Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, introduced an amendment on the Senate floor Thursday that would have created a nonbinding referendum on marijuana legalization. Photo by Elizabeth Hewitt/VTDigger
The Senate snubbed an effort Thursday to put the question of marijuana legalization to voters in a nonbinding referendum.
With just a few days left in the legislative session, Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, who has led the push to create a regulated market for recreational marijuana in Vermont over the last several months, took one more stab at moving the issue forward.
After the House voted down several iterations of the marijuana language this week, “the issue of legalization is absolutely dead,” Sears said. “The issue of how we go forward is still alive.”
Sears proposed language on the Senate floor that would have amended H.858 — the bill to which the Senate had earlier attached its marijuana legislation in an effort to get the House to address it — to hold an advisory vote on legalization on Election Day in November.
But the Senate did not provide the necessary two-thirds majority to suspend the chamber’s rules in order to debate the matter Thursday. Since the Senate didn’t vote on the referendum idea Thursday, it is unlikely the proposal can make it through both bodies in the few remaining days in the session.
Asked if he would offer the amendment when the House version of H.858 comes up for a vote Friday, Sears replied, “Nope, I got beat.”
“You win some, you lose some, some get rained out, and some you shouldn’t have played at all,” Sears said, quoting Yogi Berra. The referendum amendment, he said, he “shouldn’t have played at all.”
Vermont has no mechanism for a binding referendum. But lawmakers could authorize a nonbinding ballot measure to test the public’s opinion on the issue.
The proposal came up during the House debate on legalization. House Minority Leader Don Turner, R-Milton, unsuccessfully offered an amendment to H.858 that would have set up a vote on the issue when the primaries are held in August. Turner said Thursday that he would support a referendum in November.
House Speaker Shap Smith, D-Morristown, said he had concerns over whether there would be support in the House for holding a nonbinding referendum. There had been contact with the Senate and with the governor’s office on the matter, he said.
If anything was going to get the necessary support in the House to pass, the leadership would have needed prior consultation about the language of the ballot question, Smith said. But the House was not consulted before Sears offered his amendment Thursday.
In addition, Smith said, there was some resistance in the Democratic caucus to holding a referendum on legalization.
Sears said he was disappointed in the debate on marijuana legalization that took place in the House this week. Before the session began, he said, a decision was made to begin the marijuana legalization bill in the Senate and a bill changing the rules on driver’s license suspensions in the House.
“And we got a driver’s license suspension bill,” he said. “We don’t have a marijuana bill.”
Smith said he didn’t recall being a party to any meeting on that subject. He said he “certainly would not have assured the passage” of a marijuana legalization bill through the House.
Any efforts to legalize recreational marijuana in the next biennium would need to begin in the House, Sears said.
Sears plans to scrap a section in the House’s miscellaneous crime bill that would create a marijuana advisory commission, before sending it back to the House.
Smith said such a commission “would significantly advance the issue” and “give legalization an opportunity that it doesn’t have at this moment.”
However, if the Senate does not advance the version of H.858 that passed the House this week, Smith considers the issue to be dead for the year.
“If they don’t concur with it, we’re done on the marijuana issue this year,” Smith said.
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