Wed, 06/02/2021 - 10:57am tim
by Timothy McQuiston, Vermont Business Magazine For those betting against a veto session this year, you will need to find your Venmo password. Governor Phil Scott yesterday vetoed two bills that would allow non-citizen voting in Montpelier and Winooski. Up to this point Scott had only vetoed one bill. That bill was related to raising the age of who legally would be considered a juvenile. That bill probably needed more work to tighten up the language and process and probably would not have triggered a veto session. But the vetoes of the voting rights bills have guaranteed that lawmakers will return to Montpelier at the end of this month.
Don t miss the big stories. Like us on Facebook.
A bill intended to address years of inequitable funding in Vermontâs K-12 public schools has passed the House of Representatives.
The bill, S. 13, establishes a task force to study how to implement new per-pupil weighting factors into the stateâs education funding formula. The bill passed unanimously on second reading, 127-0, and the House suspended its rules to send it to the Senate for concurrence right away.
Since the Brigham court decision in the 1990s threw out Vermontâs education funding system as unconstitutional, the state has used weighting factors as part of a formula intended to provide equitable opportunity to students regardless of geography.
Vermont Legislature, governor have different ideas on budget
May 14, 2021
FacebookTwitterEmail
MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) Lawmakers in the Democrat-controlled Vermont Legislature and Republican Gov. Phil Scott have different visions of how the state should spend about $1 billion from the American Rescue Plan.
It’s unclear how those differences will play out as the Legislature wraps up its work and prepares to adjourn for the year, possibly next week, but it s possible Scott could veto the budget.
The governor wants to spend the federal money on housing, economic recovery initiatives, water and sewer, universal broadband, and climate change initiatives.
He says the state has to begin using that money now.
Don t miss the big stories. Like us on Facebook.
MONTPELIER â The Vermont Senate joined the House in passing a resolution apologizing for its role in the eugenics movement, in which so-called âdelinquentsâ and âdefectivesâ were institutionalized or sterilized. The policies targeted French Canadians, French-speaking indigenous Canadians, indigenous peoples and people of color, and disproportionately affected women.
The Senate, rather than concur with the House version of the resolution, replaced it with a âstrike-allâ amendment and its own wording â varying slightly from the House text, but hitting all the same salient points.
Like the House version, which passed 146-0 on March 31, the Senate resolution, reported by Sen. Brian Collamore, R-Rutland, sums up the history of the eugenics movement, and the Legislatureâs active role in promoting it in the early 20th century, up to and including the passage of a sterilization law in 1931.