MONTPELIER — After a drawn-out day of disagreements and false starts, the Vermont Legislature bailed on its plan to wrap up business for the year on Friday, failing to come to a deal, at least for now, on this year’s landmark education reform bill.

So strained were the talks, the House and Senate couldn’t even immediately agree on when negotiations would continue.

The Senate gaveled out for the night shortly after 11 p.m. Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, told his colleagues that coming to an agreement needed more time, and the Senate would instead gavel back in at 2 p.m. Saturday.

“We’re going home now,” Baruth said. 

Soon after, around 11:30 p.m., the House adjourned until Monday at noon. From there, House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, said the chamber would be holding brief sessions without taking any actions, known as “token sessions,” until mid-June. That’s when legislators had previously penciled in to hold votes to override potential vetoes by Gov. Phil Scott.  

“We’ve been putting compromises on the table all day, trying to find a path forward,” Krowinski said in an interview after ending her chamber’s business for the night. “This is a top priority for this legislative session, and we have to get it right. And at the end of the day, everyone was feeling like it needed more time.”

Legislative leaders said they expect the joint House and Senate panel hashing out the education bill, H.454, to continue meeting in the coming weeks, though the schedule was not immediately clear.

Both chambers signed off on a handful of other bills Friday, including sweeping housing legislation that would set out a program to finance infrastructure around new developments, a bill that would make it harder for neighbors to sue farmers over impacts the farm may have on their properties, and other bills on motor vehicles, cannabis and drug price caps.

However, the outcome leaves the session’s highest-profile work unfinished. Following an election where property tax rates drove voters, leading to a wave of Republican victories in the House and Senate, Democratic legislative leadership pledged to heed voters’ call for a more affordable education system. 

Yet four months in, the path toward that future state remained murky.

The parties began Friday closer than they ended it. Early in the day, the House and Senate conference committee members appeared to reach some tentative agreements on H.454. But as the hours wore on, negotiations — at least in public — faltered. The committee had been unable to lock in key details. Left unsettled was which funding formula to use, what to do about school choice and private schools and how to limit spending before school districts consolidate down the road. 

Meetings of the conference committee — three senators and three house members — were continuously postponed. Legislators and legislative staff scrambled in and out of rooms. Lobbyists lingered in the halls. As the conference committee drifted further and further from either chamber’s original position, the possibility of explaining the hugely complex and fast-changing piece of legislation to 180 lawmakers looked near-impossible. 

The vast majority of lawmakers dawdled as the conference committee worked in fits and starts, with people playing cards and sipping drinks throughout the Statehouse. 

The House, Senate and Scott have made education reform the year’s key issue. All three parties agreed on the need to consolidate school districts and transition the state to a new funding formula. But for months, the parties have reached little consensus on the intricacies and the timeline of that generational transformation. 

Baruth had told his chamber around 10 p.m. that agreement still looked possible.

“It’s frustrating,” he said on the floor, describing the delay, “but the way I think about it is, your constituents and my constituents sent us here for this night because they want us to do our work, they want us to finish it up, pay strict attention and then be done and go home.”

That proved overly optimistic.

If you’ve kept an ear out for new indie rock in the past few years, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Burlington, Vermont-based songwriter Greg Freeman. Maybe someone told you to check out his 2022 debut, I Looked Out, with its ragged-edged anthems bearing welcome echoes of Neil Young and Jason Molina. Or maybe you ended up at one of his unforgettable live shows — all-in, passionate performances that have made him a genuine word-of-mouth sensation among indie, classic rock, and Americana fans of all ages. 

If you haven’t listened yet, go ahead and get familiar, because Freeman’s new album, Burnover, out Aug. 22, is even better than the last one. Recorded in between tour dates last year, it’s the first album he’s made in a proper studio, something that enhances his electric sound without losing any immediacy. “I taught the players the songs the day we recorded most of them,” Freeman, 26, says. “Which we did out of necessity, but we ended up getting recordings that had energy.”

Freeman is calling from Amsterdam, where he and his band are just wrapping a run of shows in Europe. “Curtain,” the new single he’s releasing today, is a great example of the energy he’s talking about — a free-flowing, brightly-hued rocker that makes his impressionistic lyrics feel like they’re written in the sky.

He’s come a long way from where he was when he first released I Looked Out on a small Oregon-based label called Bud Tapes three years ago. “I mean, I really had no expectations for that record,” Freeman says. He was working at a bakery just outside Burlington at the time, making “sourdough, some yeasted breads, too,” and about six months went by before he realized it might be worth taking the album on the road. “I only decided to tour because people were messaging me about booking shows in other cities and stuff, and I was like, ‘Yeah, maybe we should,’” he says. 

A February 2023 show at a Chicago bar called Sleeping Village, where he performed with a seven-piece band he’d brought along from Vermont, drew enthusiastic reviews. “Damn, this is a pretty good crowd for a city 14 hours away,” Freeman recalls thinking.

A few days later, he played “this tiny show in Philly in a record store” where it felt like his band and their gear took up half of the 75-capacity space: “There were people there singing the lyrics, and that was a first for me.”

When he got back to Burlington after that first tour, Freeman took some time off from work to mull his next move. He tore through pulp crime novels by Jim Thompson, poetry by Emily Dickinson and Louise Glück, and literary fiction by W.G. Sebald, and watched old movies like the acclaimed 2001 melodrama In the Bedroom. “I was just looking for inspiration in as many places as I could,” he says.

One thing he was wrestling with was a sense of place. “I guess I was trying to figure out how to write about New England,” says Freeman, who grew up in Maryland and moved to Burlington at age 18. “What does it mean to have that experience of not having a grounded home that’s tied to where you were born?” Ultimately, he adds, “I feel good about the record conveying that kind of complicated relationship with a complicated place.”

“Curtain” was one of the first songs he wrote, pouring out of him as a guitar riff that “was just really fun to play.” He’d been listening to “a lot of ’70s Dylan,” especially 1978’s Street-Legal, and thinking about writing a love song. He added more color and detail in the studio, building out an arrangement that blossoms with horns, keys, woodwinds, and a jaunty tack-piano part by his friend Sam Atallah.

The song runs on for more than six minutes on the album, including a perfectly gnarly guitar solo from Freeman himself. “If we had practiced the song more, it wouldn’t have been so long,” he says. “And I think in our minds, we were like, ‘Oh, we’ll just fade it out or something.’ But listening back, we didn’t want it to end.”

He contrasts that song’s easygoing, spontaneous writing process with the one for “Gulch,” a raw, up-tempo album highlight that took much longer to come into focus. “I mean, I wrote ‘Curtain’ in maybe one day, and ‘Gulch’ took me over a month to write,” he says. “I remember not being able to sleep for many days that month, just trying to write that song and tormented by it…. I was super pissed at a certain point, after three-plus weeks of working on this song. And then I finally got it one day. I drank a half-bottle of wine and wrote it all at once.”

Freeman has a busy calendar coming up, including a one-off date in New York opening for This Is Lorelei in July, followed by more U.K./Europe shows in the late summer and fall and a U.S. run opening for Grandaddy in October. It’s shaping up to be a big year for him — don’t be surprised if he ends up on a trajectory that’s similar to MJ Lenderman’s as more and more people hear Burnover and see him in concert. Adds Freeman, “I’m just excited for more music to be out.”

The Vermont-based fly-fishing company Orvis is now facing pressures “at a pace that we haven’t faced in our 170-year career,” company president Simon Perkins said at a roundtable on tariffs hosted by U.S. Sen. Peter Welch.

At Orvis’ flagship rod shop and factory on Wednesday, Perkins said the Trump administration’s shifting policies have not given businesses enough time to adapt their sourcing and manufacturing models to absorb the shock of tariffs. 

“It’s really hard for a business to respond quick enough to make it work,” Perkins said. “That’s when prices for consumers, that’s when American jobs, that’s when American manufacturing, that’s when that gets put at risk.”

Welch said he aims to highlight business leaders impacted by new tariff policies through roundtable discussions around the state. American business owners and consumers will bear the costs of tariffs, which Welch claimed are analogous to the “biggest tax increase in decades.”

The Trump administration has changed course on tariff policies 21 times since February, according to reporting by Forbes. 

Kevin Meyer of Mary Meyer Stuffed Toys, a wholesale toy manufacturer based out of Townshend, said he feels “lots of frustration” with the fast-paced changes to tariffs. He said one of the challenges as a business owner is staying informed and charting a way forward amid the uncertain impact of tariff policies. This sentiment was echoed by many business leaders at the roundtable. 

“How can you have a business that way?” Meyer said. “How can you plan for your new product lines that are coming out, how to price them, where to get them made?”

Vermont is one of 34 states that hold Canada as its top foreign trade partner, and many businesses nationwide are feeling the effects of erratic tariff policy, Welch said. Last week, Welch and four other congressional colleagues met with the Canadian prime minister and other officials to help restore the relationship, but he said “that requires us to get back on track to a mutually beneficial trade regime.”

Tim Miles, the fourth-generation owner of building supplier rk Miles, said his business relies on price stability for wood products sourced from Canada or hardware supplies sourced abroad. He said his customers are often spending large sums to build or renovate their homes and need to plan ahead for costs, but that sudden tariffs are causing “a lot of confusion in the marketplace for our customers.”

David Black and Anja Wrede, who contract with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and create specialty bikes and mobility equipment for those with disabilities through their company RAD Innovations Inc., said they source specialized components from around the world for their bike designs.

Black said sourcing specialized components locally for bikes designed to fit the needs of each outdoor recreator is “logistically impossible to imagine.” He said the erratic nature of the Trump administration’s tariff policies undermines the company’s dependability and survival. 

Coral Vogel Cutting, owner of Brattleboro-based Back Roads Granola, said the 20 ingredients essential for her organic, non-GMO, vegan granola cannot be grown locally, so the company is forced to bear the cost of tariffs. She said the company does not have much leeway to increase their prices to recuperate costs, as customers already pay “top dollar” for the high-quality product. 

“We cannot source the quantities of ingredients that we need for most of our products within the United States. It just does not exist,” Vogel Cutting said. “We’ve built our brand around making a very clean product, and now we’re being penalized for that.”

Perkins, of the Orvis fly-fishing equipment company, said the continued uncertainty with the Trump administration’s tariff policies will “stall out innovation” because businesses have to plan ahead for pricing and demand before taking a risk on a new product. 

“Innovation starts with strategy and the strategy starts with the customer and understanding the marketplace,” Perkins said. “If that’s unknown, it’s really hard to understand how you’re going to build that pathway to innovation.”

Welch said he is concerned with the Trump administration’s tariff policies using a “very blunt instrument in an arbitrary way.” Although the Constitution gives Congress the power to set tariffs, it allowed the executive branch to take on that role through the Trade Act of 1974.

“It’s been distressing to me that many of my colleagues are accepting the utilization of that limited authority that was given at a time when it was more restrained, and are not insisting that we take back the capacity in Congress to do what the Constitution provides us with the authority to do,” Welch said. 

The same day Vermont business leaders met in Manchester, the U.S. Court of International Trade found the tariffs unconstitutional. The panel of judges ruled that the broad 10% tariff on most of foreign U.S. trading partners and the specific tariff policies against Canada, China and Mexico for national security reasons exceeded the authority of the executive branch. 
But the decision was temporarily halted on Thursday by the U.S. Court of Appeals, so tariffs will continue to be imposed for now.