact moment federal funding for housing and homelessness programs could disappear.

“Frankly, this is not a good look for the state. It feels like an attempt to distance the state from its responsibility to care for its most vulnerable people,” Kim Anetsberger, executive director of the Lamoille Community House, a shelter in Hyde Park, told lawmakers Wednesday. 

“These are Vermonters, and yet they’re often treated like a problem to be solved rather than people to be supported,” she said.

A not-so-new idea

The seismic shift contemplated in H.91 caught many who work in Vermont’s homelessness service system off guard this legislative session. Yet the transition considered in the bill is hardly new. For over a decade, state leaders have looked at shifting the state’s role in homelessness response over to local and regional organizations – and at times have experimented with it.

In the midst of the Great Recession, in 2009, DCF relaxed the rules guiding the emergency housing program, allowing more people to access motel vouchers. The next year, it began contracting with the five community action agencies to essentially vet applications, while the state held ultimate responsibility for approving someone’s stay, according to a 2012 stakeholder study.

“I remember waiting rooms in community action agencies being filled daily with folks who were seeking entry to the motel voucher program,” said Erhard Mahnke, the former coordinator of the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition. People would wait all day to hear whether the state ultimately approved them a place to stay for the night, he recalled.

The system didn’t last long. The 2012 study found that many believed the state had asked the regional nonprofits to take on the vetting responsibility “without giving them adequate resources to do so” – resulting in “considerable inconsistency around the state.” While some wanted the local groups to gain full decision-making power, the state ultimately took over the application process again.

In the years following, reports to the Legislature routinely emphasized the program’s high price tag and the need to shift to a different model. 

“While motels may meet the need for a temporary roof overhead, it is not good public policy for reducing homelessness in Vermont,” one such report from 2016 read.

Several years later, DCF pushed to remove the motel program from state government entirely. In a February 2020 memo, DCF officials outlined their aim to restructure the state’s approach to emergency housing, ending the state-run motel voucher program and shifting to a “100% community-based emergency housing/shelter system.” Officials hoped to begin the transition that July, but service providers pushed back, arguing the state wasn’t providing enough time.

The next month, the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and the proposal was shelved. With emergency funding from the federal government in hand, the state opened the voucher program’s doors to anyone in need of shelter. 

The program transformed from one that provided short-term shelter to a few hundred people during the coldest points of winter and cost under $5 million annually into one that offered long-term stays to several thousand people at a time and cost upwards of $50 million a year. (The cost has since decreased due to various caps placed on the program over the last several years, and is projected to cost about $34 million this fiscal year).

When DCF attempted to revive their localization proposal in 2021, critics worried the state was offering communities too little time to plan and was removing itself as a backstop, according to a DCF memo to lawmakers from that February. Service providers strongly objected, arguing the change would result in an “exponential increase in literal homelessness,” according to VTDigger reporting from the time. 

Since then, fights over how to best wind down the program’s pandemic era-expansion have become a perennial flashpoint in yearly budget negotiations, as lawmakers and administration officials debate the best way to care for a homeless population that has tripled since before the pandemic. Last-minute extensions and rule changes have become the voucher program’s hallmark, creating what Dragon called a “roller coaster” ride for unhoused people and service providers alike. 

Proponents of H.91 see it as the last-best effort to step off that turbulent ride.

Seeing all the pieces

The concerns that plagued former versions of regionalization – the timeframe of the transition, the funding questions, the fear that the state is absolving itself of responsibility – all haunt H.91. But the leaders of community action agencies were quick to point out the differences between this bill and prior proposals to decentralize Vermont’s homelessness response system. 

Past efforts focused on restructuring the motel program in particular, Dragon said. The current bill is much more holistic, giving communities more flexibility in how they choose to use the funding after undergoing a regional planning and needs-assessment process – while the state plays a monitoring role.

That decision-making process could result in using motel rooms to an extent, Dragon said. “But it may look very different. It could include a variety of different shelters…It could include single resident occupancies.” 

H.91 proposes maintaining the current funding level for homelessness programs when the regional nonprofits take the reins. Even now, however, there is not enough money in the system to address the needs of all Vermonters experiencing homelessness, said Frank Knaack, director of the Housing and Homelessness Alliance of Vermont. 

He thinks the regional shift envisioned by the bill could work, if adequate funding for shelter and affordable housing is maintained over time – and if the state retains a key role in the picture. 

If it’s the middle of winter in Burlington and the local response team has run out of funding for an emergency cold weather shelter, the state must be there to assist, he said. If another flood occurs in Washington County, “the state has the ability to bring massive state resources in immediately to address that.” 

“The state is the one who can kind of see all the pieces,” Knaack said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Plan would overhaul Vermont’s response to homelessness, dissolving statewide motel program.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

When Jose Ignacio decided to leave his job on a Vermont dairy farm, it took him nearly two years to secure a stable apartment. Housing had been provided on the farm, but when he made the choice to leave – to begin a job in construction, building homes – his family sent in rental application after rental application, but seldom heard back. When they did, landlords pressed for his identification, he said.

“Everywhere we went, they just asked for our Social Security number,” Jose Ignacio told the House General and Housing Committee last week, providing only his first name. He lacked the government identifier. “It didn’t matter if we could demonstrate that we had the ability to pay,” he said. 

As landlords rebuffed them, Jose Ignacio and his family spent months living in a cousin’s attic. It lacked electricity, so in the summer, he fanned his 1-year-old with a piece of cardboard to keep him cool. Ultimately, he landed a rental only when a coworker with a Social Security number agreed to act as a guarantor on his lease. 

“It’s unjust that the state relies on our labor to be building these things, but doesn’t allow us to live in the houses that we build,” Jose Ignacio told lawmakers. His comments were translated from Spanish to English by Will Lambek of the nonprofit advocacy group Migrant Justice. 

Jose Ignacio came to the Statehouse to speak in favor of H.169, a bill that seeks to expand access to housing for immigrants without legal status living in Vermont. As the Trump administration ramps up deportation and detention of immigrants, proponents of the bill argue the state should do more to protect immigrants living in Vermont and increase their housing options. But the legislation faces headwinds from landlords and lenders. 

Pushback to adding protected status

H.169 would add citizenship and immigration status to the list of protected classes in Vermont’s fair housing laws, prohibiting discrimination on those grounds when someone is seeking to rent or buy a home. The bill, backed by a host of immigrant and housing advocacy groups, would take the additional step of banning landlords and property managers from requesting a Social Security number when a prospective tenant applies to rent a home. 

The Vermont Landlord Association has objected to the addition of immigration status to the statute. 

“To make a landlord have to take somebody – even if they’re not here legally – I think is a challenge and a big ask,” Angela Zaikowski, the association’s director, told legislators in late March. 

The association echoed these concerns in a “call to action” email last week, imploring its members to reach out to legislators and adding that the proposed change “has the potential to create federal issues for housing providers.” 

Asked by lawmakers whether there were past examples of landlords getting into legal trouble after renting to people without legal status, Zaikowski said no.

“I think anything is possible at this point,” she added.

Lambek, from Migrant Justice, maintained that these fears of federal repercussions lacked legal basis.

“Any fear of civil or criminal liability against landlords for renting to immigrant families is simply unfounded,” he said.

Representatives for lending institutions in Vermont brought parallel concerns to lawmakers, asking them to strike the “immigration status” protection when it comes to discrimination in writing mortgages. 

Christopher D’Elia, president of the Vermont Bankers Association, told legislators that verifying an individual’s immigration status is required when approving some federally-backed loans. But the current political environment factors into his concerns, too.

“We see what happens on the news. We see what’s happening out there with the immigrant community,” D’Elia said. “The credit risk analysis becomes much more difficult and heightened,” he added. If a bank makes a loan to someone, D’Elia said, and “two weeks from now (they) may be deported, what’s the credit risk of being able to get repaid on that loan? That is the reality we find ourselves in.”

Rep. Leonora Dodge, D-Essex Town, one of the bill’s chief sponsors, countered that other states have taken similar steps to bolster their fair housing laws, like New York and Washington. When immigrants in Vermont step into a bank to make a deposit into a checking or savings account, they feel welcomed, she said – and those banks should offer loans in return.

“So that (immigrants) can build a life and form part of the economy, as taxpayers,” Dodge said.

A ban on asking for Social Security numbers

The prospect of a blanket prohibition on asking for Social Security numbers during the rental application process has also drawn pushback from the Vermont Landlord Association. Zaikowski told legislators that landlords rely on Social Security numbers to conduct credit and background checks. 

Using other pieces of identifying information – like a name, address and date of birth – instead of a Social Security number wouldn’t yield as much information, she argued. Landlords would need to put in more legwork to collect information on all prospective tenants, she said, which “would be a huge burden.” 

“We want housing providers to be able to have an accurate report and be making decisions based on accurate information,”  Zaikowski said.

At least one large landlord has said it could work around the change, however. Chris Donnelly, a lobbyist for Champlain Housing Trust, told lawmakers that his first reaction to the Social Security number prohibition was hesitation, since the northwest Vermont nonprofit uses the identifier to assess whether prospective tenants will be able to pay their rent. But further analysis revealed the housing trust could adapt without too heavy a lift, he said.

“We got pushed by advocates, and we looked into it deeper,” Donnelly said. “We found out that we can actually get this very similar amount of information without using a Social Security number.”

Still, the landlord association has begun pushing for a change to the bill, asking lawmakers for an amendment that would say a landlord can’t deny a rental application because an applicant has not been issued a Social Security number. That measure would replace the language instituting an outright ban on asking for Social Security numbers from all potential tenants.

Rep. Marc Mihaly, D-Calais, who chairs the housing committee in the House, has floated a different potential change: mandating landlords accept an alternative form of government identification to a Social Security number, when one isn’t available.

Lambek, from Migrant Justice, said such a change would still allow for de facto discrimination.

“It’s very difficult for prospective tenants to have that burden of proof of – ‘Well, I left that field blank, and I never got a call back, and I don’t know whether or not they discriminated against me,’” Lambek told lawmakers. “I think people’s experiences, even if that field were to be made optional, would remain quite consistent with what they’re experiencing now.”

Mihaly said Thursday that the committee will dig into discussion on how to proceed with the bill next week – it could get rolled into an omnibus housing bill the committee is working on. He understands the concerns around the bill given the “atmosphere of fear” stoked by the Trump administration, he said.

“It’s conceivable that there isn’t a will on the committee to move forward with this. It’s conceivable that they will. And I’m not sure at this point,” he said.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Trump’s immigration enforcement casts shadow over Vermont housing discrimination bill.

Dear Reader,

Your support powers journalism that holds decision makers to account — and brings Vermonters’ stories to light. Will you make a gift now during our Spring Member Drive?

Last fall, over 1,500 unhoused people exhausted their stays through Vermont’s motel voucher program – including 378 kids.

The evictions were the result of new restrictions placed on the state’s politically contentious emergency housing program. I was in the room when lawmakers agreed to them, and over the course of months, I tracked their impacts. 

That meant putting in countless calls to state officials and service providers to get a handle on the scale of the situation, and their response to it. But mostly, it meant spending hours with the people directly affected by the change in policy – including many who got in touch with me after reading my initial reporting. The grandmother in Barre trying to find a safe place to stay with her six-year-old granddaughter. The Burlington family of four contemplating where to pitch a tent. 

I am always deeply humbled when people allow me into their lives during times of remarkable hardship, and are willing to stay in touch over the long term. Bringing their stories to you, our readers, takes time and care to get right. 

Your support helps us reveal the everyday impacts of decisions made in Montpelier. And we know the decision-makers are reading, too. After my reporting this fall, dozens of lawmakers spoke out against the motel evictions – including some who helped craft the law — and state officials opened new family shelters after we reported on the state’s lack of them.

We can’t do this work without you. When you donate to VTDigger, you’re helping shine a light on how government decisions play out in real people’s lives — and you’re helping hold leaders accountable to the communities they serve.

There is just one week left in our Spring Member Drive. If you value this kind of deep, unflinching reporting, please make a gift today. Every dollar helps sustain our independent journalism.

Thank you for your readership and support.

Sincerely,

Carly Berlin,
Housing and infrastructure reporter

Carly Berlin is a Report For America corps member shared by VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Less than one week left: Stand up for local reporting.

The Legislature has once again sent a midyear spending bill to Gov. Phil Scott’s desk, but a partisan standoff over Vermont’s motel voucher program continues to unfold.

On Thursday afternoon, the Senate gave final approval to its second attempt at an annual budget adjustment bill, after Scott vetoed the first version last month. But without a key change sought by Republicans to narrow criteria for the voucher program, the bill appears destined to meet the same fate.

Republicans brought forward an amendment on Thursday to bring eligibility rules for the motel program in line with an executive order signed by Scott late last week. The order — which the Legislature’s chief lawyer has called unconstitutional — extended motel stays for families with children and certain people with acute medical needs through June 30. 

“Those individuals would be prioritized over any other eligible people,” said Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck, R-Caledonia, when bringing forward the amendment on the Senate floor.

Democrats, who have sought an extension for all people sheltered through the program via the midyear spending bill, stood by that conviction on Thursday. 

The motel program’s looser winter rules ended for the season earlier this week, on April 1. While the governor’s executive order shields a narrow group from time restrictions on their stays this spring, it left out the majority of people eligible for the program over the winter months — including people over the age of 65 and people fleeing domestic violence. Evictions for those not included in the order began Tuesday. 

All of these unhoused individuals met vulnerability criteria determined by the Legislature last year, and lawmakers voiced their opposition to further winnowing down access to emergency housing.

“Are we exiting veterans who are 100% disabled but don’t need to plug something in to stay alive?” said Senate Majority Leader Kesha Ram Hinsdale, D-Chittenden Southeast. “Are we exiting widows because they’re not getting cancer treatment, but they simply lost a spouse, and that’s not good enough anymore?”

Lawmakers also emphasized constitutional concerns with Scott’s order, and the danger of codifying it into law.

“This is not a small issue,” said Sen. Nader Hashim, D-Windham. “The rule of law and respect for the constitution does not get swept away in one broad stroke, but rather it occurs through the death of a thousand cuts.” 

The Senate ultimately declined to approve the amendment, with all Democrats voting against it, except for Sen. Thomas Chittenden, D-Chittenden Southeast, who said he sided with Republicans in order to advance a bill Scott would sign. The bill ultimately passed on a party-line vote.

The ongoing stalemate over the spending bill makes the prospect of passing the midyear adjustment increasingly improbable. At a meeting of the House’s budget panel earlier on Thursday, members of Scott’s administration told lawmakers they were beginning to make preparations in case no such bill makes it to the finish line. 

“It’ll be complex. It won’t be easy. It’ll be very challenging for financial offices across the state,” said Secretary of Administration Sarah Clark. “But we do believe that we can develop a plan that will support the core functions of state government through the end of the fiscal year through the mechanisms that we have available to us.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Still at odds over motel program, Senate sends another spending bill to Phil Scott.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

The Legislature’s chief lawyer has deemed Gov. Phil Scott’s move to extend motel voucher eligibility for a narrow segment of unhoused Vermonters an “unconstitutional consolidation of power.” 

The executive order, signed by Scott late last week, extended motel stays for families with children and certain people with acute medical needs through June 30. It came after the governor blocked an attempt by Democratic legislators to pass a three-month extension for all people sheltered through the state program this winter. 

Speaking from the Senate floor on Wednesday afternoon, Senate President Pro-Tem Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, said that he’d asked the Office of Legislative Counsel, the nonpartisan body that drafts bills for lawmakers, for an opinion on the legality of Scott’s order.

A subsequent letter penned by Brynn Hare, the office’s director and chief counsel, did not mince words.

The order effectively creates “a new eligibility category” for the emergency housing program, Hare wrote, “prioritizing that new category” over the groups determined most vulnerable by the Legislature last year.

“The executive order directly and intentionally conflicts with the actions of the legislature in favor of the Governor’s policy preference,” Hare wrote. “The Governor’s attempt to circumvent the intent of the General Assembly is an unconstitutional encroachment on a core function of the legislature.”

Hare characterized Scott’s move as “an overlap of authority so complete as to constitute an unconstitutional consolidation of power.”

Scott’s order leaves out the majority of people eligible for the program over the winter months — including people over the age of 65 and people fleeing domestic violence. Evictions for those not included in his order began Tuesday. 

The letter frames the order as “the latest in a disturbing trend of actions” by Scott’s administration “that flagrantly and unconstitutionally intrude on the authority of the General Assembly.” Hare cited Scott’s appointment of Zoie Saunders as interim state education secretary shortly after the Senate denied her confirmation last year, as well as Scott’s order authorizing the sale of specialty license plates for flood relief in 2023.

In response to the letter, Amanda Wheeler, Scott’s press secretary, argued in a statement that the order “was intended to protect the most vulnerable.” She did not directly refute the letter’s assertion of executive overreach and unconstitutionality. 

“If the legislature has concerns about the legality of this action, they could adopt our language and add it” to the latest version of the budget adjustment bill, Wheeler suggested. 

At a press briefing earlier on Wednesday, Scott indicated he would sign such an updated bill. He vetoed lawmakers’ first attempt at the annual legislation, in large part over objections to the broader motel program extension sought by Democrats.

Senate Republicans plan to bring such an amendment to “codify what the Governor’s executive order was” when the budget adjustment bill comes around for final approval on Thursday, according to Senate Minority Leader Scott Beck, R-Caledonia.

Democrats do not appear poised to go along with the change. Baruth, in an interview, maintained his support for passing a budget adjustment bill that offers extensions to everyone who received motel vouchers ahead of the April 1 cutoff.

“There’s two very clear options,” Baruth said. “One protects everybody in a fully legal manner. The other one makes these absurd distinctions and does so in a way that is flagrantly unconstitutional.”

Asked if he saw a future court challenge as a possibility, Baruth said, “I have not pursued that path.” 

Read the story on VTDigger here: Legislative lawyer calls Phil Scott’s executive order on motels unconstitutional .

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin and Vermont Public reporter Elodie Reed, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

A chilly wind swirled around the Travelodge parking lot in South Burlington on Tuesday morning as several residents packed up their things.

Among them were E.J. Bressette, 26, and Abbie Lawrence, 27. The couple said they’ve been at the motel with the aid of a state voucher for the past three months, and that they lost their housing more than a year ago.

“I just had a lot of family problems,” Bressette said. “We lost our property, lost my job all at the same time.”

Having the place to stay has helped them get back on their feet somewhat. They were able to replace lost IDs.. Both of them have been looking for jobs.

“But it’s kind of hard to get the work and then not knowing I’m going to have a stable home,” Bressette said. 

State officials say about 235 households exhausted their stays in Vermont’s motel voucher program for unhoused residents on Tuesday. The Department for Children and Families anticipates about 172 more households will have used up their allotted days by the end of the month. 

As of April 1, the emergency housing program’s loosened winter rules ended for the season. That means an 80-day limit on motel stays, along with a 1,100-room cap on the program, came back into effect on Tuesday. Those restrictions resulted in a mass wave of evictions from motels between September and December. 

Democrats in the Legislature had sought a three-month extension for all people sheltered through the program this winter to head off a repeat of the fall, using existing department funds. Gov. Phil Scott and fellow Republicans in the Legislature forcefully opposed the move, arguing the program has failed the people who have used it. The dispute over whether to include the extension in a midyear spending package led to a weeks-long stalemate.

But late Friday, Scott issued an executive order extending motel voucher stays through June 30 for a narrow group of people already in the program: families with children and certain people with acute medical needs.

The 11th-hour extension leaves out a broad swath of people who were eligible for the emergency housing benefit over the winter, including Vermonters over the age of 65, people fleeing domestic violence, people displaced by flooding, and more. 

Last-minute changes to the program’s rules have left participants like Bressette and Lawrence confused. The couple thought they still had time left on their voucher. But their caseworker told them they had to leave the motel by Wednesday, unless Bressette could get a doctor’s note. As of 10:30 a.m., the couple planned to try driving down to the doctor’s office in Berlin. 

If they couldn’t get their documentation in hand and their voucher approved, the couple planned to live in their car.

“This is really creating a lot of last-minute chaos,” said Brenda Siegel, executive director of End Homelessness Vermont. “While I am grateful that some people will be protected…this order is not an order that’s made in such a way that is actually humane,” she said.

Many individuals spent Tuesday trying to call the Department for Children and Families to confirm their eligibility for the extension, facing multiple hours on hold. About 30 people who had already exhausted their 80 days in motels in Barre, Berlin and Montpelier were trying to reach state employees to provide medical documentation, according to Julie Bond, executive director of Good Samaritan Haven, a service provider in Washington County.

“People are still trying to get in touch with the state,” Bond said at around 1 p.m. If they weren’t able to get their voucher extended before check-out time, they would need to leave their rooms, she said. “There could be dozens of people outdoors as of late this afternoon with nowhere to go.”

“Medical vulnerability” as outlined in Scott’s executive order refers to individuals who are “homebound,” require a lifesaving device that needs access to electricity, like an oxygen concentrator, or are receiving active cancer treatment, among other stipulations. That is far more limited than the disability criteria used for the program in the past.

Asked how the Department for Children and Families is determining whether motel program participants meet the criteria for the extension, Miranda Gray, deputy commissioner of DCF’s economic services division, wrote that households can self-declare that they meet the new definition. The department “goes through a screening and will house for 7 days which allows the client time to get a release signed or medical records together,” Gray said.

Moving forward, Gray noted, “eligibility will be closely monitored and assessed based on documented medical needs.” The department plans to introduce a “more specific” evaluation process in which state officials will review medical records “to determine whether an individual’s condition requires placement in a hotel or motel.”

“The focus is not solely on whether an individual uses medical devices, but rather on their need for assistance due to the use of these devices,” Gray wrote. “Simply having a device does not automatically mean that an individual is homebound or requires emergency housing.”

The department plans to meet with local service providers on Wednesday to discuss the guidelines of the executive order — a day after going into effect.

Some service providers, including Bond and Siegel, pooled donations in the fall to pay for some of their clients to remain sheltered in motel rooms after they lost their state vouchers. But as this latest round of evictions begins, they lack the resources to meet the need, they said.

“We are giving out tents and sleeping bags where we can,” Siegel said.

Steve Anzano, 56, who receives disability benefits for what he described as “mental health challenges,” doesn’t meet the Scott administration’s threshold for “medically vulnerable.” He has 14 more days before his voucher expires at the Harbor Place hotel in Shelburne.

Anzano said he ended up in the motel program after leaving housing where there was drug activity. As someone in recovery, he said he needed to get away from that. 

“But I didn’t have a backup plan,” Anzano said. “When you don’t have a landing zone or something to hold on that’s buoyant, it gets shaky and hard.”

He’s going to move to ANEW Place, a shelter in Burlington, where he’ll have roommates and pay a fee with his SSDI income. 

He said that will be less comfortable than at Harbor Place, where he’s grown used to feeling safe — and having his own room. 

“It’s gonna be a can of sardines,” Anzano said. “But life happens, you know, you just have to roll with the punches.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: End of winter motel season means hundreds of unhoused people must move out.

This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.

Gov. Phil Scott took executive action on Friday to extend motel voucher stays for unhoused families with children and certain people with acute medical needs through June 30. 

Without the extension, this group of unhoused Vermonters would have faced a cliff next Tuesday, when the voucher program’s loosened winter rules will expire for the season. Democratic legislators had sought a three-month extension for all people sheltered through the program, a move Scott and fellow Republicans fiercely opposed.

Scott’s order came down just hours after Senate Republicans blocked an attempt to advance a bill that would have provided an extension for all 2,300 people currently receiving motel vouchers. The blockage essentially ensured that all unhoused people in the program would be subject to strict time-limits on their stays beginning on April 1.

“While I’ve been opposed to the Hotel Motel program because it doesn’t serve those in the program well, I have also been clear that we have an obligation to protect children and Vermonters who are most vulnerable,” Scott said in a statement on Friday afternoon. “This executive order does just that without unwinding the important progress we’ve made.”

The extension will apply to just over 400 households, according to Amanda Wheeler, Scott’s press secretary. State data shows 1,439 households are currently sheltered through the program.

Those eligible for the extension are families with a child under the age of 19, and “medically vulnerable” individuals. The order defines “medically vulnerable” as being “homebound”; requiring a lifesaving device that needs access to electricity, like an oxygen concentrator; in active treatment for cancer, “severe kidney/renal disease, or severe liver or heart conditions”; receiving Medicaid or Medicare-eligible “home-based” nursing services; or women in their third trimester of pregnancy. 

This eligibility criteria leaves out a broad swath of people currently eligible for the emergency housing benefit, including Vermonters over the age of 65, people fleeing domestic violence, people displaced by flooding, and more.

That means those individuals will still be subject to restrictions on the motel program come April 1: an 80-day allotment on motel stays, along with a 1,100-room cap on the program. Many people housed in motels already used up their 80-day limit for the fiscal year last fall, which resulted in a mass wave of evictions from motels between September and December. (The restrictions were eased for the winter months.)

In the fall, some families with young children leaving the motels ended up pitching tents. That prompted considerable public outcry, including from some legislators who had agreed to the new restrictions last year as a way to scale back the motel program’s pandemic era expansion. Service providers and advocates demanded Scott take executive action, but at the time, he declined to do so.

The order on Friday comes after weeks of heated exchanges between Scott and Democratic leaders in the Legislature over the immediate future of the motel voucher program, tied to an annual budget adjustment bill.

Scott vetoed lawmakers’ first attempt at the legislation two weeks ago, citing concerns about increased spending — along with his disapproval of the three-month voucher extension.

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate conceded to Scott’s spending asks, but held firm in their position to extend eligibility for the voucher program through June 30, proposing to do so with existing state funds. 

Scott and Republican legislators fiercely opposed the full extension, arguing that the voucher program is a “failure” that has “warehoused” people instead of helping them. Still, Scott brought forward a counter-proposal to Democrats last week, offering to grant voucher extensions for families with kids and people with severe medical needs.

Democrats declined to take up the offer, in a refusal to carve out exceptions among a broadly vulnerable group. 

“What we did was to try to stay steadfast behind the idea that nobody should be exited,” said Senate President Pro-Tem Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, in a Friday interview before the order came down. “I think very few people in that program do not have major challenges.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Phil Scott extends motel stays for families and ‘medically vulnerable’ individuals.