Lawmakers weigh funding new judicial positions with higher corporate taxes and fees

A bill moving through the Vermont Legislature this year would create dozens of new positions across the state’s judicial system — and fund them with higher corporate taxes and fees.

The bill, H.880, would support some 70 total positions, many of them new, from prosecutors to IT specialists. It’s meant to give the courts additional resources to tackle a stubborn backlog of thousands of unresolved cases.

But a proposed funding mechanism for those positions — raising taxes on corporate income and increasing the annual fees due on many types of securities offered for sale in the state — has drawn criticism from Republican lawmakers and Gov. Phil Scott. 

Scott has also said he wouldn’t support adding the new positions, regardless of the funding mechanism. The bill passed the House late last month and is now under consideration in the Senate. 

Democratic lawmakers maintain that H.880 would support the needs that judicial system leaders have identified in testimony to lawmakers this year and that lesser investment would undermine efforts to improve public safety across the state.

“Without that funding, we have an unfunded liability,” said Rep. Martin LaLonde, the South Burlington Democrat who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, on the floor last month. “I think it’s pretty critical that — I’ll use cliches — we put our money where our mouths are. That we walk the walk, and not just talk the talk, about public safety.”

LaLonde told his colleagues that it would take a decade to overcome the court backlog of more than 16,000 cases just on the criminal side at the judicial system’s current staffing levels. Many of those pending cases are multiple years old.

The additional resources in the bill could cut that timeline at least in half, he said, adding that doing so would also bring the court system more in line with nationally established standards for the timelines with which a case enters and exits the system. 

As approved by the House, H.880 would appropriate about $7.5 million in the 2025 fiscal year to fund the expanded workforce, as well as other initiatives. The new corporate taxes and fees would provide that much next year and significantly more in future years, according to estimates from the Joint Fiscal Office.

Most of the new positions are “limited service,” which typically means positions that will only exist for three years or less.

That includes 27 limited-service positions for the court system, among them judicial assistants, IT help desk analysts and other systems administrators. It also includes 10 limited-service deputy state’s attorneys and 10 limited-service victim’s advocates. The bill would also fund six limited-service positions in the state Department of Corrections to assist with remote hearings, as well as a limited-service court diversion position under the attorney general.

The funding would also support contracted sheriffs’ deputies, court technology, grants to community justice centers and legal services for low-income residents, among other initiatives.

In addition, the bill would require the departments that receive new limited-service positions to ask the Scott administration for additional funding for those roles in the 2026 fiscal year.

None of H.880’s proposed positions were in the administration’s recommended budget for fiscal year 2025. In fact, lawmakers have previously noted, Scott’s budget would prompt cost savings, forcing the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs to cut as many as nine prosecutor positions. 

However, the administration has proposed creating two new superior court judge positions this year — an allocation for which is included in this year’s annual budget bill, House lawmakers said during floor discussion last month.

H.880 is one of three separate bills that the House passed in recent weeks that contain significant policy proposals with new tax revenue attached to cover their multi-million-dollar price tags. But their future in the Senate is unclear.

One of the budget’s chief architects — Sen. Jane Kitchel, the Caledonia Democrat who chairs the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee — said the budget, the so-called “big bill,” is where new positions and revenue sources should end up, rather than individual policy bills, such as H.880.

“We’re going to be building our budget the way we always do — so some of these bills that the House passed will end up being incorporated into the budget,” Kitchel said during Tuesday’s Senate Democratic Caucus meeting.

Kitchel noted then that she was concerned the House’s budget bill and the administration’s proposal did not include enough resources for the judicial system. Her local state’s attorney was “practically in tears” over the number of cases pending in their county, she said at the same meeting.

Broadly, H.880 would increase Vermont’s top marginal corporate tax rate from 8.5% to 10% — the highest top rate in the nation — and would add back a federal deduction on certain income into the definition of corporate net income in Vermont. 

The Legislative Joint Fiscal Office estimates that these changes would generate about $2 million in new revenue in fiscal year 2025 and $33 million in fiscal year 2026, when most of them would go into effect.

In addition, the bill would increase the cost of both the initial notice fee and the renewal fee for securities — financial vehicles for investment or ownership — available for sale in the state. Those increases are expected to raise at least $6 million annually starting in fiscal year 2025. 

The judicial bill includes language noting legislators’ intent to fund the new judicial positions going forward with revenue generated by the corporate tax and securities fees proposals. Another bill that passed the House last month, H.721, would direct some of that same revenue toward an expansion in eligibility for Vermont’s Dr. Dynasaur and Medicaid health insurance programs.

Scott spokesperson Jason Maulucci said last week that H.880 was akin to “throwing money at a problem” and that the governor would rather see further changes to criminal justice legislation. Several of the administration’s proposals have made it into bills that are moving through the House and the Senate this year.

“Simply growing the bureaucracy, without making real policy changes, won’t work. If the Legislature thinks more resources are needed, they should do so within existing resources,” Maulucci said in a statement.

Speaking shortly after LaLonde on the floor last month, Rep. Carl Demrow, D-Corinth, suggested that policy and financial resources could not be so easily separated. He said appropriations in the bill would help more criminal cases be disposed of quickly — something that isn’t always happening right now. 

“Many of the public safety issues our communities face right now are a symptom of the system’s inability to process criminal cases in a timely fashion,” said Demrow, speaking for the House Ways and Means Committee. “The most effective way the Legislature can reduce crime is by ensuring certain and quick consequences.”