The public can follow much of Vermont lawmakers’ work easily these days: Bills are updated and tracked from the day they are introduced; agendas are published online in advance of meetings. Since the pandemic, floor discussions and even committee meetings are generally live streamed, and the recordings remain online for viewing after the sessions conclude.
For a small state with relatively limited Statehouse resources, this is a testament to how even Vermont’s oldest institutions can use modern tools to foster trust in government — when they choose to.
State lawmakers have chosen not to do so when it comes to their own potential conflicts of interest. Vermont’s legislative ethics disclosures fail to provide meaningful insights into legislators’ potential conflicts, according to government transparency experts in Vermont and across the country who spoke with Seven Days.
In this digital era, lawmakers nevertheless fill out their disclosure forms by hand, and they are often difficult to read. Adding to the confusion, House and Senate members use separate forms that ask for different information. Experts said standardizing the disclosures and switching to an electronic system would offer a clearer and more comprehensive view of potential conflicts of interest among elected officials.
Easy access to this information can illuminate for voters the private interests behind their elected officials’ votes, experts said. Previous reporting by Seven Days, for example, created a database of legislators’ disclosures and found that nearly half of all state senators were landlords as the chamber mulled legislation on tenant protections in 2019.
Transparency advocates pointed to the current tumult in federal government, as the Trump administration upends government norms, as evidence of the need for robust mechanisms for transparency and accountability.
Vermont ranked 37th in the country in a 2015 assessment of state government accountability and transparency conducted jointly by the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity. The findings helped spur the legislature to establish the state’s ethics commission two years later amid vows that Vermont’s elected officials were committed to restoring faith and trust in government. The commission can receive and review all complaints filed against legislators before referring them to ethics committees in the House and Senate. Those committees alone can investigate concerns at the center of legislative business, such as voting and committee assignments.
This year, despite that, the House voted to exempt the groups that investigate alleged misconduct by legislators from a requirement to consult with the state ethics commission, a move that raised concerns about the legislature’s commitment to government ethics. The commission has spoken out publicly against the move.
More than half of Vermont’s citizen legislators hold jobs outside of the General Assembly, according to a review by Seven Days of this year’s disclosures. According to House and Senate rules, state legislators are only prohibited from voting on matters in which they are “immediately and directly interested.” So, legislative attorneys have advised lawmakers that unless they are among a small number of people who would benefit directly from a bill, they have no conflict of interest. That means few legislators opt to abstain from votes, which is generally the remedy when a lawmaker has a conflict.
Seven Days reported last year that the Senate ethics committee dismissed a complaint alleging that Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (D-Chittenden-Southeast) had a conflict of interest stemming from her husband’s job as a property manager with his family’s business, Hinsdale Properties, a major landlord in the Burlington area. Ram Hinsdale, who was then the chair of the Senate Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs Committee, had helped craft a bill that changed municipal zoning laws to allow for more dense housing, which later was passed into law. The committee concluded there was no probable cause of an ethics violation.
“Overall, the disclosure for Vermont lawmakers is substandard compared to what it should be.” Kedric Payne
The fact that so many of Vermont’s lawmakers have other jobs makes it particularly important for the public to stay informed about what money might influence their elected officials, said Kedric Payne, vice president, general counsel and senior director of ethics for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on voting and government ethics.
“When you enter into public service, you enter into a public trust,” Payne said. “The integrity of the entire government partly depends on how the public views their individual representative.”
Though there have been incremental improvements to legislative disclosures over the past decade, they’re still wanting, experts said.
“Overall, the disclosure for Vermont lawmakers is substandard compared to what it should be,” Payne said. Expanding the scope of information required — particularly for House members — and making the forms electronic would help, he said.
Ethics disclosures only became a requirement for Vermont’s state legislators in recent sessions. The House introduced the forms in 2014, and the Senate followed suit soon after.
The details sought by the Senate disclosures have since surpassed those in the House, shedding far more light on senators’ potential conflicts. The Senate form asks for five fields of information: sources of income, company ownership, leases or contracts with the state, lobbying activity, and service affiliations (including boards, commissions or other entities that are regulated by law or that receive funding from the state).
The chamber updated its form last year to mirror Vermont’s candidate disclosure, which individuals are required to submit when running for statewide or legislative office. Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth (D/P-Chittenden-Central), who chairs the Senate Rules Committee that has authority over the Senate ethics disclosures, said the recent move to match the candidate form has been part of an overall trend toward greater transparency since he was first elected to the Senate in 2010.
Payne, of the Campaign Legal Center, said it would be better if senators had to disclose more detailed information about individual stocks they hold. Senators must list each source of investment income, such as stocks, bonds or property that is worth more than $5,000. While many federal public officeholders are required to list specific stock holdings, state officials, including those in Vermont, generally are not.
The Vermont House form asks for just two fields of information: a lawmaker’s employer and any service affiliations, such as boards or commissions that receive funding from the state. The questions have not changed since the form was created more than a decade ago. The House separately requires its members to provide the state’s more detailed candidate disclosure form from the Secretary of State, which House Speaker Jill Krowinski (D-Burlington) described as the “standard-bearer for financial disclosure information.” But the chamber’s rules do not require those forms to be published alongside the legislative disclosures.
The lack of information required for House forms as opposed to Senate ones stood out to Michael Beckel, senior research director for Issue One, a nonpartisan group that advocates to reduce the influence of money in politics.
“If transparency and disclosure of certain activities is good enough for one chamber, it should be good enough for both chambers,” Beckel said.
Once legislators in each chamber complete their respective forms at the start of the session, the handwritten forms are scanned, then published on two web pages in more than 100 separate files.
“That’s a transparency issue,” said Viki Harrison, a director at Common Cause, a nonprofit that advocates for government reform. “It’s like you’re trying to make it hard for people to get information.”
Harrison said the pen-and-paper approach of both chambers makes it hard for the public to easily grasp their elected officials’ potential conflicts of interest.
“It’s 2025,” Harrison said. “They need to be electronic.”
Beckel, of Issue One, said digital forms would better help Vermonters stay informed. Legislators’ responses would be standardized and legible and easily entered into a database that could be updated automatically throughout the session.
In the absence of a state-managed database, news outlets have stepped in over the years to fill the void. In 2019, Seven Days created a searchable database that standardized lawmakers’ responses and linked to the original handwritten form. VTDigger created a similar database for last year’s disclosures and provides a tool to review lawmakers’ current legislative and campaign disclosure forms.
While these third-party resources have helped make legislative disclosures more accessible, they can miss some updates. If a lawmaker amends their form during the session, for example, groups managing external databases might not pick up on the change.
The Secretary of State’s Office uses a robust set of digital tools, including forms, to populate databases for its campaign finance, lobbying and election-management systems. Seán Sheehan, elections director in the office, said the move to managing everything electronically has been like “night and day.”
“Going electronic with all three systems has been a great benefit, both in terms of staff efficiency and in terms of public transparency and overall effectiveness,” he said.
The House appears to have no plans to update its disclosure form. Krowinski, who chairs the House Rules Committee, which would oversee any adjustments, said the matter had not been brought up for consideration recently but that the committee is open to considering ways to make the chamber’s ethics information more accessible online.
Baruth said he was similarly open to discussions about updating how the Senate form is completed and published. Currently, all 30 state senators’ ethics disclosures are available on the Secretary of the Senate’s web page in a 91-page scanned document.
When asked about possibly changing the way the forms are uploaded or administered, Senate Secretary John Bloomer said the handwritten forms are in line with the chamber’s broader policy of not permitting electronic document submissions. He said there had not been much thought to date about how the forms are uploaded beyond getting that done as quickly as possible, or whether to consider an electronic form.
Bloomer also noted that the Senate still operates under “arcane” procedures; devices such as laptops and cellphones are barred from the chamber’s floor during session.
Every state legislature has to adapt time-honored traditions to modern systems, and customs should not impede progress, Payne of the Campaign Legal Center said.
“Even though you can expect an assembly to be steeped in tradition,” Payne said, “you still have to respect the times you live in.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Transparency Ends at Ethics | The Vermont legislature’s handwritten ethics disclosure forms are simply not up to snuff, watchdogs say”
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2025.
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