Drafting group for H.91 narrows language on regional needs assessments, hotels-as-shelter and advisory committee makeup

A legislative drafting group working on H.91 agreed on edits to sections of the draft bill that assign statewide planning responsibility, require community action agencies to prepare regional needs assessments, set rules for use of hotel and motel rooms as emergency shelter, and change the membership and duties of the bill’s advisory committee.

The committee removed the word “jointly” from a provision on regional needs assessments and rewrote the section so that the Agency of Human Services, working with the Department for Children and Families, “shall have statewide responsibility for meeting the intent of this chapter, including statewide planning and system development.” Community action agencies will “develop a regional needs assessment and planning process in collaboration with community and state partners,” the group agreed.

Those edits were offered as part of a broader effort to ensure state departments — including, the drafter said, Department of Mental Health and other state partners — are explicitly involved in planning and not siloed in advisory roles. Members emphasized that the planning process should include input from “people with lived experience.”

On reporting, committee members added language requiring that plans report household participation rates in coordinated-entry processes and in case-management services, to give the department a sense of how households move through assessment and services.

Hotel and motel use: rates, limits and priorities

The group also refined language about using hotel and motel rooms for emergency shelter. Under the agreed edits, the department will propose hotel and motel rates as part of its budget presentation to the General Assembly. Community action agencies “shall not pay or cause to be paid more on a per-room, per-night basis than that rate approved by the General Assembly when using state funds,” participants clarified.

Members added a policy preference — not an absolute requirement — that community action agencies, “to the extent possible,” enter agreements for blocks of rooms or hotel-based program arrangements and prioritize those block agreements over individual per-room placements when appropriate for the household. At the same time, the group said the language should not constrain domestic-violence providers or other life-safety placements; members explicitly said DV services should not be limited by the block-agreement preference.

The committee also agreed that any hotel or motel providing emergency shelter must comply with the department’s program rules and the lodging-establishment licensing rule the health department enforces; health-department inspection and licensing requirements were discussed as tied to the program-rule framework.

Advisory committee: membership, subcommittees and sunset

The drafting group made multiple changes to the bill’s advisory committee. They removed several state officer lines (including a vote-line listing the secretary and the commissioner as voting members), clarified that some department officials may serve as nonvoting participants, and added the director (or equivalent head) of the Office of Economic Opportunity and the head of Economic Services as specified participants.

Members debated the committee’s size and representation. The group kept five representatives with lived experience of homelessness, appointed jointly by the state’s two Continuums of Care (the Chittenden County Continuum of Care and the Vermont Balance of State Continuum of Care), and retained five representatives of local housing coalitions (including at least two who are shelter providers). In several spots members agreed to reduce some representative counts (for example, changing one five-person slot to three in discussion) but ultimately left the lived-experience and coalition representation counts in place to ensure geographic and demographic representation.

The committee’s statute will explicitly permit subcommittees. Those subcommittees may include people not formally appointed to the advisory committee and should include participants representing older Vermonters, people with disabilities, people transitioning from corrections, people with substance-use disorders and other specific populations cited during the meeting.

The drafting group kept an existing per-meeting stipend in statute and recorded it as $50 per meeting; members noted the amount is widely viewed as inadequate but that the $50 figure is in current statute. The advisory committee will sunset on July 1, 2029, to cover planning and the initial phase of implementation, the group agreed.

Implementation plan and housekeeping

Committee members said several items enumerated under the advisory committee’s duties would be relocated into the department’s implementation-plan requirements so the advisory committee would advise on the department’s implementation plan as a whole rather than having a separate, duplicative statutory list. One drafting member summarized that the advisory committee will “provide advice and recommendations regarding the design, implementation plan and transition,” and that the department’s implementation plan will spell out the detailed components.

What the group did not do

There were no recorded formal votes during the session on the draft language; the transcript records discussion and agreement on edits, not a roll-call decision.

Next steps

Members said staff will incorporate the agreed edits into the bill language and return to the implementation-plan section after a legislative floor break.