One of the first jobs a legislature has
in January is to make adjustments to the current year's budget to
balance any gap between expected revenues and actual revenues. While
budgets are normally the focus of partisan disagreements, this year's
Budget Adjustment Act, dealing with a $19M revenue shortfall, was a
pleasant exception. By the end of January the House realigned
spending to end the current fiscal year with a balanced, responsible
budget and passed the bill on a 135-5 vote. With that important vote
out of the way, I decided to devote this report to two bills I
introduced.
The first is a bill to allow the
establishment of “natural burial grounds”. I introduced H.25,
after talking with Lisa Carlson, a Hinesburg resident and the author,
along with Joshua Slocum, of "Final Rights: Reclaiming the
American Way of Death". I had been aware of only two ways of
laying the dead to rest: embalming and cremation. It hadn't occurred
to me that embalming is a relatively recent phenomenon that arose in
the U.S. funerary industry in the 20th century. Lisa
pointed out that the downsides include the use of toxic chemicals as
well as expensive caskets and the concrete burial vaults to hold
them, and that cremation requires very high temperatures generated by
burning fossil fuels. On the other hand, the practice termed "green
burial" requires neither and allows us to "return to dust"
in the natural way that all other living beings do. This burial
method is already allowed by state law, but must take place in
specially reserved areas of existing cemeteries. Orthodox Jews as
well as Muslims practice this type of burial as a religious practice.
H.25 will expand the allowable use of the green burial method in an
even more natural way. It establishes the right of a landowner to
set aside a section of land where such burials can be performed with
the additional characteristic that would not require a grave marker,
but would allow the land, a field or forest, to return to its natural
state. It would require the land to be registered as a natural
burial ground and the grave site(s) to be “platted” or mapped for
future reference. While most people may still prefer to be buried or
to bury their relatives in the usual manner in a traditional
cemetery, H.25 will provide an alternative for those who wish their
bodies to simply "return to nature".
The second bill, H.104, will reclaim
the deposits on unredeemed beverage containers for the state. Under
current law, the sale of a soft drink or other deposit beverage
includes passing the deposit from the final customer to the
distributor. If the beverage container is never redeemed for the
deposit, but instead is diverted into regular recycling or the trash,
the beverage distributor keeps the deposit. It is estimated that
between one and two million dollars in Vermonters' deposits are
abandoned every year. Since we have paid these deposits for the
purpose of maintaining a clean environment, my bill will reclaim 80%
of them to help pay for Vermont's recycling efforts. The beverage
industry will keep the remaining 20% for handling costs. Three
states – VT, IA and OR – currently allow the distributors to keep
all of the unclaimed deposits, while five – CT, NY, MA, ME and MI –
reclaim some or all of them. In these tight budget times, finding an
extra million or two without raising taxes makes sense to me.
I continue to welcome your thoughts and
questions and can be reached by phone (802-233-5238) or by email
(myantachka.dfa@gmail.com).
