Much has been written about the effort expended on changing the way Vermont's education is provided. So what else of interest happened this session?
Windham County's lawmakers, all Democrats except for one independent, passed laws that may help prevent children from becoming addicted to the internet. They discussed bills that curb the cost of health insurance and also ones that protect affordable meals and farmers markets. They discussed how to prevent violence in hospitals. They passed a bill that prevented hospitals from overcharging for drugs.
And they learned to work with Republicans.
"Vermont voters wanted us to work together, and we did," Rep. Mike Mrowicki, Windham-4, said.
In the last election, more Republicans replaced Democrats, many who were long-serving lawmakers, and the Democrats lost their supermajority - their ability as a party to override Gov. Phil Scott's vetoes.
"The new reality we had to face is that voters gave the governor more political muscle, and he used it," Mrowicki said. "Voters sent more Republicans to the Legislature, which further strengthened the governor. So on any legislation, the governor [now] gets the last word."
For Sen. Nader Hashim, D-Windham, the most heartening part of the session was "seeing the unified resistance against federal policies that are antithetical to Vermont values."
Senators from across the political spectrum expressed varying degrees of concern about due process, immigration, and government stability, Hashim said.
"It was a privilege to serve as the chair of [the] Senate [Committee on] Judiciary and to take the lead on bills that improve protections for migrants, modernize our hate-crime laws, and expand protections for providers of reproductive health care and those who come to our state seeking that type of care," Hashim said.
Experiencing history
Windham County sent several new legislators to Montpelier, including Zon Eastes (Windham-1), Ian Goodnow (Windham-9), Emily Carris Duncan (Windham-6) and Chris Morrow (Windham, Windsor, and Bennington).
Eastes, for one, regarded the session as a chance to experience history.
"I've most appreciated learning about and participating in the long history of Vermont's citizen legislature," he said. "I am engaged in wrestling with the most complicated, human issues. I work with an amazing, thoughtful array of colleagues and support teams. And I work in the Vermont State House, a precious, historical gem."
There was a steep learning curve that turned out to be the most difficult part of the job, Eastes said.
"We are challenged to absorb both very specific and quite general information at a remarkable speed," he said. "Like, the protocols for bill creation, development, and passage. Also, who's who, and what might I learn from each person."
Carris Duncan, who was placed on the House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development, thought that on the whole, being a legislator was a great experience for her.
"I think we touched so many different subjects that we had our hands in everything," she said. "We went from education policy to unemployment insurance and all sorts of fun stuff.
"I feel very fortunate to be on the committee," Carris Duncan continued. "We have a pretty broad array of people, both politically and regionally, and I think it helps to craft good policy for Vermont."
The veterans
In addition to Hashim and Mrowicki, Windham County returned most of its incumbents to Montpelier, including Sen. Wendy Harrison, plus Reps. Laura Sibilia, Leslie Goldman, Michele Bos-Lun, Emily Long, Emilie Kornheiser, and Mollie Burke.
For Mrowicki, the best thing about the session was that Vermont property owners will not be seeing a surge in their tax bills this year.
"That was the issue in Vermont last November that propelled Gov. Scott to an overwhelming majority win, even in the two towns I represent, Putney and Dummerston," Mrowicki said.
Windham County's legislators now chair important committees. Hashim, as noted, is chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Kornheiser is chair of the House Committee on Ways and Means. Sibilia is vice-chair of the House Committee on Environment and Energy. Harrison is chair of the Senate Committee on Institutions.
Harrison said there was a definite difference between her first two-year term and this one.
"I'll never forget being brand new in the Statehouse last session," Harrison said. "Even as a person with decades of government experience, it is still the most challenging 'workplace' I've experienced. It's truly a citizen legislature and people are generally helpful to the newer folks.
"This year, the seats around me were mostly occupied by newly elected senators with vastly different perspectives than the folks they replaced. I tried to be helpful to them and was pleasantly surprised that the partisan comments and suspicions were less this year than in the first year of the last biennium."
Being chair of a committee was a new experience for Harrison.
"It made me responsible for the Capital Bill, a $100 million, two-year budget for state buildings, historic preservation, water and wastewater systems, housing funding, corrections, state parks, and our expanded authority of information technology," Harrison said.
"In response to auditor concerns about late or over-budget multi-million dollar state [information technology] projects, we passed Act 48 to require that the state be more transparent and accountable to the public for these projects. We will consider additional standards or requirements in 2026," she said.
Many positive moments
Sibilia, I-Windham-2, who has spent decades advocating for legislative responses to climate change, reported that she was delighted that her committee did not pass three bills.
"There were three bills that were introduced to repeal the Global Warming Solutions Act, the Renewable Energy Standard, and the Clean Heat Standard," Sibilia said. "We didn't pass a single one. That makes me very happy. I worked really hard on all three of those things to pass them [originally]. And while some of them need work, we're not going backwards here with climate change."
Bos-Lun, one of two Windham-3 representatives, said a new committee assignment made her happy.
"The best thing that happened to me this session was being transferred to the Agriculture, Food Resiliency and Forestry Committee," she said. "I loved being able to work on policies to support food access across Vermont and strengthen local food production at our farms."
Bos-Lun said she "valued the deep, non-partisan, cooperative discussion and deliberation that I experienced in committee every day. The committee showed me how politics can work when people focus on common shared goals."
Among the committee's successes, she said, "we helped keep Universal School Meals in the budget."
"We passed Vermonters Feeding Vermonters, to benefit food-insecure individuals and provide a steady market for farmers. We also developed a bill to support cottage food producers at farmers markets," Bos-Lun said.
"All this legislation passed unanimously," she added. "My committee gave me hope that positive political change is possible."
Working with so many new Republicans - including on the Rural Caucus - was, on the whole, a cooperative experience, Bos-Lun said.
"I rarely felt party affiliation was a barrier to working cooperatively and finding common concerns," she said. "The work showed me that some of the Republicans currently serving are caring, thoughtful people who listen and engage productively for the benefit of Vermont and Vermonters."
However, some new Republicans do not work constructively within their committees or in the House, Bos-Lun said - "and that can be difficult. But some people from every party can be difficult.
"There is work to be done in the Legislature with both parties to improve legislative outcomes," she added. "I prefer policy to result from people working towards common goals, not because of party agendas."
Putting brakes on the internet
Asked what she was proudest of this session, Harrison said it was being the lead sponsor of the Kids Code Bill, Act 63, which was approved by large majorities in both chambers of the Legislature and signed into law by the governor on June 12.
The bill aims to protect children from predatory online practices. It gives minors the highest privacy settings, limits data collection, and puts restrictions on design patterns that encourage compulsive use.
In conjunction with that was the Age-Appropriate Design Code, a law that protects the safety and privacy of young Vermonters by requiring internet companies to design their services so that they don't harm children.
"The industry must stop using algorithms that literally addict children to their services, such as infinite scroll and intermittent pings that keep kids awake at night, waiting for sounds that prove their popularity," Harrison said.
"This law will certainly be litigated, but has a good chance of surviving freedom-of-speech challenges because it focuses on the platform's code rather than the content," she added.
Harrison said she will continue to work with the House in the second half of the biennium on data privacy for all users, adults and children alike.
"I can't overstate how important this is," she said.
"It was important last year because the federal government hasn't had the courage to enact effective regulations on businesses," Harrison observed. "The internet and data industries are a $300 billion operation, with hundreds of well-funded lobbyists. The potential misuse, however, has increased after the November election."
The new federal regime in Washington is actively assembling private and personal information that was collected with the promise that it would be kept confidential, she said.
"We had over 100 lobbyists in the Statehouse this past session for Kids Code and Data Privacy, and were still able to get Kids Code passed because the harms to kids appalled senators and representatives of all parties and both chambers," Harrison said.
"The governor signed the bill, and I hope that he will be able to support broader data privacy protections for individuals in 2026," she added.
Mrowicki is another legislator who said he was proud of the way the Legislature was protecting children on the internet by making sites like TikTok and Snapchat less addictive.
In addition to the Kids Code bill, "we also started the process of keeping our schools and kids phone-free during school hours. And initial reports from schools like Putney Central, which has been out in front of this issue, show it's working," Mrowicki said.
He reported that after they relinquish their devices at the beginning of the day, students "are interacting more with each other and with staff instead of standing around 'heads-down' while doomscrolling, oblivious to the world happening around them."
Carris Duncan also said she found her work on these internet issues rewarding and that the Kids Code bill "sets out to create a system of care for young people online" that controls "the very addictive design features that we see on social media sites."
"While it doesn't go after their content, it goes after the constant 'like' repetition, the constant notifications, and the over-reliance on parents and young people to police these features themselves," Carris Duncan said.
An art social
In April, members of both chambers took part in a community art project designed to build friendships and camaraderie. The sergeant-at-arms and the state curator helped develop a theme: to represent the Vermont State House as it is surrounded by a Town Forest.
As an art teacher, Burke was invited to implement the project. It became the happiest memory of the session for her.
"We gave instructions to represent the Town Forest with collages of trees, a forest, a forest animal, or a bird," Burke said. "About 50 legislators came out for a spirited session. Legislators created wonderful individual collages." The organizers assembled them into one large piece with the help of Carris Duncan, a fiber artist.
An official unveiling of the final piece took place in May. It now hangs in a prominent place in the State House Card Room.
"The entire project demonstrated how art can be a vehicle for collaboration and cooperation, and helped to diffuse partisan boundaries," Burke said.
The longtime member of the House Committee on Transportation said partisan boundaries required an analysis of what was possible and what was not.
"In our committee we had five firm Democratic votes, one conservative Democratic member, and five Republicans, including a Republican chair," Burke said. "Because of a lack of money, there were not many contested things. And many transportation issues are nonpartisan."
Burke said that the committee "did have some contested issues related to a bicycle safety measure that didn't get enough votes to pass, and a bill related to a requirement for net-zero vehicles that unfortunately wound up getting paused by the governor."
"However, our committee was very collegial, and despite differences of philosophy, we generally appreciated each other and enjoyed working together," she said.
Burke said that this year's Legislative Cabaret, an event that happens at the end of each session, provided an opportunity for committees to work together on presenting a spoof or a skit.
"Our Transportation Committee had good laughter and camaraderie in rehearsing and presenting our skit this year," Burke said. "Other committees also reflected the collaboration inherent in this special event.
"As for the entire House, the same was true," she added. "The situation limited what we could pass, but generally, members feel the bonds of our legislative family, and despite disagreements and challenges, there is abundant respect and good humor."
Health care
As a former nurse practitioner, Goldman, who represents Windham-3 with Bos-Lun, knows health care from the inside out and was assigned to the House Committee on Health Care three years ago. This past session was a difficult one because health care is in turmoil, she reports.
"This year we focused on addressing barriers to accessibility, affordability, sustainability, and efficiency across our health care system," Goldman said.
"Currently, Vermonters are being challenged with significant problems of affording insurance premiums. Our only insurance carrier, Blue Cross Blue Shield, is near insolvency. And nine out of our 14 hospitals are operating in the red."
She cited "an increase in violence against our health care workforce" and reported that "primary care practices are being closed."
The Health Care committee passed a series of bills to address these crises, Goldman said. Starting with affordability, H.35 unmerges the individual and small group markets that purchase insurance on the federal Affordable Care Act exchange. The individual market currently receives federal subsidies to reduce premiums for Vermonters.
"Unfortunately, these are expected to expire at the end of the year," Goldman said. Undoing the ACA subsidies is a cornerstone part of the One Big Beautiful Bill that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4.
But the small group market will have lower premiums as a result of H.35, she said.
The bill H.96 significantly increases the threshold required for obtaining a certificate of need for a health care facility developing new projects from the Green Mountain Care Board (GMCB).
"This will allow for a less expensive and onerous process and with lower costs being passed on to Vermonters," Goldman said.
Most importantly, the committee took a look at the 340B Drug Pricing Program, a federal program that allows certain safety-net health care providers to purchase outpatient drugs at discounted prices from pharmaceutical manufacturers.
In committee, another bill, H.266, started as a bill to support 340B pharmacies at Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and Planned Parenthood in dealing with onerous pharmacy benefit management practices.
But it soon revealed that hospitals were seriously overcharging for drugs, Goldman said.
"As we took testimony, we learned that the federal 340B program was being used by some hospitals to significantly overcharge patients and commercial insurance to shift money to support other programs," Goldman said.
"We learned that Vermont is the most expensive state in the country, charging approximately 600% over the average sales price to commercial insurers. H.266 was amended to put a cap on prices equal to 130% of the average sales price as determined by Medicare for 2026."
The committee also passed S.53, which will require doula services be paid for by the Vermont Medicaid program.
"Doulas support families throughout the prenatal, birthing, and postnatal period," Goldman said. "This support reduces preterm births, low birth weight, and postpartum depression, leading to healthier families and lower costs."
The Health Care Committee also passed five bills focusing on stabilizing the health care system.
One of them, H.259, "An act relating to preventing workplace violence in hospitals," requires hospitals to implement a security plan.
"From June 2023 through December 2024, six hospitals reported 89 total incidents with injury to staff," Goldman said. "We need to protect our staff from violence."
The committee also worked on S.126, a bill to help Vermonters who are likely to lose their subsidized health insurance next year.
"S.126 is the most impactful amendment passed out of Health Care this year," Goldman said. Without subsidies, "the current monthly premium is $3,908.06, or about $58,000 per year, for the benchmark Silver plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont on the Vermont Health Exchange."
"Since Covid, the federal government has extended tax credits and subsidies to most Vermonters, ensuring that no one pays more than 8.5% of their income for this benchmark plan," she said.
"Barring action by Congress, these credits will expire on Dec. 31, 2025 and are unlikely to be extended," Goldman said. "This is simply unaffordable for Vermonters."
S.126 aims to reallocate scarce resources using multiple levers, including reference-based pricing, Goldman said.
"This is a tool that the GMCB shall use to set rates," Goldman said. "The bill also allows the GMCB to review rates of hospital networks, provide transparency for state agencies to set contracts between providers and payers."
The bill also "creates a statewide health resource plan to identify what resources we actually have and what resources are actually needed and where," she continued. "It forms a primary care committee that actually has some teeth in the development of the plan. Most of all, this bill is about urgency and accountability."
What's ahead for next year
The biggest story of the year - again, no surprise, it is health care - is still not written, Mrowicki said.
"The dominoes are lining up, and if we don't do something, they could start falling," he said. "It's that serious."
He said that "nobody's happy with the system."
"Not patients, not providers, not hospital administrators, not even insurance companies," Mrowicki said. "People are paying more and more for less and less. Care is being rationed by a shortage of providers, and cost."
He said his constituents regularly call with complaints that they must book six, eight, or even 10 months ahead to see a specialist.
"And the costs are choking budgets at every level: family, town, school, state," Mrowicki said. "It's one of the biggest cost drivers in all of our budgets."
Legislators passed some bills "to start to address costs this year, but it's nibbling at the edges," he continued. "We need the governor to make this a top priority and be a willing partner in the work."
Mrowicki said he realized how big a problem health care had become when the head of the GMCB testified to his committee, Appropriations.
"He said last year the GMCB issued a report that said in five years, we may see some Vermont hospitals closing because of their financial situation," Mrowicki said. "Then he said, 'I was wrong. It's not five years but one.'"
Nine of Vermont's 14 hospitals are losing money, Mrowicki said.
"Several only have about two months of cash on hand," he said. "Our largest health insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, is saying they're practically out of money. They've had losses of $150 million over the past three years and had to go borrow $30 million from their sister organization, Michigan Blue Cross Blue Shield, just to pay claims this year. That's on top of five years in a row of double-digit cost increases."
Mrowicki said that "the dominoes are lined up, and I'm afraid it won't take much to get them rolling."
He added that the Legislature tried to bring a sense of urgency to the governor - but failed.
"The media has tried also, as when [reporter] Pete Hirschfeld of Vermont Public asked the governor at a press conference what he's going to do on health care," Mrowicki said, saying that Scott replied that "he can only deal with two crises at once, and he's dealing with housing and education funding."
"Once again, the Legislature will have to lead, but this issue needs to get higher priority," Mrowicki said.
The limits of state government
None of the legislators had any ideas about how to protect Vermont from the chaos coming out of Washington.
"When considering what state government can do in response to federal actions, we often find ourselves legally constrained," said Hashim, an attorney.
"There were many requests and ideas for legislation proposed by colleagues and constituents, and the hardest part was discovering and explaining that, legally, state government is quite limited in what it can do in response to federal policies," he said.
The judiciary remains America's best protection, but community political action is also needed, Hashim said.
"The protection lies in a few places," he observed. "Our judiciary is the final stop as the place where conflict is resolved and where constitutional questions are answered.
"Outside of government, people need to come together more on the local level to support and protect each other and to ensure basic needs are met, because it doesn't appear that our federal government will be doing that for us," Hashim said.
This News item by Joyce Marcel was written for The Commons.