click to enlarge - File: Luke Awtry
- Emma Mulvaney-Stanak (right) at a mayoral debate
Vermont Rep. Emma Mulvaney-Stanak (P/D-Burlington) is weighing her first big decision as the Queen City's mayor-elect: whether to start her historic administration while holding two elected offices at once. When she’s sworn in as mayor on April 1, she’ll have several more weeks of the legislative session still to go.
Mulvaney-Stanak knows she can’t give both jobs the attention they demand. But she’s torn about when to resign her Statehouse seat given a pivotal vote this spring on whether Vermont should open overdose prevention centers — a bill Republican Gov. Phil Scott is expected to veto.
Mulvaney-Stanak says such a facility could help Burlington, where a more dangerous drug supply has caused overdose rates to skyrocket. If she steps down, she worries that the legislature won't have the numbers to override Scott.
“I really want people to know that I’m trying to do this very consciously,” Mulvaney-Stanak said of her decision. If the vote were to fail, she said, “I do not want to be the reason.”
Cosponsored by Mulvaney-Stanak,
H.72 would allocate $2 million to open two overdose prevention centers, which would allow people to use drugs under supervision and be revived from possible overdose. Medically-trained professionals would provide people with sterile supplies and distribute naloxone, an overdose-reversal drug. The centers' operators and the people who use them would be shielded from arrest and prosecution, according to the bill.
Mulvaney-Stanak says the centers would reduce needle litter and help people with substance-use disorder get treatment. She hopes one could open in Burlington.
Scott has long opposed overdose prevention centers, and in 2022,
he vetoed a bill that would have simply studied them. Vermont Health Commissioner Mark Levine has been skeptical of the facilities but appeared recently to change his tune, saying in a press conference earlier this month that they should “become part of Vermont’s multi-pronged strategy” of harm reduction,
Vermont Public reported.
The bill passed the House and is now in a Senate committee. Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth (D/P-Burlington) said it could be a month or longer before the full Senate takes up the bill. Meantime, the governor is already contemplating a veto, according to his spokesperson, Jason Maulucci.
“[Scott] continues to believe the unproven sites would divert scarce resources away from more impactful and proven harm reduction, treatment and prevention strategies. They also remain federally illegal, which is not contemplated in the bill,” Maulucci said in an email. “We’ll see how the bill winds up after potentially future Senate changes.”
The House would need 100 votes to override a veto, and Mulvaney-Stanak isn’t sure the margin is there, even with support from Progressives. Despite having a supermajority, Democrats haven't always been able to overcome differences within their own party. Last June, for example, they overrode Scott's vetoes of the state budget and a new childcare payroll tax — but didn’t have the votes to bypass his rejection of a bill that would have boosted legislator pay.
On overdose prevention centers, there's no consensus. “I don’t think it’s a shoo-in,” Mulvaney-Stanak said of the bill. “The vote count really matters.”
For that reason, Mulvaney-Stanak is considering “holding on” to her seat and only heading to Montpelier to override the overdose prevention site veto or to vote on other key bills. Her seat is up for election in November, but s
he'd resign, at the latest, in June.
She’s also considering resigning sooner. The governor traditionally appoints replacements from the outgoing lawmaker’s same party, and Maulucci said Scott would do the same for Mulvaney-Stanak’s Chittenden-17 seat.
But Mulvaney-Stanak says she doesn't trust Scott to appoint someone in time to vote on the veto, which could happen sometime between April and June. She charged that the governor swiftly fills Republican vacancies but drags his feet for other parties.
In 2022, for example, it took Scott less than a week to
appoint a Republican to a vacant House seat in Franklin but several weeks to fill a
Democrat’s seat in Essex that same year. In 2023, a Hyde Park Democrat’s seat was open for a month before Scott
named a replacement, whereas
last week, he filled a Republican’s seat in Lyndon in five days.
Maulucci says Mulvaney-Stanak is reaching. The Essex seat, he said, became vacant in December 2021, while the legislature wasn’t in session, and Scott appointed a replacement when lawmakers reconvened that January. The governor often has to wait for party committees to submit names for his consideration, which can slow down the process, Maulucci said.
“The Governor believes Vermonters deserve representation in the State House,” he said, “so we prioritize these [appointments] and make them as quickly as possible.”
Mulvaney-Stanak said she’s already heard from people interested in her seat and that, if she does resign, her party would promptly present a list of candidates for Scott’s review.
Meantime, she hasn’t heard any negative feedback about potentially holding her seat through a veto override vote. She plans to discuss her options with the House Progressive caucus and constituents.
“If, for some reason, people feel like it's cleaner for me to just fully resign, I'll certainly do that,” she said, but “I would hope that my constituents in Chittenden-17 would understand that overdose prevention centers, even if it's just that one vote, is so critical.”