MONTPELIER – The past two weeks have been busy. New bills are introduced daily on a myriad of topics. To date, the House of Representatives have voted on and passed 13 bills. These are now onto the Senate.
The education committee seems to be inundated with bills addressing education reform in some fashion or another. A lot of their time has been spent on the bills being introduced into their committee by the bill sponsors. I am checking in with a member of the education committee this week to see where things are at. Hopefully I can share some information in my next update.
My assigned committee, Energy and Digital Infrastructure, spent a lot of time hearing annual updates from various state entities as well as bill introductions to the committee. We are finalizing the verbiage in proposed legislation related to Consolidated Communications discontinuing the copper lines. Our ability to oversee Consolidated is limited as they fall under the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) oversight. The committee is looking to strengthen the notification process which is required to customers.
We heard more testimony on H.527, known as the cell tower siting bill. We will be finalizing the language and voting on it in committee this coming week. Bill introductions and testimony was taken on a couple of bills related to energy and building codes. I am very concerned about these as we are currently needing housing and this may increase the cost to build homes and increase regulation on contractors. If you are interested in looking at these bills, they are H.717 and H.718.
Michael Southworth is a state representative for Caledonia-2 House District, including the towns of Hardwick, Stannard and Walden.
