EAST MONTPELIER – The Senate Appropriations Committee is a distillation of everything I don’t like about the Senate as a whole. It’s heavily weighted toward seniority. The senior solons get near-total deference from any junior colleague who manages to wedge their way onto the committee. Those veteran members are a knowledgeable lot — but they think they’re smarter, wiser and more knowledgeable than they actually are, and they sometimes reflect antediluvian opinions on current political issues. And they frequently express disdain, if not contempt, for the work of the House.
But the worst of the lot is Sen. Bobby Starr. He’s really been on one this week, as Appropriations considers whether to extend emergency housing programs for the well over 2,000 Vermonters who face unsheltering within the next two months. When it comes to homelessness, he crosses the line from “roguish bumpkin” to “hateful bigot.” Repeatedly.
Starr is allegedly a Democrat, and he does cast some useful votes. But the things that come out of his mouth are a stain on the Senate and on the Vermont Democratic Party, and both institutions would be better off without him. Even if his Northeast Kingdom district were to choose a conservative Republican to replace him, I’d prefer that. At least it’d be honest, and at least we wouldn’t have to deal with a Democrat displaying rank ignorance and prejudice in high office.
So what has he been up to this week? Well, let me tell you.
On Tuesday, when the committee was discussing whether to impose a price cap on motel vouchers, Sen. Dick Sears floated the idea of setting a flexible cap based on advertised rates offered to the general public by each motel.
Starr responded, “I can’t believe that the public, for the most part, stays in these motels that we’re renting to put homeless in.”
In fact they do, and quite often, as other committee members quickly reassured him. When Starr talks like this, his colleagues treat him like the MAGA uncle ranting at the Thanksgiving table. They gaze intently at their tablets or laptops, they are suddenly engrossed in whatever document is close at hand, and in the case of Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth, they fix their gaze firmly in the middle distance.
Which is a reasonable response when Starr is sitting across the table saying flat-out that the unhoused are fatally flawed subhumans who ought to be shunned by polite society. Maybe he fears that whatever it is they’ve got might be communicable. Is it like the plague or COVID-19? Can you catch it by touching them or breathing their air?
That belief was on full display in a February 7 hearing, whose very existence is worth noting. The previous day, Appropriations approved the Budget Adjustment Act including a reduced emergency housing extension, as described in my previous post. Well, apparently they decided, after the fact, that their bill might be a little tiny bit too cruel to the unhoused, because they reopened the issue the next day.
Its most notable change to the BAA, as adopted on February 6, was its decision not to extend housing to the roughly 1,600 Vermonters currently covered in the adverse weather program. That day, committee chair Jane Kitchel, had expressed her belief that those people were all “able-bodied,” but she started the next day’s hearing by expressing a desire to extend coverage for vulnerable Vermonters — families with children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Apparently she found out that she’d been wrong the previous day.
The hearing ended without deciding on any changes. But during the discussion, Starr went on a tear about how able-bodied lazybones are griftin’ off the hard-workin’ taxpayer.
“The other thing that should be in this bill is if you’re an able-bodied person, you should have to have a job of doing something. One of the qualifiers for an able-bodied would be to do public service, to, to go do some type of work rather that just sit home and maybe, I don’t know, read or watch TV or whatever they do,” he said.
Kitchel interjected, trying to explain to Starr that she intended no such thing. “We’re talking about people who meet the definition of vulnerable, you know, families with children, we’re talking about people with disabilities, we’re talking about someone who is elderly.”
“The folks you’re talking about should be taken care of,” Starr responded, “but the able-bodied people, they should be gettin’ retrained in something to start earning money to pay their own way.”
See, we could solve this housing crisis in a heartbeat if we just gave the poor a little dose of tough love.
A bit later, when the committee was talking about the motel shortages that have plagued the program this season, Starr described a hypothetical case where “a single person can run like heck and get a motel room, and then a mom and her kids who are vulnerable would come and there wouldn’t be any rooms for ’em.”
Yeah, it’s amazing how those shiftless poors can slam it into overdrive when there’s a free handout in the vicinity.
But wait, there’s more!
Starr said, “The vulnerable people should be helped, I have no problem with that. But these people who just go from motel to motel or stay in the same one for months that don’t work… we shouldn’t be spending that money, we should be keeping it for next fall [when cold weather returns]…”
These mythical people who just gallivant around the state, leeching off the public purse. Starr’s point, as crudely as it was delivered, actually seemed to shift the discussion. Kitchel expressed concern that improving the emergency housing program could mean other social service programs would get the shaft. Because God only made so many dollars to help the poor, you know. It’s a finite pot that can’t possibly be enlarged just because there are more people in need.
This led to the committee’s decision not to decide anything right away. But the hearing couldn’t conclude fast enough to prevent Starr from opening his yap one more time.
“You take a lot of our senior citizens, spent their whole life working for small dollars and end up in a nursing home, and the nursing homes are cutting back because we can’t help ’em enough to keep ’em open. And these people actually worked and paid their way, and they get thrown out or move 100 miles away to a different nursing home and then the family can’t go see ’em, maybe once every other week or something,” he said.
That’s right, for every “able-bodied” poor scrambling headlong for “our stuff,” there’s an old person, somebody’s grandma or maybe even a veteran who defended our freedoms, who just wants to spend their sunset years in peace and comfort surrounded by their loving family, and they get the shaft because we’ve got too many self-entitled laggards sucking happily at the public teat.
It was a disgrace. If the Senate or the Vermont Democratic Party had a conscience, they would censure Starr for his open bigotry. Well, they may have a conscience, but they keep it firmly in check for the sake of political convenience.
Just as a reminder, this isn’t Starr’s first rodeo. Last spring, when the Legislature was deciding whether to extend emergency housing beyond its scheduled expiry on June 30, 2023, Starr delivered a similarly tasteless rant about how it was time for the “able-bodied… to go to work and have a place for them to work and earn and provide for their own.”
He hasn’t learned anything in the year since then, and yet he’s still making policy on emergency housing. Disgraceful.
But that wasn’t the worst. According to housing advocate and 2022 Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Starr delivered a blistering tirade at her in a hallway conversation. Brenda Siegel told him that many motel residents actually had jobs but couldn’t find housing or didn’t earn enough to pay rent in our overheated rental market. He expressed disbelief. When Siegel related her own experience with holding down a job that didn’t pay the bills, Starr made the attack personal. In Siegel’s telling, which she posted on Facebook, Starr told her “You are telling me you worked that much and still didn’t have enough for food sometimes? Yeah right. I doubt you have worked at all.” He continued in that vein for several minutes, to the person who’d been his party’s standard bearer less than a year earlier.
This is a guy who chairs a Senate committee and holds a seat on Appropriations, the most powerful committee in the chamber. He has continued to occupy those positions in spite of his hateful behavior and public displays of ignorance and prejudice. It’s a disgrace.
(This was published Feb. 9, to The Vermont Political Observer, a.k.a. the VPO: Analysis and observation of Vermont politics from a liberal viewpoint. John Walters is the sole author of The Vermont Political Observer, readable for free (but donations cheerfully accepted) at thevpo.org. John has had a long career in print and broadcast journalism. He’s been an observer of Vermont politics since 2011, including a three-year stint as political columnist for Seven Days. He lives in East Montpelier with his loyal spouse, two house rabbits and two cockatiels.)
