Scott Signed the Forensic Facility Bill. Now Vermont Has to Build It
The five-year fight over who runs it is settled. The fight over whether it gets built just started.
For five years, Vermont has been described — by its own Department of Mental Health, among others — as possibly the only state in the country without a secure forensic facility for defendants too ill to stand trial. On June 16, Governor Phil Scott signed S.193 into law as Act 147. After five years, four bills, and a list of the dead, the law resolves the dispute that stalled the project for all of them: who runs the facility, and under what model.
It does not resolve whether the permanent facility will be funded, sited, built, staffed, and opened by the law’s own July 1, 2029 deadline.
That gap — between the law and the building — is now the question.
What Vermont settled
The five-year argument was never mainly about whether Vermont needed a secure setting for the narrow group of defendants charged with life-sentence offenses — murder, aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping — who are found not competent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity, and who do not meet the threshold for psychiatric hospitalization. The argument was about whether that setting would be run by the Department of Corrections or by a health agency.
Act 147 answers that. The permanent facility will not be operated by Corrections. The Agency of Human Services Medical Director oversees all clinical, forensic, and competency-restoration services. The building will be licensed as a therapeutic community residence. DOC’s role is limited to perimeter and admitting-area security, and only if the facility is located on the same grounds as a correctional facility.
The law also puts three things in statute:
An interim program is scheduled to launch inside an existing Department of Corrections facility on July 1, 2027. It does not require another vote of the Legislature to begin.
Wellpath — DOC’s for-profit health care contractor, which declared bankruptcy in 2024 — is barred from providing restoration services in the interim program. The law requires that the entity providing those services “shall not be under contract with the Department of Corrections.”
The procedural safeguards are preserved: six-month competency reviews, dangerousness hearings where the state must prove its case by clear and convincing evidence, court-approved involuntary medication under strict standards, and victim notice throughout the hearing process.
What Vermont did not settle
The money to build the permanent facility.
FY2027 funding covers planning only. The law expressly bars spending on construction or fit-up “absent further legislative enactment.” The facility’s size is unsettled. Its location is unsettled. Both are left to a feasibility plan due January 15, 2027, with interim updates to lawmakers in August and November.
So the permanent facility is a statutory mandate without a construction appropriation. It is not yet funded, sized, or sited.
The part of Act 147 with a near-term mechanism is the interim program — the smaller one, inside correctional facilities, operating under emergency rules due by the end of this year. The permanent facility has a deadline. It does not yet have the money to become a building.
ANALYSIS: Why Vermont keeps landing here
Start with the size of what passed, because it is real. For five years the executive and legislative branches were deadlocked over whether this would be a prison wing or a hospital, and the final law settles it decisively toward care — boxing Corrections out of clinical operations entirely. That is a historic shift in how Vermont treats this population, and it is now statute, not aspiration.
With that on the table, it is fair to ask why a state that agreed it needed this spent five years not building it.
The strongest defense is that the governance fight was not a detail. A corrections custody unit and a therapeutic residence are different buildings — different design, different license, different law. You cannot pour a foundation until you know whether you are building a jail wing or a hospital. The disagreement over who runs it was, in effect, a disagreement over what the thing is. The same logic defends the budget: committing tens of millions to construction before the state has a site, a size, or a design would be reckless, and the feasibility plan due in January is how a state avoids that.
But that defense explains 2027. It does not explain 2021. The law that finally passed proves a both/and was available the whole time — an interim corrections-based bridge and a permanent health-run facility, start now and finish later. That is roughly the structure the governor was publicly asking for this year, and what victims’ families had been asking for far longer. Kelly Carroll, who founded Voices for Vermont Victims after her daughter Emily Hamann was killed in Bennington in 2021 by a man who had been found incompetent to stand trial in an earlier case, has been making that case for years, as Compass has reported. The compromise that broke the logjam did not require five years to invent. It required five years to accept.
And this is not the first time Vermont has let the fight over the model delay the facility itself.
After Tropical Storm Irene destroyed the Waterbury state hospital in August 2011, Vermont had already been trying to site a new psychiatric hospital since 2005. The replacement — the Vermont Psychiatric Care Hospital in Berlin — did not open until July 2014. A flood forced the issue, and it still took three years. Anne Donahue, a Republican state representative from Northfield and a longtime mental health advocate, described the dynamic plainly: the storm, she said, “forced our hand when we were really caught up in this maze of differing ideas of what to do and inadequate urgency.”
That is the floor, not a clean parallel. Irene gave Vermont an urgency this debate never had, and the state still argued over the model the whole way down. The forensic facility had no flood. So it waited five years with no building at all, and now starts a clock that does not run out until 2029.
The people this was written for cannot necessarily wait that long. The interim program is the part that protects them in the meantime — if it launches on schedule, if it is staffed, if the resources arrive. The permanent facility is a promise the next Legislature has to keep. Whether it does, and whether the building exists before another name is added to the list that got Vermont here, is the part of this story that is not finished.
Act 147 is the law. The facility is still the question.