For two years, a Vermont Legal Aid program gave free lawyers to tenants facing eviction, and it worked. Out of 207 cases resolved through August, attorneys stopped the eviction entirely in 73 of them, more than a third. In dozens of other cases, tenants avoided debt they couldn't pay. The Tenant Representation Pilot Project cost the state just over $1 million over two years. It is shutting down this fall because lawmakers left it out of the budget.

Landlords show up to eviction court with attorneys far more often than tenants do, and Vermont has no general right to a lawyer in civil cases like these. Sara Kagle, the project's director, compares a tenant without representation to a patient being handed a scalpel and told to perform their own surgery. Brattleboro tenant Steve Koren experienced that gap firsthand this year, when a $200 rent dispute nearly cost him his apartment. A Legal Aid attorney got his case dismissed. Without that help, Koren said, "I would have been forced to pay the money that I don't have, and in that, I would've lost the apartment."

This program did not turn anyone away for income, and it kept dozens of Vermonters housed at a fraction of the cost of emergency shelter or homeless services. Letting it disappear now, right as winter approaches, will mean more Vermonters losing eviction cases they could have won with a lawyer beside them.

The Vermont Legislature can fix this in the next budget cycle. Sign the petition to demand lawmakers restore funding for tenant legal defense before more Vermonters lose their homes over cases they never had to lose.