Night had fallen in Indonesia when Christina Sivret logged onto Zoom. It was morning in Montpelier, where a Statehouse committee was waiting for her testimony. Sivret was supposed to be taking her first real time off in four years. Instead, she adjusted her camera and prepared, once again, to explain the limits of an office pushed to the brink.
Since 2021, she has run the Vermont State Ethics Commission as one of its two part-time employees. During that time, the legislature has kept assigning her office new tasks but without providing additional staff to do the work. She is paid for part-time hours while working full-time ones. Eventually, she and her colleague paused parts of the commission’s work — not by choice, but because there was no way to keep up.
Reporting to the legislature was routine. But the circumstances of her mid-April appearance were not. Sivret had reached her breaking point and taken an unpaid, extended leave of absence. She was testifying despite that, and from the other side of the world, as lawmakers considered assigning the commission yet another duty: overseeing political candidates’ financial disclosure forms.
It might seem like a minor ask, she told lawmakers, but it would burden an office already straining to function.
“If we don’t even have the vision of more staff coming, I just don’t know what is going to happen to us,” she said. None of it made sense to her.
The scenario Sivret faced has become commonplace: The legislature has repeatedly created mandates — often in response to public pressure or high-profile concerns — without committing the resources to carry them out.
State government departments, as well as school districts and town governments, offer plenty of examples. Schools are required under Act 77 of 2013 to provide more personalized learning for students in grades 7-12, but without the full state funding they need to do the job. The Vermont Clean Water Act of 2015 requires towns and cities to reduce pollutant runoff while shouldering much of the implementation costs themselves. State agencies, including Natural Resources and Education, cite mandates they face while lacking the requisite staff or money.
Underfunded legislative mandates carry consequences that extend well beyond dollars and cents, many of which lawmakers have yet to fully address. Some impacts are visible: Candidates struggle to access financial disclosure forms or get timely assistance; school administrators scramble to set up tents so learning doesn’t have to go remote; and communities face delays in critical flood recovery aid. Others are not as apparent but still damaging, as programs stall and initiatives once touted as transformative never fully materialize.
Lawmakers have largely sidestepped accountability for what follows, instead criticizing agencies for not meeting their duties or recasting funding shortfalls as administrative hurdles or problems to solve in future legislative sessions.
The result is a kind of performative policy making: Legislators draft laws that signal urgency and intent while shifting the burden of execution onto schools, communities, agencies and public servants. State employees, school officials and communities scramble to fill the voids left by the lawmakers’ unfunded or underfunded demands.
Lawmakers acknowledge the long-standing problem. They have considered requiring reports on the cost of some unfunded mandates they have created — but have never followed through. Unfunded mandates are not sound policy, the elected representatives say, but they remain a persistent feature of how Vermont governs. With 180 legislators, two chambers and a limited pool of money, the legislature is a “ripe environment for inconsistencies,” according to Sen. Andy Perchlik (D/P-Washington), chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
“It’s easy to pass legislation saying that we should do all these things, and it’s another thing to fund them,” Perchlik said.
It’s easy to pass legislation saying that we should do all these things, and it’s another thing to fund them.
Sen. Andy Perchlik
Rep. Robin Scheu (D-Middlebury), chair of the House Appropriations Committee, said the challenge reflects the complexity of lawmaking itself.
“There’s never enough money to do everything everybody wants to do,” she said. This year, Scheu’s committee received roughly $250 million in spending requests but could only grant $18 million because of budget constraints. Still, she added, lawmakers are ultimately responsible for revisiting laws that fall short, whether because they were poorly written, underfunded or both.
Legislators have developed strategies for demands that they don’t fund: making programs contingent on taxpayers’ money, delaying timelines, commissioning studies or inserting sunset clauses to force a future reckoning. But sometimes those maneuvers can create more work and prolong the delay between what the state promises and what it delivers.
And at times, as Sivret knows firsthand, legislators simply plunge ahead with priorities and don’t worry about the practical problems they are creating. That morning in April, as she finished her testimony, lawmakers were already moving to assign candidate disclosure duties to the ethics commission without additional staff or funding — compounding the very problem Sivret had spent years warning them about.
‘A Bad Science Experiment’
One of the most striking recent examples of a law legislators imposed without understanding its real-world consequences is one that required all schools built before 1980 to test for polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, toxic chemicals once commonly used in construction materials. The provision was hastily tacked onto a 261-page appropriations bill at the end of the 2021 session with no testimony or debate. It called on the Vermont Department of Health to set standards for acceptable PCB air concentrations — a complicated undertaking that no other state has attempted.
The result was a mandate that both disrupted learning in some school districts and cost way more money than anticipated.
Legislators initially appropriated $4.5 million for testing — just a fraction, it would turn out, of the amount actually needed to test for PCBs and remove them from schools. One of the testing program’s most fervent supporters was senator Brian Campion, a Bennington Democrat who no longer holds the office. He had seen firsthand the fallout from water contamination from other toxic chemicals, PFAS, in his region.
For some schools, including Newport’s North Country Union High School, money has been the least of the problems with the PCB mandate. In early July 2024, as North Country’s principal, Chris Young, unwound on a family vacation in Canada after a stressful school year, he got a phone call from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation. More than 12 months before, elevated levels of airborne PCBs had been identified at North Country, and Young had been dealing with the panoply of requirements that followed. The district had been busy installing air filters, sampling construction materials, testing the air and reviewing mitigation plans.
State officials now told Young that the remediation efforts hadn’t made much of a difference. The latest test results were so bad, according to the state’s stringent standards, that the district might not be able to open the school building in late August as planned.
For Young and North Country superintendent Elaine Collins, moving classes online was not an option, given how many students fell through the cracks during pandemic-era remote learning. They scrambled to make contingency plans. Ultimately, the district decided to erect six massive wedding tents in which students could attend classes while environmental consultants tried to figure out how to lower PCB levels.
Young and Collins spent much of their summer in a frantic rush, meeting with state and local officials, facilities directors, and contractors. Workers built floors and walkways for the tents and installed Wi-Fi and electrical connections. Staff rescheduled buses to bring some students to a satellite campus at the Community College of Vermont. Employees adjusted lessons and activities to account for new spaces and a new schedule. Administrators had to delay the first day of school for a week to complete these preparations.
Ultimately, school staff banded together to create a serviceable learning environment for students, but it was far from ideal, Young said. The tents were cold in the morning and hot by the end of the day. During stormy days, the patter of raindrops made it hard to hear. Meanwhile, inside the building, classrooms were sealed off with plastic sheets, more air filters were installed, and the school’s HVAC system was modified to improve air circulation.
In mid-October, state officials told administrators they believed the PCB air concentrations were trending in the right direction and gave permission for students to return to the building. The work, by that point, had cost the state $6.2 million. But the saga did not end there. PCBs remained in materials throughout the building.
Now, a year and a half later, the pernicious chemicals are still causing problems for administrators. The latest development in what Collins refers to as a “bad science experiment” occurred over the April break, when a huge rubber mat was installed around the exterior of the school to prevent the soil, which has been found to contain high concentrations of PCBs, from releasing them. One school board member, Collins said, likened the installation to “a huge prophylactic.”
In April, both Young and Collins testified before the Senate Education Committee as it considered H.542, a bill passed by the House that would terminate airborne PCB testing in schools because the state has no money to pay for it. Other administrators, from Hartford and Wilmington, also spoke about the logistical headaches and disruption of student learning they’d experienced.
It was the third time that the House, led by Education Committee chair Rep. Peter Conlon (D-Cornwall), had tried to end the testing program. Conlon was disturbed by the challenges the testing mandate caused for schools, not to mention the expense. It was a “cost rabbit hole that may have no end,” he told his fellow committee members earlier this year.
Elevated levels of airborne PCBs — a threshold determined by the Vermont Department of Health that is significantly lower than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s PCB exposure guidance — have been detected in 46 of the 157 schools tested, and the state has spent almost $40 million on testing and remediation efforts.
Another 171 schools are awaiting testing, but there is no money to do the work. The proposed 2027 budget has no funds for it, either.
On April 8, Mike O’Grady, a lawyer from the nonpartisan Vermont Office of Legislative Counsel, highlighted that issue to Senate Education Committee members.
“There’s still session law out there that says the state is going to fund investigation, remediation and removal” of PCBs, “but there is no money,” O’Grady said. “I don’t know how else to say it.”
The potential optics of ending an initiative designed to protect children from toxic chemicals weighed on some legislators.
“If we passed the House version of the bill, would a headline be accurate that said ‘State Ends PCB Testing Program in Schools’?” Senator Kesha Ram Hinsdale (D-Chittenden-Southeast) asked O’Grady.
It would probably be more accurate to say the House bill “puts a long-term pause” on testing, O’Grady told her.
The following week, Young and Collins painted a more vivid picture in the committee room.
Collins described the massive disruption that the PCB testing program had caused her high school and said she wished lawmakers would take heed of the medical adage “first, do no harm” when considering mandates that could have damaging real-world consequences.
Young, meanwhile, spoke of the “irreparable social-emotional, academic and financial damage” the PCB initiative had wrought on his school at a cost to date of almost $9 million to the state. A new plan to fully remove PCBs from the 1960s-era building or tear it down completely, he told lawmakers, had a price tag of between $12 million and $21 million.
Sen. Seth Bongartz (D-Bennington), who chairs the Education Committee, asked Young what he thought about the House’s proposal to stop testing altogether.
“I highly encourage you to cease the testing program until and unless there is serious thought to how it’s going to be funded if and when PCBs are found,” Young said.
Bongartz thanked Young for his testimony. He’d seen firsthand how disruptive the PCB testing program could be when he visited Twin Valley Elementary School in Wilmington. The school had to discontinue use of its gym, library and offices, and the community was still feeling the impact.
Still, the chair knew his committee members didn’t want to just abandon the program, even if they understood there was no money for it. Better to keep it on life support, the group reasoned, than pull the plug.
Weeks later, members of the same group of lawmakers laughed when a witness testifying about a different topic asked whether an “unfunded mandate” could be included in state statute.
“That’s what we specialize in,” committee member Sen. David Weeks (R-Rutland) said with a chuckle.
Despite the warnings of the school administrators and the fact that the program has no funding, the Senate Education Committee voted 6-0 to reverse course on the House’s termination bill, instead extending the deadline for testing for four years, to August 1, 2031. The committee also created a special fund to hold money for PCB remediation that, theoretically, could be obtained through litigation. Vermont’s lawsuit against PCB manufacturer Monsanto, filed by Attorney General Charity Clark, is expected to go to trial as soon as early next year, according to Clark’s spokesperson.
In a text message after the Senate Education Committee’s vote, Conlon, the House Education chair, hammered home the point he’d been trying to make for years.
“I don’t understand why we would keep the deadline in law before there is a plan to pay for the testing and the consequences,” he wrote.
The PCB bill is now before the Senate Finance Committee.
‘Asking for Mercy’
The toll of underfunded legislative mandates can also be felt throughout state agencies. Executive branch department heads say the legislature has steadily expanded the work expected of state government without providing enough money for it. The disconnect has triggered growing friction between lawmakers and the people responsible for making their laws work in practice.
Within the Agency of Natural Resources, employees are being asked to implement increasingly complex environmental and climate laws without sufficient workforce or budget, according to Charles Martin, the agency’s deputy secretary.
“The agency absolutely has a significant issue with legislatively underfunded or unfunded mandates,” Martin said.
Disagreements between the agency and the legislature became more apparent after the 2023 floods, when lawmakers passed Act 121 to strengthen flood resilience and waterway management. The agency determined it would need 17 staffers to implement the law.
Lawmakers allocated 15 positions but ultimately funded only 11. Even with an additional $1.75 million to support implementation, the state left an estimated $500,000 shortfall in staffing and operating costs, according to agency figures. The result, Martin said, is a program that, in practice, is not what exists on paper.
In April of last year, Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore sent a memo to the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy outlining a series of unfunded or underfunded mandates she said were causing stress and anxiety for staff, including Act 121.
Weeks later, Moore expanded the critique in an op-ed in VTDigger, faulting the legislature for passing “unfunded laws” with “only theoretical benefits.” Initiatives such as the Global Warming Solutions Act and the Climate Superfund Act may benefit Vermonters, she wrote: “Realizing these outcomes, however, requires more than simply enacting idealistic laws. It requires working together to design achievable, properly funded initiatives rather than marching toward impractical requirements.”
The agency absolutely has a significant issue with legislatively underfunded or unfunded mandates.
Charles martin
Now, Martin said, the agency faces undue criticism for not moving fast enough to implement laws it was not fully funded to execute.
Some lawmakers see it differently. Scheu, the House Appropriations chair, said she doesn’t always take staffing proposals at face value, citing what she described as inflated claims. She pointed to a Department of Corrections estimate that pegged the cost of making inmates’ administrative files available for viewing by them and their lawyers at nearly $10 million.
“It became clear that when they were pressed, they really didn’t want to do it, so they put in a large figure,” Scheu said.
Martin said ANR is careful in how it presents staffing needs to lawmakers. Its estimates, he said, are not inflated for negotiation but reflect what staff believe is required to carry out assigned work.
Still, there’s mistrust on all sides. Martin said agency staff lose faith in the process when lawmakers discount their subject-matter expertise. The result, he said, is legislation that is often well intentioned but difficult to implement.
“Where the legislature fails is, they’ll pursue things that have some agreeable intent, but they won’t realistically think about implementation in a critical way,” Martin said.
Over time, he added, that disconnect reshapes the relationship of agencies and the legislature. Requests for help from agencies are read as resistance. Delays are framed as failure. And agencies, already stretched, face additional problems with morale and burnout.
“We came into this legislative session more or less asking for mercy,” Martin said.
The Agency of Natural Resources does not oppose the work it is being asked to do, he said; the problem is that the dollars to do it often arrive later, if ever.
“I want to have a functional agency, and I want employees to maintain some level of emotional, professional capacity,” Martin said. “And the legislature is just not hearing us at all.”
Full Plate
The Agency of Education has also experienced frustration over unfunded mandates. In 2024, lawmakers passed Act 139 to improve reading instruction in schools. The agency was to develop a plan to ensure all students learn to read by the end of third grade. Months after the bill passed, the agency launched an initiative called Read Vermont, a vehicle to fulfill its responsibilities.
One of Read Vermont’s main goals was to train educators to teach reading effectively. The agency identified federal dollars to launch the program, knowing the money would eventually dry up and it would have to find another funding source. Late last year, agency officials believed they’d found the money: $700,000 left over from an earlier project to modernize the agency’s information technology system.
In the early months of the legislative session, with support from the administration of Gov. Phil Scott, the agency appealed to both the House and Senate Appropriations committees to reappropriate those funds to Read Vermont in the 2026 Budget Adjustment Act.
At the time, House Appropriations chair Scheu said she didn’t know enough about Read Vermont to feel comfortable putting money toward it but would consider including the funds in the 2027 budget. In March, the legislature passed the Budget Adjustment Act with no money for Read Vermont; those unspent education dollars went back into the general fund.
The education agency then changed tack, appealing to the Senate Appropriations Committee to include the money for Read Vermont in next year’s budget. But Appropriations, too, rebuffed the request, leading to a proposed budget with not “a dollar for strengthening literacy instruction,” said Toren Ballard, the agency’s director of policy and communications.
Perchlik and Scheu said the agency is to blame for not having a good grasp of the state’s budgeting process.
Just because an agency has money left over from a previous year, Perchlik said, it can’t bank on using it for another purpose. He questioned why, if Read Vermont is an administration priority, the governor’s office didn’t protest more when it wasn’t included in the Budget Adjustment Act and also did not include funding for the program in its 2027 budget proposal.
The agency’s “inability to budget properly does not constitute an error on our part,” Scheu said. “That’s their problem.”
Ballard said focusing on the minutiae of the budgeting process obscures the bigger issue: Why is the legislature preventing the Agency of Education from using unspent funds to help implement a law it passed?
Without the $700,000 appropriation for Read Vermont, Ballard said, the agency will not be able to contract with literacy coaches to train teachers, which has been a fundamental component of improving literacy outcomes in states such as Mississippi. Ballard, who worked in education policy in that state before coming to Vermont, pointed out that the Mississippi legislature invested $15 million a year to support literacy efforts.
He said the agency hasn’t given up trying to get lawmakers to include money for Read Vermont in the final version of next year’s budget.
“We hope that the legislature will see the wisdom in allowing the Agency of Education to spend its own money to support teaching kids how to read,” Ballard said.
Ballard pointed to Act 29, a 2023 school safety law, as another example of legislation passed without the resources to implement it. The law requires schools to create behavior threat assessment teams, conduct intruder drills, and ensure that windows and doors meet certain standards. That means training for school staff and, in some cases, building upgrades. The agency secured a federal grant to do some of that training, Ballard said, but it’s far from enough.
Brooke Olsen-Farrell, superintendent of Slate Valley Unified School District, also criticized the implementation of the school safety law. While she said she fully supports its intent, it requires staff time, training and coordination with local law enforcement that puts more responsibility on schools “without a corresponding investment,” creating “additional strain on already tight district resources,” she said.
Both the literacy and school safety laws are listed on a spreadsheet that the Vermont Superintendents Association helped create to track unfunded mandates related to education. A draft from 2024 shared with Seven Days includes 30 entries, including PCB testing and a host of others — from Act 173 of 2018, which requires schools to provide a higher level of academic support to students in the general-education classroom, to laws requiring access to contraceptives and menstrual products.
Principals and superintendents “often lament that more and more gets added to the plate every year,” said Vermont Principals’ Association executive director Jay Nichols, “without anything coming off those plates.”
Commission Impossible
When Christina Sivret returned to Vermont after working in Washington, D.C., she assumed state government operated under a basic code of ethics. Instead, upon becoming the head of the Vermont State Ethics Commission, she found the state had no formal ethics framework in place and encountered resistance when she asked lawmakers for the workers and money needed to carry out the commission’s work. “It was beyond anything I ever expected,” she said.
Part of that tension traces back to how the Vermont State Ethics Commission came to exist. For decades, there was little oversight of conflicts of interest, self-dealing and other ethical lapses in Vermont’s government. While much of the country strengthened ethics laws in the 1970s after the Watergate scandal, Vermont lagged behind.
Vermont’s shortcomings became harder to ignore when national assessments — including a 2015 report by the now-defunct Center for Public Integrity — ranked the state the worst in the nation for ethics enforcement. Lawmakers responded in 2017 by creating the commission, promising a new era of accountability. The nonpartisan, independent state agency would provide ethics advice and training, as well as oversee complaints related to ethical conduct in state and municipal government.
But from the beginning, there were warnings the legislature might hamstring the ethics body.
Jim Condos, a former state senator and secretary of state who helped create the commission and now serves on it, argued that any meaningful ethics body would need three things: independence, the authority to investigate and adjudicate, and adequate money and staff. At the time, Condos estimated that would require three to five staff and at least $500,000 annually.
There’s never enough money to do everything everybody wants to do.
Rep. robin Scheu
Two of those pillars are largely in place. The commission operates independently, with commissioner appointments spread across officials and outside entities, and lawmakers expanded its authority in 2024 to include investigatory and enforcement powers, though key provisions have been delayed.
A staffing shortfall, however, persists. The commission runs with two part-time employees and roughly $250,000 annually, even as its responsibilities have expanded to include public education, guidance, complaint management and now potentially managing candidate financial disclosure forms.
Vermont has the most underfunded state ethics commission in the country, according to Thomas Jones, an attorney and specialist in government ethics law. Jones is also an independent consultant for the commission and for state and municipal governments nationwide. By comparison, Rhode Island’s ethics commission has a budget of more than $2 million and a dozen staff, while Maine’s has a roughly $3 million budget and seven employees.
The only thing Sivret has wanted for the past two years is more employees to do the work that is mandated. The legislature’s repeated refusal to pay up reflects its true view of ethics and accountability, she said.
This legislative session, Sivret asked for money for two additional positions to carry out the commission’s existing work. The House backed one position and added a requirement that the commission produce a new ethics handbook. But the Senate Appropriations Committee later stripped a proposed attorney position and handbook requirement from the budget bill, dashing any plan for future staff.
Scheu said she expects money for the commission’s proposed staff attorney position to be discussed when the budget bill goes to conference committee.
“Many legislators have been dragged kicking and screaming into the concept of having an ethics commission,” Scheu said, acknowledging that the commission cannot fulfill much of its work with its current staff and budget.
Condos cautioned that, without proper support for the commission, the legislature risks creating a self-perpetuating cycle: assigning new responsibilities, withholding the resources to meet them, then pointing to the commission’s limitations to justify further cuts or inaction.
Jones, the ethics expert, said commissions in some states, including Wisconsin, have collapsed after lawmakers faulted them for failing to meet mandates they were never equipped to fulfill. Politics often plays a role, he added, but in Vermont he does not see outright opposition to the commission so much as a gradual erosion of support, with fewer lawmakers willing to champion it. Even a funded staff attorney, he said, would still fall short of the commission’s needs.
“It’s just throwing another life preserver in the water,” Jones said.
Jones estimates that the commission needs to add one part-time and four full-time employees in order to fulfill its current mandate. That does not account for staffing required once enforcement powers take effect.
Despite warnings from Sivret, Condos, Jones and Ethics Commission chair Paul Erlbaum, lawmakers continue seeking ways to expand the commission’s responsibilities. This session, the House passed the bill requiring the commission to manage candidate financial disclosure forms. And another proposal would have it design and collect travel disclosures from legislators. Neither proposal comes with the prospect of additional money or staff.
Condos, who served eight years in the state Senate, knows the additions can seem incremental.
“People sitting in the committee room think, Well, we’re just adding a couple of things,” Condos said. But for an office already operating beyond capacity, he said, each addition compounds the challenge.
If the commission cannot keep up, the consequences are not always immediate or visible. Investigations could stall or go uncompleted. Complaints could go unanswered. And over time, the system itself could lose credibility, weakening the public’s trust in government at a time when it’s already waning.
Advocates and critics of the commission generally agree that most of Vermont’s elected and public officials want to do the right thing.
But the Green Mountain State is not immune to ethical lapses. Recent resignations — including those of senator Sam Douglass after his participation in a racist group chat surfaced, and representative Bob Hooper over sexual harassment allegations — underscore that Vermont needs government accountability and oversight.
Everybody likes the idea of a vibrant ethics commission, Perchlik said, but ultimately legislators have chosen not to put their money where their mouths are.
The commission, Sivret said, is not seeking to expand its reach. It is simply asking to be able to meet the responsibilities lawmakers have already laid out and to serve as the safeguard Vermont needs.
“Once we have the staff to implement it and really do our work, they’re going to see how beneficial this is,” Sivret said. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Promises Too Steep | Vermont legislators pass laws to strengthen education, environmental protections and more. Just one thing is lacking: the money to do the work.”
Correction, May 13, 2026: The Senate Education Committee voted 6-0 to extend the deadline on the PCB testing program. A previous version of this story had the wrong tally.
This article appears in May 13 • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
