House lawmakers finish draft budget

Lawmakers on the Vermont House’s powerful budget-writing committee finished their draft of a roughly $8 billion state budget late Friday night, voting 10-0 on a spending blueprint that makes major one-time investments in broadband, housing, clean water and climate.

A former aide to U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., announced Tuesday she is jumping into the hotly contested race for Vermont’s sole congressional seat and hoping to win the votes of progressive Democrats.

Vermont plans to begin providing at-home antigen tests for COVID-19 at state-run testing sites, rather than PCR tests, officials said at a press conference Tuesday.

On Feb. 8, Vermont skier Ryan Cochran-Siegle won Olympic silver in the super-G at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.

Legislators in the state’s Senate Committee on Agriculture are discussing a bill that would limit the types of nuisance suits property owners can bring against farms.

January 2022 was the second-deadliest month of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from the Vermont Department of Health.

Before he died, VTDigger spoke with Willem Jewett about the law he worked on while in the Legislature.

Vermont farmers who are working to reduce phosphorus pollution from their fields into local water bodies will soon be eligible for a new kind of compensation.

With about 350,000 at-home antigen tests on their way to Vermonters’ mailboxes, readers wrote to VTDigger to ask how the antigen tests would hold up if left for an afternoon or overnight in cold weather.

The Vermont Supreme Court slammed the state Department of Corrections this month over its handling of furlough cases, calling the system close to a “procedural mockery” and demanding that the department “do better for the persons subject to the rules.”

So far only a handful of Vermonters have tested positive for the Omicron variant of COVID-19, state health officials said on Dec. 21. But that won’t be true for long.

Since June, a task force of eight Vermont lawmakers has been mulling one big question: How can the state’s school funding system be made fairer?

Some 482 Vermont dairy farms will receive an extra $23 million in subsidies through a federal program next year.

Horizon Organic, which plans to stop taking milk from Northeast producers, has announced it will extend contracts by six months, giving farmers more time to find new markets.

Becca Balint, the president pro tempore of the Vermont Senate, is running for the state’s lone seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, she announced Monday morning. “I’m running because I believe that, even with the challenges of today, we cannot back … (read more)