By Carly Berlin/VTDigger
This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, is published via 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,” Dept. 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.
