Ways & Means hears revised Budget Adjustment Act that strips several new spending items

Emily Byrne, Joint Fiscal Office staff, briefed the legislative Ways & Means committee on a revised edition of the Budget Adjustment Act and said the bill removes a number of spending items that had appeared in the governor’s recommended adjustment and the earlier H.141 version.

"There are some changes," Byrne told the committee, and she walked members through the high-level bullets in the revised proposal.

Byrne said the revised bill returns $14 million to the treasurer’s appropriation that had earlier been moved to other uses after the summer floods. "There’s $14,000,000 going to the treasurer for bond redemption costs," she said. That $14 million had been moved earlier from the treasurer’s appropriation and, in a prior House-Senate version, was allocated elsewhere, primarily to the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board; the new edition restores the money to the treasurer.

The revised bill does not create two positions that H.141 had added in the Attorney General’s Office and the Human Rights Commission; Byrne said that omission reduces appropriations by about $67,000, representing roughly two months of funding for the positions. "The new…