Legislative Alerts; Legislative Updates

VLCT issues Legislative Alerts usually as the legislative session winds down, when legislators need to hear from municipal officials about a particular issue and when time is of the essence. Legislative Updates typically provide the status of legislative activity. They are chiefly informational and do not require you to contact your legislators. Alerts and Updates posted here reflect the current biennium only. Please contact VLCT Advocacy for documents from earlier legislative sessions.

• Legislative Alert 05-08-13: Action Required on Authorizing All Cities and Towns to Adopt Local Option Taxes. Urge House members to agree to allow all cities and towns to adopt local option rooms and meals and sales taxes as part of the conference committee report on H.528.
• Legislative Alert 04-23-13: H.526, in its current version, deletes any provision for existing municipal bylaws that address shoreland zoning. Instead, it require the Agency of Natural Resources to adopt interim standards for “management of vegetative cover, creation of impervious surface, and shoreland disturbances by procedure.”
• Legislative Alert 04-15-13: H.87 would require the state to pay its prorated share of any costs, attorney’s fees, or property tax liability incurred by a municipality in the defense of an appeal taken from the board of civil authority. H.329, the current use program reform bill, addresses concerns raised by listers about some enrollees using the program to “park” land that they fully intend to develop in the program in a short period of time just for the tax break provided.
• Legislative Alert 04-02-13: On Thursday, April 4, the House General, Housing and Military Affairs Committee will hold a public hearing on S.14, a bill that will mandate that all municipal employees in a collective bargaining unit with a union pay an “agency fee” to that union, even if they chose not to be members of that union.
• Legislative Alert 02-27-13: Today, the Vermont Agency of Transportation recommended to the House Transportation Committee cutting $1 million in FY14 Town Highway Aid programs.