The Deeper Dig is a biweekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom, hosted and produced by Sam Gale Rosen. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
The state of emergency gave the Scott administration the authority to maintain a vast social safety net during the pandemic. Landlords were barred from evicting renters, homeless Vermonters were housed free of charge in motels around the state, and a series of meal distribution programs ensured families access to food.
Now that the emergency declaration has ended, advocates are nervous that the boost in social services over the past 15 months will be coming to an end too.
Pandemic aid programs showed that the state could feed and house every person in need, said Anore Horton, executive director of Hunger Free Vermont. Horton’s organization and more than 130 others sent a letter to the Scott administration last week urging the state to seek more permanent solutions to the housing and hunger crises.
“What we’re saying in part with this letter is that it’s not acceptable to go back to what was accepted as normal pre-pandemic, where we had a significant number of people in our state who didn’t have food and didn’t have shelter on any given day,” Horton said. “We want to transform that situation and never go back.”
On this week’s podcast, Horton discusses the path to making pandemic social services permanent. Plus, VTDigger’s Xander Landen details the effects of lifting the emergency declaration. Below is a partial transcript, edited for length and clarity.
Xander Landen: The state of emergency that we’ve now had in place for 15 months, since March of 2020, has basically been the vehicle that the governor has used to either ratchet up or wind down the pandemic restrictions that we’ve all been living with for the last year.
The state of emergency is really what allowed the governor to unilaterally shut down the economy, require that people wear masks in public, limit where people can travel and under what circumstances they can travel. All of these things, in normal times, a governor would not be able to order unilaterally. This emergency declaration gives executives — governors — extraordinary power in times of great need. And now that we’re winding down the pandemic, the governor is seeing that it’s time to give up the authority that he’s been able to wield for the last year.
What happens on the day that the state of emergency actually ends? What actually changes?
Xander Landen: The big thing that the governor and the administration have to do is think about, what aspects of the state’s Covid-19 emergency response have to continue? And how does the state ensure that they can continue, even though you don’t have this emergency declaration in place?
What has come up in recent days is a concern about, how is the state going to be able to maintain heightened aid programs that it’s been carrying out during the pandemic without an emergency declaration? Because that emergency declaration has allowed Vermont to receive a lot of federal funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That has allowed the state to distribute more food to those in need, and has allowed the state to receive reimbursement from the feds for housing programs for the homeless population, which has almost entirely been housed by the state since March of 2020 in motels, hotels, shelters. That’s cost a lot of money.
There’s concern that if you drop this emergency state of emergency, we’re going to lose access to resources that we need to respond to continuing needs.
How does the administration plan to handle that?
Xander Landen: This is not a surprise to the administration. They’re also concerned about this. And this is sort of a technical question that they have to answer: How can we ensure that we’re still getting support from the federal government for those programs, even if the state of emergency is lifted?
Their solution at this point is an executive order. The governor can issue executive orders at any time to carry out initiatives. And what this executive order will be is an executive order that basically continues the state’s emergency housing and food distribution programs, for the purpose of being able to receive funding from FEMA. Because FEMA has told the Scott administration, you can continue to receive this federal funding, so long as there’s a governor’s order that sort of lays down the necessity for these programs to continue.
I talked to the governor’s legal counsel, Jaye Pershing Johnson, the other day, and I was asking her about, basically, what’s the administration going to do if we get rid of the state of emergency, and there’s all of a sudden a resurgence in cases? What happens? What can the governor do?
And she did say, the governor can always just issue another emergency declaration and put us back in a situation where the governor can do what he’s done before. However, she was pretty confident that even if there is a resurgence in cases, the government’s response is not going to look like what it was in March of 2020, or even a few months ago — because people are vaccinated, which gives them immunity. And because the state and the public know how this virus works, and they know how to respond.
She said that they’d expect that any public health response would be much more minimal, and more targeted, than what we saw before, which is basically broad-stroke, blanket restrictions.
Does it make sense to look at the end of the state of emergency as kind of symbolic of the end of this period where the state has really made Covid-19 the focus of its operations? Is that reading too much into it?
Xander Landen: I don’t think that is reading too much into it. I think that you’re correct, that this is very momentous. It shows that the state government has a great deal of confidence that cases are not going to spike again, at least for now — that business and daily life can go on as usual, to some extent, without any restriction. That is a giant change.
And I think it’s also evidenced in the fact that, at least the press, our lives were dominated by the governor’s biweekly press conferences, where officials would get up and talk about the latest modeling of the pandemic and the latest case information, etc. The governor is now winding those down, and we’re going to be hearing a lot less about Covid. That, to me, is also a big sign that things are changing. And hopefully they’ll stay that way.
We’ve been aware for a few weeks now that the end of the state of emergency was on the way. So last week, a group of about 130 organizations sent a letter to the Scott administration, urging them to find permanent solutions to some of the needs that the pandemic exposed.
Anore Horton: People have relied on these programs for over a year, and now they’re coming to an end. And what are we going to do then as a state?
Anore Horton heads one of the organizations behind that letter: Hunger Free Vermont. She said it’s going to be critical for the state to find ways to slowly ramp down the pandemic hunger and housing relief programs.
Anore Horton: I think that that’s really important, because we need some time to figure out, as a state, how we’re going to continue to serve the people who are really continuing to need these programs.
The hotel housing program, for people who don’t have any other place to live — that’s another critical program that’s quite expensive, but has made a profound, profound difference — a life and death difference, literally — during this last year-plus for people in our state. That’s another program that is FEMA-funded, and it is ending in its current form July 1. And while some categories of particularly vulnerable people will be able to continue to be housed in hotels, there’s a significant number of individuals who are going to not be able to stay in the hotels any longer.
The challenge there is that there simply do not exist sufficient units of housing in the state to house those folks in another way. Right now, there’s really no stable place with four walls and a roof for some of these folks to go. And what’s also going to end for them is meals that were being paid for also through this FEMA funding and delivered to the hotels by a range of local charitable and social service organizations. So we’ve got a housing/shelter crisis and a hunger crisis looming.
I thought it was really interesting the way you and the other authors of this letter phrased this by saying that “most people in the state are still living in a state of emergency.” We’re talking about this in the technical, sort of legalistic sense, but you’re talking about something much different and more abstract there.
Yes. There’s a couple of points here. One is that we have had people living in a state of emergency in Vermont before the pandemic, and during the pandemic — and still now, because we’ve had a really unacceptably high number of people who really did not have access to some of the absolutely critical basic needs that human beings have to have to survive: shelter and food.
What we saw during the pandemic that’s really extraordinary, and that I really hope that every single one of us holds on to, is that we actually were able to house everyone who needed housing, and get food to pretty much everyone who needed food. And that means that it’s possible for us to do that as a society, as a state. What we’re saying in part with this letter is that it’s not acceptable to go back to what was accepted as normal pre-pandemic, where we had a significant number of people in our state who didn’t have food and didn’t have shelter on any given day. We want to transform that situation and never go back.
Some of what you’ve said about certain specific programs is that some kind of extension, or way to continue to fund these and ramp them down slowly, would be an improvement from just ending them abruptly. But it seems like the point that you’re getting at here is something even broader — that regardless of some of these technical designations, you’re really looking for more long-term, more permanent solutions to some of these problems. What do those look like? How do we take what we learned during the pandemic and actually apply it to what we see going forward?
I think that some answers are easier than others. If you look at housing, I think that our state is trying to move in the right direction. The Scott administration and legislators have appropriated a significant amount of money. There will be new housing units built, new affordable housing units built, in our state. And we need more of that. We’ll need to commit more funding and get additionally creative about how we’re going to really house everyone who needs to be housed. But that’s possible to do.
For populations — especially, this is easy to think about when it comes to children and young people in our state, who spend a considerable amount of their time in childcare and in school — how we end hunger for those populations, the solution is actually easy to understand. In school, it’s easy to implement; in childcare, it’s a little more challenging — but that is to provide universal meals that go along with the universal education that we all understand is really important for our children to receive. That’s kind of the lower hanging fruit, I think, when it comes to how we make sure that everyone has enough food to eat.
And then I think there’s a lot of creativity available to us as Vermonters that we need to apply toward how we’re going to reach everyone in our state who isn’t making enough money to be able to make their own choices about feeding and housing themselves. Fundamentally, actually, the answer to all of this is quite simple, and that is that we need to pay people livable wages that cover the costs of their basic needs. That Vermonters work hard, and we all deserve to be able to earn what we need to take care of our basic needs for ourselves and our families. So ultimately, this is an economic problem. And it’s possible for us to solve it, but we just all collectively need the will to do that.
Given how much we understand of the role of federal aid funding over the past year, it really does seem like funding is really the key issue here. Things like universal school meals, the way we saw that move through the Legislature this year — the price tag really became sort of the sticking point. I wonder, looking to a day when we don’t have these influxes of federal cash coming in, how do we deal with the price tag? How do we deal with the sticker shock when we tally up how much these things will cost?
Well, first of all, there’s advocacy to do at the federal level. So I think that it’s really possible for us to continue to work on having the programs at the federal level redesigned in ways that make it easier for Vermont to use those programs and maximize their benefit for Vermonters.
But I think the sticker shock question is really an interesting one. And it’s a matter of perspective. So from our perspective at Hunger Free Vermont, if you really stop and think about how much money we spend on public education in our state, for the next generation, that’s really important. And it’s worth a lot to all of us in Vermont to have an educated workforce, and to have all of our young people have what they need to grow and thrive and develop and come up with the next generation of creative solutions for our state. And the overall price tag for that is quite significant.
The cost of providing nutritious, healthy local, farm fresh school breakfast and lunch for every student in our state is actually a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket of that. And I think that if there was an educational reform that had been proven over and over and over again to improve student math and reading test scores, reduce obesity, reduce number of pediatric days in the hospital, improve focus, reduce bullying, reduce absenteeism and tardiness at school, and improve overall student health and reduce, dramatically, visits to the school nurse — doesn’t that sound like, for $24 million a year for the entire state of Vermont, that is actually incredibly cheap? That’s amazingly cheap. All of those benefits have been proven when schools provide universal meals.
So to my mind, I think that actually, the real sticker shock for Vermonters, the real steep price tag, is in not doing these interventions that we know make a dramatic difference, and are going to really actually make our population much healthier and better educated into the future.
One thing that struck me reading what was in this letter was how much it reminded me of a lot of the things that were really at the forefront for people a year and a half ago, last March or April, when things like hunger and housing were really at the forefront in images that we were seeing and things that we were hearing about the pandemic response. And it seems that those things sort of faded from view as the pandemic wore on, yet from what you’ve described, the need didn’t really change all that much. How do you explain that discrepancy?
I’m not sure I totally agree with you, that these issues faded from view, I think that many organizations and individuals in Vermont did continue to pay attention to these issues. But I do think that now, the impulse is to celebrate our ability to come out and be in public together. Part of the reason why we published this letter is that there’s a real danger that we think that the crises exposed by the pandemic have somehow been handled. But they were crises before the pandemic.
The long lines of cars that we saw early on in the pandemic, those were people who were hungry before the pandemic hit and needed those resources before the pandemic, and suddenly were able to access them. And the fact that those lines of cars blocking streets have disappeared does not mean that people are no longer coming to pick up boxes of food. People are still doing that. It’s just that the Vermont Food Bank and all of their partners who’ve been running those food box programs all this time are logistical wizards, have found all kinds of ways to make that process quicker and easier and more dignified for people. They’ve been running that program this whole time. And the fact that the cars aren’t backed up is a testament to their neverending hard work on behalf of everyone in our state during this really challenging time.
But the food boxes are still getting packed, and they’re still being picked up. And many other programs are also still being used every day here in our state. And it’s really important for everyone to understand and remember that.
