We Have a Lot of Unpacking to Do.
If Compass has been useful to you this year, this is a good moment to make it a paid line on your monthly budget.
The 2026 General Assembly session has ended. The fog of committee hearings, floor debates, amendments, and procedural votes is lifting. A handful of bills still sit on the Governor’s desk awaiting his signature or veto. Several others have already become law.
That’s when most coverage of the legislature stops. Compass Vermont is going to do the opposite.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be reading each bill carefully and telling you what’s actually in it — not the framing offered by the bill’s sponsors or its loudest critics, but the language itself, the funding mechanisms, the effective dates, the exemptions, and the people it changes things for. Property taxes. Education. Housing. Land use. The road rule. Each bill gets the kind of read that lets you decide for yourself whether you support what passed.
We’ll also be looking at who isn’t coming back next session, and what that means for the committees, the chairs, and the dynamics that shape next year’s debates. Several veteran lawmakers have stepped down, and the institutional consequences are real even if they aren’t loud.
The point of all of it is the same point Compass has had from the beginning. The fog is a problem when you’re trying to track what’s happening. It’s a worse problem when the fog lifts and you still don’t know what landed on top of you. We try to do the lifting.
If you’ve been reading Compass for free, the next several weeks are when paid subscriptions matter most. The bill-by-bill work is slow, the document trail is long, and the reading is where the work actually happens. A paid subscription is what lets us spend the time on it.
If Compass has been useful to you this year, this is a good moment to make it a paid line on your monthly budget.
Tom Davis
Compass Vermont