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Senate rejects amendment to strip Higher Education Trust Fund support for UVM center and housing pilot
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Summary
An amendment to remove $12 million for a UVM multipurpose center and $600,000 for a Vermont State University housing pilot from the Higher Education Trust Fund failed on a 7-23 roll-call vote after senators debated the fund's purpose and a committee plan to repay the trust fund with cannabis excise revenues.
Senators voted down Thursday an amendment that would have removed two capital allocations from the Higher Education Trust Fund in H.951, the state's biennial appropriations bill.
Senator from Addison introduced the amendment and argued the trust fund was established as an endowment to provide perpetual scholarships. She said the fund's statutory purpose and oversight committee make it inappropriate to divert corpus to pay for capital projects such as a University of Vermont multipurpose center or a housing pilot for the state university system.
"If we have a windfall in this fund, we should be using it to increase scholarships," the sponsor said, urging colleagues to preserve the fund's scholarship focus.
The Appropriations Committee chair responded that the committee had constructed a repayment path for the trust fund by directing 20% of the cannabis excise tax into the fund, an approach the chair said would replenish the corpus in three to four years and leave the long-term scholarship commitment intact. The chair said that construct and the committee's due diligence persuaded the panel to oppose the amendment.
After a brief recess to allow additional consultation, the Senate took a roll-call vote: 7 senators voted for the amendment, 23 opposed, and the amendment failed. Senators on both sides framed their arguments around statutory purpose, intergenerational scholarship commitments, and the balance between immediate capital investments and long-term endowment health.
The full appropriations package was later advanced to the House with the committee's recommended amendments and scheduled for third reading.
