In Morrisville, Vermont, a recent Front Porch Forum post reads: “Vote down the school budget! They don’t want to just survive, they want to thrive.”
If I still lived in Stowe, I would support the petition to keep the short-term rental registry in place, but unlike you, I couldn’t take it anymore. I recently sold my place and moved to Waterbury Center where I now have actual neighbors who live in the houses around me.
I am writing to the community of Stowe as a former selectboard member who has proudly and diligently served our town for the past 12 years. I have watched this town debate and then come together as a community repeatedly. It is my hope that life after the May 1 special town meeting vote over the possible rescission of the Stowe short-term rental registration ordinance will be no different.
As we move toward the special town meeting on May 1 to vote on the Stowe short-term rental ordinance, I have been processing my thoughts on how to compose this message. Mainly, because I wanted people to understand the importance of being educated, without it appearing that I am pushing my thoughts.
With only a few more weeks remaining in this year’s session, activity is focused on resolving differences between the House and Senate versions of numerous bills, major and minor. There will be legislation taken up in the House this week dealing with education property taxes.
I have carried this poem with me for years. Always close at hand, it is tucked into my wallet. I reread it from time to time to remind myself of what it takes to “get the job done” — whatever the job may be.
A quick look at the Internet provides ample evidence a lot of people in Vermont and around the country don’t have a place to live or enough food to eat. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reports about 653,000 Americans experienced homelessness in January 2023. That’s a 12.1 percent increase from the same report in 2022.
As the Legislature makes it through crossover, we remain busy on the floor doing our best to represent your needs.
Thinking about how the short-term rental ordinance in Stowe got to this point of contention, remember that the selectboard is just a group of five locals we elected to represent us in exactly these kinds of matters.
As your Legislature heads into the final month of session, much is underway while much remains to be accomplished.
With the former president, more unhinged and desperate than ever, again knocking on the White House door, in what has become, in large part because of his first term, a fundamentally different country, the laughter has been replaced by the grim acknowledgement that we never saw this coming.
Aaron Calvin’s excellent piece on Zoie Saunders, Gov. Phil Scott’s pick for Vermont Education Secretary, sent me down rabbit holes of charter school sales brochures, statistics and studies. Between pots of coffee, I have crunched numbers and pondered policies.
The education finance crisis facing Vermont is the gravest in decades and eerily like the crisis we faced a decade ago, which led to Act 46. Legislators and school boards have difficult choices ahead as they grapple with a system they have largely lost control of.
The House ways and means and education committees are working on several bills dealing with property tax and education funding issues that have been front and center this session, as they have been in the Senate as well.
As members of Gov. Phil Scott’s cabinet and senior staff, we were part of the team who interviewed candidates for the next secretary of the Agency of Education. All five of us are also moms of kids currently in, or graduated from, Vermont’s public school system.
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