The House Committee on General, Housing, and Military Affairs on Wednesday examined raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, despite signals from the governor that such a measure would get a veto if gets to his desk.
Just days after Vermont’s pro-gun coalition issued a joint complaint to House leaders regarding a lack of accessibility to lawmakers, the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday passed S.55, which includes a handful of significant restrictions on Second Amendment rights.
In Vermont, the pros and cons of universal pre-K fall along party lines. Democrats and Progressives largely support it; Republicans and libertarians mostly oppose it. Yet much to the surprise of Vermont conservatives, Republican Gov. Phil Scott has been supportive of state pre-kindergarten expansion.
The Vermont Poverty Council began ten years ago and its tenure is up. Now it faces a crossroads, and lawmakers must decide if it has a future, and what that future might be.
If the conclusions presented to House lawmakers last week are indicative of what’s to come on pre-kindergarten programs, Vermonters can expect to see increased calls for expanding early education on the taxpayer dime.
In this Statehouse Headliners, medical pot for every disease clears Vermont Senate, fossil fuel divestment is back, homeless bill of rights still alive, and proposed racism panel may have skin color quota.
Morey said students are calling on lawmakers to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines, and expand background checks on all gun sales. Politicians backed by the NRA, she added, “want you to forget the 427 mass shootings in 2017 alone.”
Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos waded into election integrity issues Tuesday, announcing his fears that a section of a bill moving through Congress could lead to the policing of polling places by armed Secret Service agents.
In this week’s Statehouse Headliners, Vermont Yankee settlement gets near-unanimous approval, an environmental group calls state carbon policies ineffective and costly, and solar jobs decline 13 percent due to tariffs.
The Scott administration is responding to a backlash from gun rights groups amid a wave of gun-control initiatives advancing at the Statehouse following the mass school shooting last month in Parkland, Florida.
A half dozen gun-rights leaders spoke Friday at the University of Vermont’s Ira Allen Chapel to oppose gun control measures being advanced in Montpelier by state lawmakers.
When it comes to judging the academic preparedness of Vermont’s students, how effective are the results of the latest multi-grade test instrument of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium?