VTGOP's "Get Real" Campaign Launches Fourth Installment: R-Regulatory Reform
Last Week VTGOP Leaders rolled out the fourth of seven installments of their new “Get Real” campaign. Below is the text
G.E.T. R.E.A.L! R: Regulatory Reform
G.E.T. R.E.A.L. is a solemn promise and a positive path forward for our state by Vermont Republicans focused on improving the quality of life of our people. It is a prescription of policy proposals, and this is the third in a series of essays explaining the program.
There has been no bigger source of anxiety among Vermonters under 40 than the concern about finding housing that is within their budget. In the past five years, there have several factors making the problem worse. Post-COVID demand has caused a rapid increases in home prices, little to virtually no new housing stock has been able to be built, and rising interest rates have made housing payments for new mortgages more and more difficult. These factors have all put home-ownership just out of reach for so many young Vermonters.
Despite a lot of talk about the issue, Democrats have accomplished virtually nothing. The House Committee assigned to this issue has spent its time on a number of other bills that have nothing to do with addressing the greatest crisis in Vermont today. Those meetings have become so unproductive that two of the members have stopped attending the committee meetings.
Gov. Scott and Vermont Republicans have been fighting against the super-majority to actually address the cause of the problem instead of just trying to paper over it with novel spending or new taxes. While Democrats keep trying to solve the same problem with new spending programs, Republicans know that there is no way to genuinely lower the cost of housing without building more of it. And at the heart of building more is the biggest obstacle, Act 250, and the unpredictable permitting process to build the kind of homes needed to house a workforce that needs to grow.
If developers and non-profits have piles of cash available but they can’t get the permits need to break ground and to get started – then all the spending is done in vain. Vermont is among the most difficult places to get reliable and consistent permitting outcomes thanks to the convoluted Act 250 process. Republicans in the Senate have made a few attempts to break the logjam and provide the reform needed to get housing built. But all of their efforts are routinely dismissed or disintegrated by other committees before the bills make it to the floor. Act 250 was also designed with Chittenden County in mind, but those rules are having an unfair impact in other more rural parts of the state that have different development needs. So we need regulatory reform that is flexible enough to adapt to the different needs of the different parts of the state.
While building new housing must be the focus to keep up with rising demand, Gov. Scott also proposed to address the issue by rehabilitating some of our current housing stock. You don’t have to drive far to see housing units in Vermont that once were viable but now are dormant and unused. Gov. Scott’s budget has originally included almost $6 million for the VHIP program to bring old housing units back online. But Democrats radically cut that funding down to just $1 million in order to spend that money on other priorities. Even among the NIMBYs in local government, this is a program that everyone should have been able to support.
The unfortunate reality is that today’s housing crisis is the result of two decades of anti-growth Democrats who just want Vermont to be frozen in time regarding our housing footprints. For the shrinking group of young Vermonters who want to stay here, it gets harder and harder for them to justify the high cost of rents and mortgages based on the manufactured scarcity of housing due to current policy. It is going to take Republicans getting elected and supporting Gov. Scott with modest regulatory reform that can help both the public and private sector spend money efficiently to build the housing that our people need.
Year after year, Democrats keep sticking their head in the sands and are unwilling to reach across the aisle to understand the problem from a Governor who works in construction. If we do not change the balance in the legislature, there is nothing else we can expect other than this problem to continue to get worse and, in turn, harder and harder to fix as we kick the can down the road. It’s time for the legislature to “Get Real” about what the true obstacle is to building new housing and work on building what our people need as soon as possible, instead of just hoping that those demands will go away.