Following is a partial list of new Vermont laws enacted in 2026.
• Act 76 (H.545) - Updates Vermont's immunization system by addressing who may issue recommendations and standing orders, purchasing authority, liability protections, and insurance coverage.
• Act 77 (H.649) - Revises the regulation of captive insurers and risk-retention groups, including rules governing sponsored captives, loans, and required financial statements.
• Act 78 (S.60) - Establishes the Farm and Forestry Operations Security Special Fund to compensate qualifying agricultural and forestry businesses for losses caused by severe weather.
• Act 79 (H.50) - Directs the State to identify underused public buildings and land that could potentially be repurposed, particularly for housing and affordable-housing development.
• Act 80 (H.84) - Permits telehealth appointments to be recorded when both the patient and health-care provider consent.
• Act 81 (H.540) - Implements recommendations concerning post-adjudication reparative programs, including the use and operation of community reparative boards in criminal sentencing.
• Act 82 (H.733) - Clarifies when a business arrangement constitutes a regulated franchise relationship, affecting the rights and obligations of franchisors and franchisees.
• Act 83 (S.210) - Revises access to autopsy reports maintained by the office of the chief medical examiner, including their availability through judicial processes.
• Act 84 (H.237) - Creates a pathway for appropriately trained doctoral-level psychologists to obtain prescribing authority under professional and health-care regulation.
• Act 85 (H.549) - Makes sentenced or detained individuals eligible to obtain a Vermont nondriver identification card or replacement driver's license or learner's permit, helping people leave custody with valid identification.
• Act 86 (H.744) - Revises procedures governing whether and under what conditions a person arrested without a warrant may be released.
• Act 87 (H.849) - Establishes a state civil cause of action for damages when a government official deprives a person of rights protected by the U.S. Constitution. (Governor did not sign the bill.)
• Act 89 (H.626) - Strengthens criminal law concerning sexual extortion, voyeurism, and the nonconsensual disclosure of sexually explicit images.
• Act 90 (H.723) - Revises how landowners may legally post land against hunting, fishing, or trespass and updates rules for private preserves.
• Act 92 (S.163) - Clarifies and expands the role advanced-practice providers, including advanced-practice registered nurses, may play in hospital care.
• Act 93 (S.181) - Eliminates the categorical requirement for a pre-sentence investigation before a court may impose a deferred sentence.
• Act 94 (H.410) - Standardizes definitions and calculations for recidivism, desistance, and related criminological measures, including measures involving repeat violent offenders.
• Act 96 (H.762) - Creates a study committee to examine Vermont's county and regional governance structures and consider potential changes.
• Act 97 (H.940) - Changes several public-utility laws affecting telecommunications, energy efficiency, utility regulation, and enhanced municipal and regional energy planning.
• Act 98 (H.46) - Establishes a Rare Disease Advisory Council to advise state policymakers on the needs of people living with rare diseases and the systems serving them.
• Act 99 (H.534) - Defines or revises the governance, responsibilities, and state relationship of Vermont's community-action agencies.
• Act 100 (H.582) - Reforms adult protective services administered by the Department of Disabilities, Aging, and Independent Living, including protections and procedures for vulnerable adults.
• Act 101 (H.814) - Establishes protections for neurological information and regulates certain uses of artificial intelligence in health care, mental health, human services, and health insurance.
• Act 102 (S.89) - Expands survivor benefits available when qualifying public-safety personnel die.
• Act 103 (S.157) - Creates or strengthens certification requirements for recovery residences serving people recovering from substance-use disorders.
• Act 104 (S.255) - Establishes a pilot Law Enforcement Governance Council in Windham County involving local law-enforcement and county-governance officials.
• Act 105 (H.270) - Protects the confidentiality of qualifying peer-support counseling sessions for emergency-service providers.
• Act 106 (H.385) - Gives victims of coerced debt legal remedies and protections against creditors when another person incurred debt through abuse, threats, fraud, or exploitation.
• Act 107 (S.173) - Updates vocational-rehabilitation and apprenticeship provisions associated with workers' compensation, labor relations, and dispute mediation.
• Act 108 (S.239) - Creates a working group to study and recommend changes to Vermont's child-abuse and neglect reporting system.
• Act 109 (H.512) - Regulates event-ticket sales and resales, establishing consumer protections for buyers of tickets to concerts and other events.
• Act 110 (H.536) - Requires testing and labeling related to toxic heavy metals in baby-food products and provides standards for determining when those foods are adulterated.
• Act 111 (H.559) - Changes the structure or operation of the Vermont Parole Board and its role in parole decision-making.
• Act 113 (H.635) - Eliminates Department of Corrections supervisory fees charged to people on probation, parole, furlough, or another supervised community sentence.
• Act 114 (H.778) - Strengthens dam-safety regulation, including emergency planning and operational requirements intended to reduce risks to downstream communities.
• Act 115 (H.171) - Establishes statewide protocols for investigating officer-involved shootings, including the Attorney General's role.
• Act 117 (H.550) - Establishes gender-equity and health-care standards within correctional facilities, including standards affecting transgender people in custody.
• Act 118 (H.578) - Revises criminal penalties and court procedures for animal-cruelty offenses and the humane treatment or disposition of affected animals.
• Act 119 (H.588) - Changes licensing and practice requirements for professions and occupations overseen by Vermont's Office of Professional Regulation.
• Act 121 (H.841) - Revises animal-welfare intervention and enforcement procedures, including how public authorities respond when animals are neglected or endangered.
• Act 122 (H.930) - Establishes measures for identifying, addressing, and preventing chronic absenteeism in Vermont schools.
• Act 123 (S.179) - Enacts the Uniform Disclaimer of Property Interests Act, standardizing how a person may legally refuse an inheritance or another property interest.
• Act 124 (S.214) - Addresses access to and tuition for prekindergarten education in geographically isolated school districts.
• Act 125 (S.227) - Requires Vermont schools to adopt protocols governing immigration-enforcement activity and protecting school safety and student access.
• Act 126 (S.298) - Strengthens voting protections, including provisions concerning election interference, language assistance, reapportionment, and how incarcerated people are counted.
• Act 127 (S.232) - Supports public libraries through changes involving bonding, library improvements, Department of Libraries responsibilities, early-education grants, and after-school and summer programming funds.
• Act 128 (S.327) - Enacts an economic-development package affecting business-growth programs, the Vermont Employment Growth Incentive program, and related planning or task-force work.
• Act 129 (H.527) - Extends the sunset date for Vermont's streamlined telecommunications-facility siting process under 30 V.S.A. § 248a.
• Act 130 (H.542) - Revises Vermont's program for testing schools for polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and responding to contamination.
• Act 132 (H.577) - Establishes the Vermont Prescription Drug Discount Card Program to help residents obtain lower prices on prescription medications.
• Act 133 (H.583) - Protects independent clinical decision-making and regulates health-care business transactions and arrangements that could interfere with the professional practice of medicine.
• Act 134 (H.606) - Establishes procedures for relinquishing, transferring, and safely storing firearms when possession is prohibited or surrender is ordered in a criminal or civil proceeding.
• Act 135 (H.639) - Creates consumer protections governing the collection, use, disclosure, and security of genetic data.
• Act 136 (H.657) - Changes Department for Children and Families programs involving child-welfare services, benefits, medical care, vital records, and services for unaccompanied homeless youth.
• Act 138 (H.211) - Strengthens regulation of data brokers and protections for personal information collected, maintained, or sold about Vermont residents.
• Act 139 (H.294) - Regulates telephone and telecommunications services in correctional facilities and addresses wages, commissary practices, and relevant state contracts.
• Act 140 (H.642) - Revises youthful-offender proceedings, affecting how eligible young people move between juvenile and criminal-court systems.
• Act 141 (H.660) - Allocates fiscal-year 2027 money from Vermont's Opioid Abatement and Substance Misuse Prevention special funds to treatment, prevention, recovery, and related responses.
• Act 143 (H.938) - Establishes the Vermont Homelessness Response Continuum to coordinate emergency housing and broader homelessness services.
• Act 144 (H.951) - Enacts Vermont's fiscal-year 2027 operating budget, appropriating money for state government, public programs, and services.
• Act 145 (S.71) - Establishes broad consumer-data privacy protections and restrictions on online surveillance, including obligations for businesses that collect or process personal data.
• Act 146 (S.189) - Establishes a review process hospitals must follow before eliminating or substantially reducing certain services, involving state health regulators and the Agency of Human Services.
• Act 147 (S.193) - Authorizes development of a forensic facility for certain criminal-justice-involved people with mental-health needs, including competency-restoration services.
• Act 148 (S.198) - Revises licensing, taxation, and enforcement rules for tobacco products and tobacco substitutes, including vaping products.
• Act 149 (S.202) - Creates a regulatory framework for plug-in photovoltaic devices, allowing qualifying portable or small-scale solar equipment to connect through ordinary electrical outlets.
• Act 150 (S.209) - Prohibits certain civil arrests, including immigration-related arrests, in designated sensitive locations such as courts, schools, and health-care settings, subject to statutory exceptions.
• Act 151 (S.243) - Provides funding to the Vermont Language Justice Project to improve multilingual access to public-health and other essential information.
• Act 152 (S.325) - Revises regional planning and the tiered jurisdiction system under Act 250, affecting land-use review, municipal zoning, housing, and development.
• Act 154 (H.686) - Expands disclosure and reporting requirements for advertisements intended to influence legislation or other lobbying-related government action.
• Act 155 (H.757) - Supports manufactured-home communities and limited-equity cooperatives through changes to zoning, wastewater regulation, property and transfer taxes, and sales-and-use-tax exemptions.
• Act 156 (H.816) - Regulates the use of artificial intelligence to provide mental-health or therapeutic services and establishes professional and consumer safeguards.
• Act 158 (H.915) - Establishes an extended-producer-responsibility program for beverage containers, shifting responsibility for financing and managing the redemption system toward beverage producers.
• Act 160 (H.931) - Makes substantive education-law changes involving minimum class sizes, independent and therapeutic schools, regional cooperative services, interstate education coordination, and employee background checks.
• Act 161 (H.932) - Clarifies when forestry activities and associated development are subject to Act 250 land-use regulation.
• Act 162 (H.935) - Updates Vermont's emergency-management laws, including governmental powers, planning, coordination, and response procedures during emergencies.
• Act 164 (H.933) - Changes several state taxes and tax programs, including income, estate, property-transfer, meals-and-rooms, vehicle purchase-and-use, and current-use taxation.
• Act 166 (H.941) - Clarifies the extent to which municipalities may regulate agricultural operations through zoning and other local land-use authority.
• Act 167 (H.942) - Changes agricultural laws involving water quality, Vermont-product labeling and standards, unit pricing, and municipal responsibilities.
• Act 168 (H.944) - Enacts the fiscal-year 2027 Transportation Program and related policy changes involving speed limits, transit, electric vehicles, transportation grants, bonding, and municipal equipment financing.
• Act 169 (H.949) - Sets statewide homestead education-tax yields and the nonhomestead property-tax rate while changing aspects of special-education finance, tax-increment financing, and education-fund administration.
• Act 170 (H.955) - Advances Vermont's education-system transformation through changes to school-district organization, education finance, union districts, prekindergarten, and cooperative educational-service areas.
• Act 171 (S.64) - Expands or otherwise revises the authorized scope of practice for licensed optometrists.
• Act 172 (S.142) - Creates an alternative pathway for qualified internationally trained physicians and medical graduates to obtain Vermont medical licenses.
• Act 173 (S.197) - Establishes primary-care reforms involving payment, access, workforce support, regulatory oversight, and the roles of the Green Mountain Care Board and Department of Vermont Health Access.
• Act 174 (S.212) - Expands or clarifies municipal authority concerning connections to public potable-water supplies and wastewater systems.
• Act 175 (S.223) - Strengthens Vermont water-quality law, including provisions concerning lakes and the protection or restoration of state waters.
• Act 176 (S.278) - Changes cannabis regulation, including purchase limits, licensing and fees, advertising, municipal authority, the cannabis excise tax, and the Cannabis Business Development Fund.
• Act 177 (S.313) - Restructures Vermont's career and technical education system, including its organization, delivery, governance, and financing.
• Act 178 (S.323) - Changes agricultural tax, permitting, property-transfer, income-tax, and food-processing rules.
• Act 179 (S.328) - Enacts a broad housing package affecting Act 250, municipal planning and zoning, housing tax credits, and the governance of condominiums and other common-interest communities.
Gov. Phil Scott vetoed legislation addressing home improvement and land improvement fraud, reducing chloride contamination of state waters, the creation of the Vermont Sister State Program, sustainable data center deployment, reference-based pricing and the Green Mountain Care Board, defining electricity generating facilities, mental health literacy and peer-to-peer supports in schools, and fair employment practices.
Windham County-related House Concurrent Resolutions were passed in 2026 to:
• Honor "the decades of extraordinary civic participation and leadership of Lexa and Steve Clark of Jamaica.
• Honor "the amazing Brooks Memorial Library Director Starr LaTronica" on her retirement.
• Congratulate former Marlboro resident Stephen R. Bissette on his designation as the sixth Vermont Cartoonist Laureate.
• Celebrate the 75th anniversary of Marlboro Music, "a premier chamber music educational institution, performance venue, and incubator."
• Congratulate the 2026 Brattleboro Union High School championship mock trial team, which won Best Overall Team honors at the Vermont state championship tournament at Vermont Law and Graduate School in South Royalton on March 14.
BUHS lawyers were Abraham Balint-Wohl, Danny Mahoney-Schmitt, Sal North, and Isabel Young; the school's student witnesses were Leland Stromberg, Eli Welch, and Gilbert Komuves; the faculty coaches were Tessa Anders and Ashley Nadeau; and Alycia Sanders served as the practicing attorney advisor.
This News item was submitted to The Commons.