Can They Cooperate?

Can They Cooperate?

It was good news for Vermonters that Gov. Jim Douglas and House Speaker Gaye Symington both specified, in their opening addresses, that they want Republicans and Democrats to work together in the legislature this year.

Last year’s legislature left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths, and there was almost a sense of weariness in the Statehouse Thursday, a feeling that "we hope we don’t have to go through THAT again." The bad feelings last year were the result of a couple of important bills that the Democratic legislature and Republican governor could not agree on and resulted in vetoes.

The Democrats and Progressives may have thought they could force the issue against Gov. Douglas because they had huge, supposedly "veto-proof" majorities in both the House and Senate. Douglas, however, thought otherwise, and when push came to shove, the Dems were not able to override Douglas’s vetoes on the all-fuels efficiency program and on new campaign finance laws. The veto session was not scheduled for several weeks, however, during which time the two political parties were free to rail against each other in hopes of affecting the final vote. It was not a pretty picture.

This year, now that it has been established that there is no "veto-proof" legislature, perhaps the two sides can produce a working result without resorting to such brinksmanship.

Last Thursday, both Douglas and Symington identified two important bills that they think they can agree on. One was the all-fuels efficiency bill. It extends the concepts of Efficiency Vermont, which now deals only with electric use, to the world of heating fuels. Owners of leaky old homes would receive assistance, including financial assistance, to make them more weather-tight and thus use less oil to heat. With heating fuel approaching $4 in some markets, this makes great sense. The big question will be how much money the state should kick into the program and where it would get it.

The second area of cooperation may be a bill to encourage the construction of more affordable housing. The Douglas Administration was frustrated with the fate of last year’s housing bill, which went nowhere. Conversations over the summer, however, left the impression that progress was possible. The governor this year added an attractive new element—incentives to rehabilitate the second floors of downtown properties, many of which have languished for decades.

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Outside those two areas of cooperation—neither of which will be easy—it is likely that old fractures will re-appear. With a heavily Democratic legislature facing a Republican governor, it can hardly be otherwise.

One casualty will surely be the governor’s proposal to lease the state lottery for 40 years to a private company, for an up-front payment of $50 million. The proposal comes with a guarantee that lottery revenues to the state will continue to flow undiminished.

With the exception of the startling sum of $50 million, nothing about this Douglas proposal makes any sense. The private firm can only make money by greatly increasing the success of the lottery games, and reaching its fingers more deeply into Vermonters’ pockets. We applaud Speaker Symington for her forthright condemnation of any expansion of gambling in Vermont—even just an expansion of promotion.

Another interesting proposal of the governor’s speech was to start collecting more in income taxes from unearned income (mostly, stocks and bond income and sales of property that have gained value over the years). Douglas made a strong case for the unfairness of the present system when he showed that a working Vermonter making $50,000 a year pays 50% more state income tax than someone whose $50,000 is in unearned money.

The Democratic legislature agrees with this reasoning—it’s more a Democratic than Republican type of proposal. However, there will be significant disagreements over the shape of the bill. Gov. Douglas wants to use the increased tax revenue to lower the income taxes of others. That seems like a reasonable approach, but it’s not the only one. Another $20 million on the table can produce $20 million worth of squabbling.

Let’s just hope it doesn’t go on forever, as it did last year.