Some of Vermont’s smallest haulers were parked outside the Statehouse on Friday to drum up support for a bill that is meant to make registering these so-called mini trucks easier.

“If you asked me everything I like about this truck, I would not be able to stop talking,” said Xavier Stevens of Newport, who brought his 1995 Mazda Scrum — length, just 11 feet — all the way to State Street for the gathering, branded as Mini Truck Day. “It’s the perfect vehicle.”

About a half-dozen other tiny tow-ers lined the street alongside several similarly scaled cars. One was decorated to look like a firetruck — presumably used for putting out very small fires. Under a tent nearby, supporters handed out miniature cupcakes.

While mini-truck owners use their vehicles just like any other truck, their small size and weight, coupled with limited modern safety features, means their legality on the road varies from state to state. The trucks are manufactured in Japan and later imported to the U.S. as used vehicles.

Vermont’s Department of Motor Vehicles allows people to register mini trucks here — and indeed, some at Friday’s event had Vermont license plates. But according to Sen. Becca White, D-Windsor, who’s vice chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, owners have had varying success getting their trucks registered in practice. She said it seems to depend on which DMV location they use.

Enter a portion of this year’s miscellaneous motor vehicle bill, S.326. The legislation would create a new definition of mini trucks, also known as Kei trucks, which White said she hopes will give the DMV more clarity when someone comes in seeking to register one.

The Senate approved the DMV bill last month, and it’s now being considered in the House Transportation Committee. White said she sees “all green lights” ahead for the mini-truck provision in the other chamber.

Stevens, the mini-truck owner, is among those who wasn’t able to get his vehicle registered. Instead, he registered the truck in Montana using a limited liability company he set up in that state, he said.

His truck is painted like a helmet for his favorite NFL team, the New York Giants. It’s an ironic paint job, he acknowledged, given the truck’s small size. A sticker on the back windshield warns that its 650cc engine will work its way from zero to 60 mph … eventually. 

One of the best things about Kei trucks, Stevens and others at the event said, is that they are far cheaper than the average truck sold in the U.S., but still offer a decent-sized bed and, in many cases, even have four-wheel drive. Stevens paid just $2,300 for his, including the cost of importing it from Japan.

“So many people in Vermont want a four-wheel-drive pickup truck. So, this market makes that accessible,” said Cristina Shayonye, who met her spouse when they both pulled up to an apple pie festival in Dummerston in the same model of miniature van.

These days, the couple operates a vehicle repair shop in Brattleboro that specializes in tiny vehicles. Both said that on top of the practicality, the trucks are simply a good time.

“I kind of feel like Santa Claus every time I roll up into a parking lot,” Shayonye said. “It just brightens people’s days.”

— Shaun Robinson

In the know

Friday marked the end of the first legislative week for which public access to the Statehouse was limited to a single entrance daily. A combination of Capitol Police officers and sheriff’s deputies were scanning bags and wanding down entrants daily, too. Previously, it had often been just once a week that the loading dock entrance was the only one available. 

Agatha Kessler, the sergeant-at-arms, has said it was “very likely” that officials would make the single point of entry permanent before the end of this year’s session. The decision to bolster security was made, in part, over concerns stemming from the assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband last year, Kessler has said.

— Shaun Robinson

Some of Vermont’s Olympic medalists were out and about in the Statehouse on Friday, part of their celebratory homecoming after this winter’s Milan-Cortina games. 

Alpine silver medalist Ryan Cochran-Siegle of Starksboro, Alpine bronze medalist Paula Moltzan of Waitsfield and two-time cross-country silver medalist Ben Ogden of Landgrove were honored in a House resolution. So were gold medalist Alpine racer Mikaela Shiffrin, who trained at Burke Mountain Academy, Stratton-trained cross-country bronze medalist Jessie Diggins, and ski big air silver medalist Mac Forehand, of Winhall.  

Current and former Olympians — both medalists and competitors — toured the Golden Dome with Rep. Jed Lipsky, I-Stowe, who commended Vermont’s winter sports excellence in a floor speech. 

— Ethan Weinstein

On the trail

Newbury resident Susan Culp is running as an independent for the Caledonia-Orange House seat, she announced this week. Culp serves as the Newbury Selectboard chair. 

That House seat is held by Newbury Rep. Joe Parsons, who is listed on the Legislature’s website as an independent and has previously run as a Republican.  

And Rep. Elizabeth Burrows, D-West Windsor, announced last month that she’s running for Senate. A vacancy in the three-seat Windsor County district opened up after Democratic Sen. Alison Clarkson said earlier this year she would not seek reelection. 

— Ethan Weinstein

The University of Vermont is asking legislators for $15 million from a statewide student financial aid fund so the school can put it toward a long-planned campus sports complex instead.

While Gov. Phil Scott supports the proposal, it has gotten a cold reception so far from lawmakers. Scott included the funding move in his state budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts in July. And he highlighted the project in his budget address to lawmakers at the start of the legislative session in January.

The House took the plan out of the version of a spending package it passed last week. The chamber’s bill, H.951, is now being considered in the Senate.

Both supporters and detractors of the plan agree it would mark a shift in the use of the state’s Higher Education Endowment Trust Fund, which helps pay for aid to students at UVM, in the Vermont State Colleges System or attending other schools in-state.

Last year, the trust fund paid for 675 scholarships averaging $1,400 each, according to data from the Vermont State Treasurer’s Office, which manages the pot of money.  About three-quarters of the beneficiaries were first-generation college students.

But for UVM, the state fund — which recently saw a large infusion of cash — is an attractive option to get construction back underway on its “multipurpose center” project, which broke ground in 2019 but has stalled since the Covid-19 pandemic. The indoor venue would be among the largest in the state, school leaders have said.

Rep. Robin Scheu, D-Middlebury, chairs the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee. She said she opposes UVM’s plan because taking money out of the trust fund would make less available for student aid. Doing that, for a building project, is a policy decision that needs more scrutiny, she said. 

“It’s completely unrelated to the uses of the fund — and that’s a huge policy shift,” she said of UVM’s project Wednesday.

One member of the appropriations panel was blunt in his criticism during a hearing on the plan earlier this year: “I don’t like this,” said Rep. Tom Stevens, D-Waterbury. The House Education Committee has also voiced its opposition to the proposal, calling it “well outside” the fund’s current purpose in a February memo. 

State lawmakers put $6 million into the fund when they set it up in 1999. It gets new money from the estate tax on high-wealth individuals’ assets when they die, as well as an annual infusion of cash from the state’s collection of unclaimed financial property. 

Every year, the state withdraws up to 5% of the fund’s assets for aid to students at UVM, Vermont State University and Community College of Vermont. Money is also sent to the Vermont Student Assistance Corp. for its financial aid programs.

The aid is drawn from the interest the fund accrues, because state law does not allow withdrawals that would reduce the amount of its principal. A smaller percentage of the fund can also be used to bolster UVM and the state colleges’ endowments — provided there are matching private donations available.

Both UVM and the governor’s office are pitching to take $15 million out of the trust fund’s principal. They argue the timing is ripe because the fund got a historic windfall of estate tax revenue last year: more than $26 million, which brought its total assets to nearly $66 million. Even after taking out $15 million for UVM’s new facility, they’ve argued, the fund would still be larger than in years past.

“I know it’s a departure from how those funds have been used for the past,” Marlene Tromp, the UVM president, told House Appropriations last month. “We believe this one-time investment is an appropriate use of those funds, because it will allow us to make such an impact on the state.”

The new facility would be able to seat 5,000 people, Wendy Koenig, UVM’s director of government relations, said at the same committee hearing. It would house the men’s and women’s basketball teams and host concerts, lectures, conferences and other events, according to previously-detailed plans. The project would also renovate existing athletic facilities on the site.

UVM has spent $75 million on the project so far and needs $100 million more to finish it, according to Tromp. The state’s infusion of cash would make some major donors who are on the fence more likely to step up, she said, as well as prevent UVM from needing to raise fees on its students to make up the funding gap.

She argued the facility would attract visitors to Burlington, boosting the local economy. It would also make UVM a more attractive campus for more students, which is a boon to the region and its future workforce. She recalled a similar facility at Boise State University, where she was the president before being hired at UVM last year.

“I used to be really proud when we hosted ‘Disney On Ice’ at my last campus, and all those kids and their families would come,” she said. “Because when you set foot on campus, it starts to change the way you think about college. It becomes your place. And we want people to feel like UVM is their place.”

Scott’s secretary of administration, Sarah Clark, reiterated the governor’s support for the project this week.

In a letter outlining areas of disagreement with the House-passed budget, she said the project would “not only be an investment in our higher education system, but in an economic development and cultural engine for Vermont.”

Theo Wells-Spackman is a Report for America corps member who reports for VTDigger.

The manufacturing industry generates billions for Vermont’s economy each year — but jobs in the sector are on the decline.

That’s according to state Chamber of Commerce President Amy Spear, who spoke to a packed room of lawmakers and business leaders at the Statehouse during manufacturing industry day programming Thursday morning. Manufacturing employment has fallen more than 11% since pre-pandemic levels in 2020, she said, and a recent long-term study on the industry returned a pessimistic outlook for the rest of the decade.

In general, Spear and her colleague Megan Sullivan said in an interview, manufacturers create relatively high-paying jobs with significant upward mobility in Vermont. They also form the backbone of a crucial facet of the state’s economy, Spear said: exports.

Manufacturing brings “new money” into Vermont, Spear told lawmakers Thursday. “It grows the economic pie rather than redistributing it,” she said.

Sen. Alison Clarkson, D-Windsor, chair of the Senate Economic Development Committee, echoed Spear’s comments.

“You are our partners in economic development, and we depend on you,” she told business leaders. “We are your cheerleaders in the Statehouse.”

But while manufacturers in the room applauded several recent legislative efforts to ease financial pressure on companies — including Covid-era relief and research and development tax credits in a bill currently under consideration — several expressed anxiety over the rising cost of doing business in Vermont.

Dave Laforce, who owns Built By Newport, a furniture manufacturer in the Northeast Kingdom, said the combination of electricity costs, property taxes and health care premiums had been crushing in recent years. But passing costs on to consumers isn’t an option when you’re facing international competition, he said.

“In my 35 years of being in this business, I have not seen the escalation of fixed costs that we’ve experienced in the last three years,” he told lawmakers.

In particular, Laforce joined Janette Bombardier, an executive at Chroma Technology in Bellows Falls, in raising concerns over the burden of the payroll tax lawmakers recently imposed to support child care growth. Many of Chroma’s employees live in New Hampshire and therefore cannot access the subsidy this tax pays for, Bombardier said, and even those on the Vermont side live in an area where the need for child care still far outstrips available slots.

“I’m not sure it’s doing what we’re all hoping it would do in terms of creating spaces,” Bombardier said of the payroll tax.

Recruiting an adequate workforce was perhaps the largest headwind that business leaders cited.

Ben Bristow of Nolato Vermont, a plastic and silicone molding company in Royalton, said his Swedish ownership had considered opening a new facility in the area several years ago. But when it became clear that hiring a 200-person staff in a short time would be difficult, the project abruptly moved to Hungary, he said.

Lt. Gov. John Rodgers concluded Thursday with a plea to strengthen and expand the state’s technical education centers and the apprenticeship programs that connect them with local manufacturers.

“If we’re going to encourage the next generation of builders, we need to get them involved in hands-on learning early,” he said.

— Theo Wells-Spackman

In the know

Testimony to lawmakers last year revealed that gaps in state alerts to crime victims sometimes caused them life-altering harm. After learning about those gaps, lawmakers on the House Corrections and Institutions Committee assembled a task force to improve the state alert system. 

On Thursday members of that task force reported back with their most recent recommendations. 

Victims have long asked lawmakers to make the automated alert system customizable. For example, someone might want to be alerted if the person who harmed them was released from prison. But they might not want to know if their abuser was merely transferred from one prison to another. Victims might also want to change the types of information they receive over time. 

Kelsey Rice, a survivor of domestic violence who sits on the task force, told the committee that as more time passes after the moment when someone’s abuser is arrested, victims might want to change the types of information they receive. “The choices and decisions I made in that moment were not the same choices and needs that I identified needing later on,” Rice said. 

Current state law leaves no room for that choice, task force members told the committee. They asked lawmakers to draft changes to Vermont law allowing victims to opt out of certain notifications. 

— Charlotte Oliver

Gov. Phil Scott had harsh words at a press conference Wednesday for the House majority that voted last week in favor of the chamber’s budget proposal. 

The Republican governor read aloud a letter he said he’d received from a Vermont-born man who wrote that he’s now leaving the state because his taxes have gotten too expensive.

“Apparently, the majority of House members have been hearing something different from their constituents,” Scott said before criticizing how the chamber is “proposing to increase property taxes by an average of 7%.”

The governor has proposed a plan that would increase property taxes too — by 4%. Ultimately, the size of the projected tax hike will depend on how much money legislators and the governor agree to use to buy down tax rates in the upcoming fiscal year.

Scott also said he disagrees with the House’s decision to draw on $9.5 million in interest from the state’s Technology Modernization Fund to pay for a number of one-time initiatives that weren’t part of his budget proposal. And he wants the Senate, which is now reviewing the budget bill, to back an idea he initially proposed to eventually send all of the state revenue from taxes on vehicle purchases to the Transportation Fund.

The Scott administration also opposes a portion of the House’s budget that would require detailed information about the state Agency of Education’s operations in some of the agency’s future spending proposals. 

In testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee later Wednesday, Adam Greshin, Scott’s commissioner of finance and management, called that language “basically a middle finger to the agency.”

— Shaun Robinson

On the trail

Attorney General Charity Clark is weighing in on the race for Chittenden County’s next top prosecutor. 

On Thursday, Clark endorsed Bram Kranichfeld, who currently serves as Franklin County state’s attorney. 

Kranichfeld, a Democrat, is running to the right of current Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, who is seeking reelection. 

“Bram is incredibly caring, moral, and thoughtful. He is an excellent lawyer, someone whose judgment I trust. I believe he’s the change Chittenden County needs,” Clark said in a statement. 

Some have said the race is off to a “spicy” start.

— Ethan Weinstein