Estimated Costs of Paid Family Leave Soar, Leading to Rival Bill

BY KEVIN MCCALLUM • kevin@sevendaysvt.com

people and telling them that if they didn’t get o the premises, the police chief would shut down the hotel and force everyone out onto the street. Pontbriand — who doesn’t have the power to do that — said that kind of fearmongering erodes trust between the town and motel residents, who often need help from first responders for mental health crises, overdoses and other emergencies.

“That’s been my chief heartache since the inception of this program — you’re placing people here with a lot of needs, and you didn’t put any kind of support structure in place, which is a real burden for the municipality,” the chief said. At a meeting with town o cials in February, Sachdev apologized to Pontbriand for throwing him under the bus and assured him that it wouldn’t happen again.

At the Brattleboro Quality Inn, Sachdev would instruct his sta to tell residents that their rooms had been treated for bedbugs when they hadn’t, said Bobbie Trujillo, who lived and worked there as a housekeeper and manager between December 2020 and June 2022. “They would rent rooms out where they knew that the plumbing didn’t work or something else was wrong,” Trujillo said.

While Ouellette was living at the Quality Inn, at least nine people died in their rooms, mostly from drug overdoses, according to records from the Brattleboro Police Department. In one case, someone had been dead at least four days before her body was discovered, the medical examiner’s report noted. Rather than hire a professional hazmat crew, Ouellette said, the hotel management would instruct its own sta — most of whom, like Ouellette, were residents themselves — to clean the rooms where the bodies had been found, so they could be turned over as quickly as possible to the next guest. “They treated us as subhuman,” Ouellette said. Trujillo shared that assessment. When she quit her job at the Quality Inn in June, six months after moving into her own apartment, she started going to therapy. “I was pretty traumatized by the stu I’d seen,” she said.

Michael Hutchins, another former Quality Inn resident, has been in the dark about his security deposit since he left the hotel in December. All of his attempts to reach Sachdev have been unfruitful. “He’s a ghost,” he said. Mostly, Hutchins is frustrated by the indignity of having to chase down money that the state, in theory, had promised him. His caseworker from Groundworks Collaborative, a local social service provider, got him the papers to file a small claims suit against Sachdev, but the courthouse is in Newfane, a 20-minute drive from Brattleboro. Hutchins doesn’t have a car, and there’s no public transportation that would get him there.

“I’d be willing to go without the money to know that that guy doesn’t have it,” Hutchins said, referring to Sachdev. “It’s the principle of the thing. You shouldn’t be able to make money, hand over fist, on people who can’t do anything about it.” e bill, H.66, passed the Ways and Means Committee by an 8-4 vote last week, with Republicans united in opposition and even some Democrats admitting sticker shock. e bill would pay workers 90 percent of their salary to take up to 12 weeks to care for a newborn, address a medical condition or escape domestic abuse. It would offer two weeks of bereavement pay. Lawmakers received updated cost estimates shortly before the vote.

A House bill that would provide up to 12 weeks of paid leave for workers continues to grow in size and scope, raising concern among some lawmakers and the governor that the costs may outweigh the benefits.

It would now require $112 million in startup costs, including the hiring of up to 65 state employees, and cost $117 million to run annually.

“ is is a lot of one-time money,” Rep. Katherine Sims (D-Craftsbury) said. “I guess I see this as an investment in Vermont and our workforce.” e payroll taxes would be sent to the state treasurer, whose office would run the new Division of Family and Medical Leave. e legislature passed a more modest bill in 2020, which would have provided 12 weeks of leave for new parents and eight weeks of medical leave. But Gov. Phil Scott vetoed it, citing the burdens of what was then envisioned as a $29 million payroll tax. e new House proposal, which has expanded beyond child and medical leave and lengthened the time off for the latter from eight to 12 weeks, is almost certain to be vetoed by Scott. His spokesperson, Jason Maulucci, said Scott “remains deeply concerned” about the “regressive payroll tax” to build and maintain a “large new bureaucracy” at a time when state government has trouble filling the vacancies it has. e new workers needed to administer that plan — 45 to 50 in the treasurer’s office and another 15 in the tax department — would drive the annual administrative costs up to $13.5 million. ➆

Startup costs would be paid for out of state coffers, while operating costs would be funded by a future 0.55 percent payroll tax.

For a worker making $50,000, the 0.55 percent tax would cost $275 per year. An employer would be required to pay half, or $137.50. at would leave workers on the hook for the other half. Employers could opt to cover the entire cost for workers, and some have said they would.

A previous estimate had put the annual program cost at $94.4 million. e figure was recently updated to reflect inflation’s effect on a program that would not be operational until July 1, 2026.

Scott has proposed a voluntary leave program anchored by state workers but open to any worker or employer willing to pay on their behalf.

“We are continuing to move forward and implement the Governor’s paid family and medical leave program, which every working Vermonter and employer can choose to opt-in to, without the need for a payroll tax, or dramatically growing a bureaucracy and assuming higher risk for the State,” Maulucci wrote in an email.

Senate Democrats are also clearly concerned about growing cost estimates. Sen. Jane Kitchel (D-Caledonia) has proposed a more modest 12-week parental leave program that would be offered through the Department for Children and Families.

How much Kitchel’s program would pay has not been determined, but it would be available to families making 600 percent of the federal poverty level, or $180,000 for a family of four. e benefit would only be available to one parent per household following a birth or adoption. e plan was hastily tacked on to S.56, a childcare subsidy bill that the Senate Health and Welfare Committee has been working on for weeks.

If the Senate passes a bill with her program, that would likely set up a tense negotiation between the two chambers. House leaders have called this issue one of their top legislative priorities.

Kitchel also told colleagues her program would be simpler to administer. “It doesn’t take an army of eligibility workers to process,” she said, in a not-so-subtle swipe at the House version.

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that his administration fund a new mental health treatment center in their region. To her surprise, Scott responded, writing that he would put the Department of Mental Health on the case.

Not long afterward, Krompf, the department’s deputy commissioner, began to look into whether the Northeast Kingdom needed more mental health services — and if so, whether the state could afford them.

Krompf knew that some of the state’s highest rates of suicide were in two NEK counties: Orleans and Caledonia. And recent data showed that roughly a third of people seeking emergency psychiatric care in the region went to hospitals instead of the local mental health agency, suggesting that people didn’t know where else to turn.

In talking to the Barretts, Krompf sensed that they had been dismissed over the years because officials thought the couple was asking for a new inpatient facility, which could cost tens of millions of dollars. But she quickly realized that they simply sought a place outside of the hospital for treating urgent mental health needs — and that seemed doable.

“They’ve been talking about this for a long time, but they just didn’t have the technical language to explain it,” Krompf said in an interview.

Still, a big hurdle remained. The most logical choice for an organization to run the center was the nonprofit Northeast Kingdom Human Services, which contracts with the state to provide mental health services in the area, but the Barretts were leery. Long waiting lists and gaps in service had

DON plagued the agency, and state officials had placed it on a probationary license.

But at Krompf’s urging, the Barretts agreed to meet with the agency’s newly hired executive director, Kelsey Stavseth. They came away impressed. Less than a year later, they learned that Scott had included the project in his proposed budget.

“It’s amazing how much has happened so quickly,” Betty said.

A similar center for children opened in Bennington a few years ago and has proven successful. School staff members now routinely call Psychiatric Urgent Care for Kids, or PUCK, when a child is in crisis. More often than not, those children are stabilized at the urgent care center, allowing them to stay out of the ER. The year after the program launched, Southwestern Vermont Health Care reported 40 percent fewer pediatric mental health emergency cases.

A federal grant will help Northeast Kingdom Human Services construct a new building for the center once state funding is approved. The House Committee on Health Care has endorsed the idea, strengthening the likelihood that it would be included in the final budget that lawmakers will vote on later this spring. Stavseth said he would then look for a place where Northeast Kingdom Human Services could launch a temporary version of the urgent care program this summer while he figures out where to locate the new one. That process could prove a heavy lift, he said, because the stigma surrounding mental illness often makes residents wary of such programs in their neighborhoods. But he’s optimistic that he’ll succeed.

Said Chris Barrett: “We plan to be at the ribbon cutting.”