Week 2: January 10th to January 13th
Committee Work
Bills, bills, bills !
The first full week of the session ended with 52 House bills now routed to committees. The bills are number sequentially, so the first House bill of the session was H.1 and the last one to get in this week was H.52. By the end of the session bill numbers will be in the hundreds.
The Senate has introduced 16 bills. It's not a contest. With 150 members in the House and thirty in the Senate there are inevitably more bills starting in the House than in the Senate. If you look at those lists of bills, you can see a wide variety of interests; from "H.37 - An act relating to winter tires on rental cars" to "H.12 An act relating to reducing the case backlog in the Criminal Division of the Superior Court."
Several bills have been routed to my committee (House Ways and Means - HWM). In fact, any bill that impacts the revenues of the state has to be reviewed by HWM. And that's a lot of bills. H.44, having to do with town meeting elections, is one of them. It is being rushed through the legislative process as March town meetings are fast approaching. It will probably be the first bill to come to the House floor for a vote. Last week H.44 came into HWM, was considered, and promptly was voted out of committee. Here's the details.
IRS, EITC, TIF, RMD, PFMLI, CIT, PIT, and more
As a new member of the House Ways and Means committee. I have a lot to learn and much of that is crammed into the first several weeks. It's all about taxes and fees, and a whole new set of acronyms and initialisms to digest. Representatives from the Agency of Administration, the Tax Department and the Joint Fiscal Office gave presentations to the committee about tax law and what constitutes a good tax law. Yes, I know some might say there is no such thing as a "good tax law." But the fact is that Vermont State Government provides some valuable services and those services have to be paid for. There are good and bad ways to to do that. At least three time during the week I was informed of the six principles of a high-quality tax system.
Coming Up
Next week's agenda for the Committee on Ways and Means is packed with some important issues.
A new revenue forecast will be coming from the Emergency Board. This is an important document. The administration and the general assembly have economists that project how much money will come and go out of the state coffers. Those economists advise the Emergency Board and two times a year the Board produces the official forecast that will be used to frame the next fiscal year's state budget.
School Construction and PCB mitigation will be discussed.
A new tax expenditure report will come from the Joint Fiscal Office. This report lists all the various tax breaks and how much revenue is lost by each one. For instance: Newspapers are exempt from the state sales tax. This results in $1.2 million in lost revenue to the state. HWM will go through this report and decide if any changes are needed.
Income based education financing - There is always talk of changing how public education is financed. The state's reliance on property taxes has resulted in inequities across the state. There may be a switch to an income based system. A report about this will be presented and discussed.
Tax Increment Financing (TIF) - TIFs are an interesting and controversial method of encouraging commercial development. HWM will be discussing the latest report on TIFs. Here's an example of how a TIF works.
Governor's Budget Address - Friday afternoon of next week (January 20th at 1:00 PM) the Governor will present his FY2024 budget proposal.
Parental Family and Medical Leave Insurance (PFMLI) - A bill to setup a mandatory PFMLI system for Vermont may well come to the floor for first reading. It will be shunted off to a committee, but will be the subject of much discussion in the halls of the Capitol.