Conferees agree $625,000 for fire truck, recovery house and Montpelier study; bond use for bundled projects unresolved

Members of the Senate Institutions conference committee, meeting with the House Institutions and Corrections conference, said they agreed to allocate $625,000 for three items — a fire truck, a recovery house and a Montpelier study — and to refer three additional projects “in bulk” for consideration, but they left unresolved whether those bundled projects qualify for bond financing.

“We are good with the 625,000 going, for the fire truck, the recovery house, and the Montpelier study,” Speaker 2, conference committee member, Senate Institutions, said during the committee’s discussion.

The committee said it supports grouping the three additional projects — repeatedly called “the 3 B’s” in the discussion — so they are discussed together rather than item-by-item. “We do agree to having the 3 b's be, bulk, being being discussed in bulk,” Speaker 2 said. Speaker 3 and Speaker 1 sought clarification about funding levels and the source of those funds.

Conferees described an arrangement in which the conferees accept $2,000,000 in cash for the bundled projects and would reallocate $1,100,000 in bond proceeds from the courthouse project to reach a $3,000,000 total for the bundled projects. “You’re saying keep it at 3,000,000…we're agreeing to your 2,000,000 in cash. But when you take that 1,100,000.0 away from that and you put it on the courthouse, to make the courthouse $8,000,000 in cash, That leaves us 1,100,000.0 in bonded. And from the courthouse project and we're saying take the $1,100,000 from the courthouse project and put that into 3 games,” Speaker 1 said, describing the arithmetic the committee used to reach the $3,000,000 figure.

At the same time, the committee recorded uncertainty about whether the bundled projects can be financed with bonds if they are not municipally owned. “The treasurer has indicated … these are not bond eligible,” Speaker 1 said. Speaker 2 responded that the projects “will be municipally owned is my understanding,” but conferees also cautioned about tax-exempt bond rules and potential Internal Revenue Service constraints. “You should have to get into tax exempt bonds and with the IRS. So you gotta be careful with bond to dollars right before the end,” Speaker 3 said.

Committee members said the group still needed to finalize precise statutory or drafting language describing the projects, including language specifying “publicly owned infrastructure” for the bundled items. Speaker 2 said that addressing municipal ownership in the text would respond to earlier concerns and that the committee needed to get final text on members’ desks before advancing the package.

No formal roll-call vote was recorded in the transcript excerpt; conferees described agreements reached in the conference discussion and identified outstanding items that require follow-up with the treasurer and final drafting.

Next steps the committee identified in the discussion include getting the draft text to committee members’ desks, confirming whether the bundled projects will be municipally owned, and resolving the bond-eligibility question with the treasurer and regarding IRS tax-exempt rules. “Let’s go talk about this,” Speaker 3 said at the conclusion of the excerpt.