Earlier this year, Vermont lawmakers took up a monumental task: reshaping how the state governs and finances schools. With precision and clarity, the General Assembly tackled some of the leading reforms in the marquee education bill. But for many of the thornier decisions, legislators deferred to a familiar solution: more reports.
Lawmakers delegated key questions — such as how new, consolidated school districts could be structured — to a redistricting task force that will submit a report before legislators reconvene in January. The education bill, which Gov. Phil Scott signed into law early last month, also created two additional study groups and called for more than 20 additional reports or studies due in coming months and years.
Legislative reports and study groups can play a vital role in Vermont’s resource-strapped citizen legislature, allowing policy making to advance year-round, outside the limited legislative session. The legislature often doesn’t just commission a report from staff; instead, it sets up special groups of lawmakers and subject matter experts to research an issue.
But studies also impose costs on taxpayers and strain lawmakers, state employees, consultants and others who must meet the legislature’s demands. Sometimes these reports, and associated working groups, have little effect on future policy decisions, leading legislators and issue advocates to question whether the practice wastes time and resources.
Efforts to scale back have done little. In 2024, 313 reports were submitted to the General Assembly —the most in a decade. In total, this year’s 73 new laws created more than 15 study groups and called for an additional 100 reports — adding to the more than 250 reports that already flood the legislature in a typical year, according to an analysis by Seven Days and data released by the governor’s office.
The legislature’s proclivity for working groups and reports is nothing new.
“It’s almost like a disease,” said Jeanette White, who represented Windham County in the state Senate for two decades before her retirement in 2023. “They love to set up study committees and love to set up reports.”
Reports vary in length and complexity, from monthly updates to one-time studies. The vast majority are prepared annually, usually by the executive branch, according to data from the Office of Legislative Counsel.
Many of the one-time reports ordered up each year are authored by a mix of lawmakers, agency staff and outside advocates. Their makeup can make or break the efficacy of a group or its final report, said Austin Davis, director of government affairs for the Lake Champlain Chamber.
“It all comes down to what are the timelines, what are the deliverables, who’s included in the process,” Davis said. “At the end of the day, it’s just like so much else: If it’s garbage in, it’s garbage out.”
Reports run the gamut from highly anticipated and impactful, like the one expected from the redistricting task force before the end of the year, to irrelevant. They can slow a conversation during a session, restart it after a roadblock or initiate it during the off-session.
“It’s almost like a disease. They love to set up study committees and love to set up reports.” Jeanette White
Publishing an impotent report can be its own strategy, according to Davis. If a legislator doesn’t want a policy to move forward, he said, relegating an issue to a working group with a report people are unlikely to read can sometimes effectively end the conversation.
But Davis cautioned against dismissing working groups or reports since it’s tricky to know what their long-term impact could be.
This summer, Davis is working on a study committee exploring the potential development of a convention center and performance venue. The task force will report its recommendations to the legislature’s housing and economic development committees by mid-November.
Rep. Alice Emmons (D-Springfield), whose 42 years in the House make her its longest-tenured member, said reports often help breathe life into policy making, particularly when time runs short during the session. Emmons pointed to the 2023 State School Construction Aid Task Force, whose summer work provided the basis for legislation that was introduced when members reconvened the following year. Summer studies like these enable legislators to extend important policy discussions, she said.
Many of the reports come due in the late fall and early winter, just before legislators return to Montpelier. That gives them time to brush up before the session resumes and can provide the basis for future legislation.
But as helpful as a study or extra committee can be, Emmons said, she is still careful to weigh the costs and benefits before deciding if creating one is in order. Emmons noted that school construction was one issue that met that threshold in recent years. Several of the task force’s recommendations were included in this year’s education bill.
The state does not track the overall costs of legislative reports and working groups. Groups typically pay their members a per diem for their work. While payments can vary, legislators typically get $168 per day, and others receive at least $50.
These expenses are often drawn from agencies’ appropriated funds, though the legislature can designate additional money to cover costs such as hiring outside consultants and facilitators, as it has done for the redistricting task force, to the tune of $150,000. The legislature set aside another $215,000 to cover contracting and software expenses for a separate working group that will create new school district voting wards, in coordination with the redistricting task force.
On at least one occasion, the legislature recognized that study groups have proliferated and, in 2017, set out to address the trend. The strategy: setting up another study group, the Sunset Advisory Commission. With White as its chair, the commission set out to identify outdated or duplicative groups and right-size pay for study participants, though it did not evaluate overall costs of working groups. Commission members interviewed committees about their purpose, expenses and membership to identify any that were unnecessary.
Sen. Brian Collamore (R-Rutland), who served on the Sunset Advisory Commission, said it dissolved 40 to 50 of more than 300 existing groups. One body, the Champion Land Transaction Citizen Advisory Council, hadn’t met in more than 10 years, Collamore recalled.
But the legislature’s appetite for new working groups and more reports largely outpaced the commission’s efforts. In 2022, VTDigger reported that the legislature dissolved six groups but created 31 more.
The commission itself sunsetted at the start of 2023. White said legislators need to continue its work by ensuring that new groups and their associated reports have expiration dates.
“If they’re not doing that, then the whole exercise was for naught,” White said.
Collamore said it’s a perpetual challenge for legislators to stay focused on minimizing studies and reports.
“Human nature being what it is, rather than sometimes having to make a tough decision and then defend it later, it’s easier to just say, ‘Well, why don’t we study it?'” Collamore said.
But the legislature’s tendency to kick the can down the road often results in a longer, heavier lift for executive branch agencies, which bear much of the downstream strain.
Over the past decade, the Agency of Human Services alone has filed more than 600 reports — far more than any other entity. That workload has a cost, said Janet McLaughlin, deputy commissioner of the agency’s Department for Children and Families.
“Time and effort is money,” McLaughlin said.
This year, DCF will produce nearly 60 legislative reports, according to Nellie Marvel, a senior adviser with the department. One monthly housing report, submitted in late July, consumed nearly two days of staff time, she said. At that rate, over the course of a year, this one report would consume the equivalent of an entire month of one employee’s work time.
“It’s important to keep in mind that every hour that our staff spends working on a legislative report is an hour that’s not spent on things like, in DCF’s case, investigating child maltreatment cases or making sure that a family that receives SNAP benefits gets them so they can buy their groceries,” Marvel said.
Other agencies face similar burdens. Administration Secretary Sarah Clark said impact often hangs on the scope and type of research requested, with larger reports typically garnering greater policy development than annual filings.
One particularly comprehensive report submitted by the Agency of Administration’s Department of Libraries on the status of libraries in Vermont required the formation of a working group and took an estimated five weeks of staff hours to complete.
The legislature does not alert agencies when they are tasked to produce a report, so staff must track Statehouse discussions and comb through new laws to identify reporting requirements. And after investments of time and resources to draft and submit a report, there’s no guarantee the legislature will make use of it.
“More often than we’d like, there are reports assigned simply to appease a particular policy interest group or legislator, and those frequently have little impact,” Clark said.
Rep. Matthew Birong (D-Vergennes), chair of the House Committee on Government Operations and Military Affairs, estimated that he reads or reviews 15 reports in a given session, all of which are specific to his committee’s subject area.
“We’ve got a digital shelf of them, like three-ring binders in the cloud,” Birong said. “As we need to understand more about a policy we’re considering, that’s when we ask for a report to be reviewed by the committee, legislative council, stakeholders, et cetera.”
Birong said that each year, committee chairs receive a list of reports relevant to their committee. They’re asked to flag any that are no longer useful and to lift the reporting requirement.
Still, the legislature has solicited reports on policy dilemmas such as universal pre-K and a second-home taxes again and again, even when it’s unclear how their questions or research needs may have changed.
“It can be frustrating when our staff spend all of this time to come up with something, and then that advice is simply not taken, or they go in the opposite direction,” DCF’s Marvel said.
Those frustrations surfaced during the education reform debate. The legislature had established the Commission on the Future of Public Education in Vermont to develop recommendations for reforming the state’s public school system. The 13-member group, composed of legislators, agency staff and education advocates, has met 20 times since July 2024 to grapple with complex questions about the education system. Supported by $200,000 appropriated by the General Assembly and shared with a school-construction task force, the commission will submit a report to the legislature with proposed policy answers by this December, and then the commission will cease to exist.
But this year, much of the commission’s work was preempted by a sweeping education reform proposal from the Scott administration, which became the foundation for the bill passed by lawmakers.
This summer, the commission’s chair, Meghan Roy, and another member resigned, voicing objections to how the commission was “undercut” and its work was never embraced. Roy wrote in her resignation letter that it was not clear that the group’s work would be “legitimately part of the [legislature’s] process moving fworward.”
Agency staff also resent the wasted time. Mike Snyder, who served as commissioner of the Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation from 2011 to 2022, said the legislature effectively requested the same report on forest health three times in five years without appearing to seriously consider the department’s recommendations.
“Why do we have to have all these reports if we’re just going to have more reports and they don’t actually lead to any policy change?” Snyder said.
Despite such concerns, state officials understand that working groups and the reports they generate can hold value.
“We really are all on the same team, trying to figure out how to make the best decisions for Vermonters,” said McLaughlin, the deputy commissioner of DCF.
Though the Sunset Advisory Committee no longer exists, Collamore said he is still pushing to reduce the volume of study groups and reports. Fewer of both, he argues, would give lawmakers more time to focus on what matters most.
“If you’re going to ask people to go ahead and invest their time and energy in making a report,” Collamore said, “then you want to make sure that you agree to read it, at least.”
The redistricting task force’s highly anticipated proposal for new school district maps will be one of many reports delivered to lawmakers before they reconvene in January.
That report, Collamore said, should be required reading for every member of the legislature.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Filed and Forgotten | Years after trying to cut back on the number of reports it commissions, Vermont’s legislature is ordering up more than ever”
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2025.
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