Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Chair David Durfee]: We're live. Okay, great. What I think we'd like to do is hear from you, of course, on anything that you feel is important to tell us. But we're interested primarily in things that have been happening at the federal level since we were last all together, so the June. I know there's been a couple of there's been legislation that passed over the summer. There, of course, was the shutdown. There has been perhaps some funding that was supposed to have gone out that didn't go out or hasn't gone out, again, since the summer, possibly earlier where the impacts are now being dealt and noticed more. We're we're, of course, all aware now, if we weren't before, of the looming changes to the advanced premium tax credits. The impact that will have on farmers is something we're going to be talking about today. Immigration enforcement, the impact that may have on farms and farmers and on farm workers, obviously something we're interested in. The drought. And I may have missed something there. And if I did and you want to talk about it, please feel free. So again, we've just got about half an hour for this segment. And I'll ask the committee to just hold questions until at least until each speaker has gotten a chance to finish. And Katie, I'm going have you kick us off.

[Katherine “Katie” Becker Van Haste (State Director, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders)]: Great. Good morning, everybody. For the record, Katherine Becker Van Hayes, state director for Senator Bernie Sanders. Please call me Katie. I appreciate the chair's commentary. I recognize why you're gonna be here till 04:00 today. There is a lot to cover. I will try to be brief. I also wanna defer a chunk of my time, to Ryan with Senator Welch because Senator Welch, of course, sits on the Agriculture Committee, and they're gonna have the most in-depth policy awareness of what's happening. So just for situational awareness, I'm gonna keep it relatively high level. The chair has just alluded to a lot of what's gone on in the last four or five months since we have been together again, including a shutdown and reopening of the government. I wanna just start by thanking the legislature and the governor for acting quickly to provide some emergency funding to keep SNAP available to Vermonters. Senator Sanders, supported the decision to shut down the government because of the need to extend the enhanced premium tax credits for the Affordable Care Act. We obviously had hoped to do that without a shutdown, but felt like it was important when the three branches of government are controlled by one party. This was essentially the leverage we had to discuss a critically important issue to about 45,000 Vermonters who would be directly impacted, but I always try to highlight when I'm speaking to people that every single one of us would have actually, will actually be impacted by these lack of subsidies. We know that our healthcare system is hanging on by a thread, and it doesn't actually have the wiggle room in the system to absorb these cuts, this many people going without coverage. Because of course, we know that going without coverage does not mean you're going without care. People will wind up in the emergency department, which is wildly expensive if it cannot be paid for. With that, however, we knew that some short term pain may have been created, federal workers not getting paid, our staffs included, and certain benefits not going out. The decision not to provide funds for SNAP was created illegally by the Trump administration because there is a contingency fund to create, to provide funding for SNAP so that hungry Vermonters and people all over the country did not go without much needed food assistance. Just highlight that SNAP provides about $6 in benefits per day. I don't think any of us in this room lives on $6 a day for food, so it's a modest benefit at best and we believe should have been paid. So I just want to thank the legislature for stepping up and providing that short term support for hungry Vermonters. I know that it was just really impactful and meaningful for those folks, despite a lot of hurdles that had to be crossed. When we reopened the government, we fully funded the USDA Agriculture Appropriations Bill. So just for everyone's situational awareness, there are 12 different appropriations bills that fund different parts of the government. Nine of those got partial year funding through January, three of them got full year appropriations, one of them being the Department of Agriculture. This was good news in our mind, because we know that our farmers, who we also know are small business owners, really needed that full year of support. They needed it for flood and drought recovery, the loans that are available for drought recovery, were not available during the shutdown, so this was good news, that the service center for farmers can now reopen. It fully funds SNAP, it fully funds WIC, as well as childhood nutrition programs like school breakfasts and lunches, and the farm to school program that Senator Lee created. Again, I want to leave it to Ryan to walk through some of the ins and outs of some of the other funding, but I know Farm Bill Extension is something that we talked about a lot in June. A fair amount of that got covered in the so called one big beautiful bill. But other aspects of that were funded on a one year extension in the legislation that was signed into law earlier this week. The last thing I will just note is that one of the issues that was discussed in the Senate prior to passage of the legislation that reopened the government was around hemp. Senator Rand Paul introduced an amendment that would have repealed some of the language that regulates hemp, that would have been his amendment fixed a problem that we are concerned about for Vermont. That amendment unfortunately did not pass. It was through Senate procedure. It was tabled. Senator Sanders did not support the tabling of that because he supported the underlying amendment that would have removed the language from the bill. We do anticipate that this could have a negative impact on Vermont hemp producers and CBD businesses. So happy to continue to work with this, committee on that moving forward. The last thing I will just mention before turning it over to my colleagues is that as part of the decision to reopen the government, there was an agreement to have some type of vote around healthcare and the extension of the subsidies in December. We are awaiting that, and senator Sanders is being explicitly clear about the need to make a very real action in ensuring that the enhanced premium tax credits continue to move forward and highlight some of the other places where we can make investments in our healthcare system to benefit Vermonters. I'll just conclude by making a plug to any of you that we all have shared constituents. So your constituents are our constituents. And if there's anything our office can do to help your constituents, when you hear from them about federal agencies that they're struggling with, you're welcome to connect them with us. I want to acknowledge Representative Boslen, who does a great job at connecting us with her constituents, so really appreciate that. And I just invite all of you to do the same. And I'm happy to, your committee folks know how to get in touch with us and all of our contact info is on our website. But feel free to reach out to me directly anytime.

[Chair David Durfee]: Great. Thank you, Katie. Think we'll Are you gonna be able to stay with us, Katie, for a little while? Okay. Ryan, why don't you come on up? We'll hear from you. And then Thomas, good morning. We see you, and we'll turn to you after Ryan.

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: Hi, Thanks for having me. I'm Ryan McLaren, senior advisor for Percentive Peter Welsh. And I am gonna do like kind of a laundry list to sort of talk about what was included, Katie covered some stuff, but what else was included in the Ag appropriations bill that passed and the one year extension of the Farm Bill. So basically we didn't rewrite a new Farm Bill, we haven't, it expired in 2023, we still have not done that, there's work to be done. But before it expired, punted for another year and gave ourselves till the 2026 to rewrite it. As part of the ag appropriations process, I'll start with just a few things that I know are important to Vermont that were included in the ag approach bill. There's $48,000,000 and for the most part these are level funding or maybe slight increases or decreases, but when there's a dramatic change, I'll just try and note that. Katie talked about fully funding WIC and SNAP, And there also is a $1,200,000,000 for the Food for Peace program, which is a program that was in USAID. And there's funding to figure out how that program can now move to USDA to make sure that the people, the farmers growing food to send it around the world. Food for Peace have a place to do that, and we're not leaving people hungry. But then there's $48,000,000 for the SARE program, Sustainable Agriculture Research Education program, dollars 30,000,000 for the National Ag Library, which includes funding for Vermont Law Graduate School where they run ag law program. Dollars 22.7 for the National Organic Standards Board, which is important work and Vermonters have served on that board for a long time. So obviously the integrity of that program is critical to the success of Vermont farmers. Dollars 11,250,000.00 for the Dairy Business Innovation Centers, which is housed over at the Agency of Agriculture. That is about half as much as we were hoping for, and so we're continuing to work with Secretary Tebbetts and the folks over there to see what we can do. That program has been, well, huge. Dairy farmers tell me all the time how important it's been and how supportive it's been to the industry in finding ways to make sure Vermont dairy can succeed in the modern marketplace. Outside, there's $10,000,000 for regional commissions, including the Northern Border Regional Commission, which obviously does immensely important work. And we're happy to see that funded. 7,250,000.00 for the organic transition program, dollars 6,000,000 for the Acer Access and Market Development Program, which is a grant program that funds a lot of the work that happens at Procter Research Center. That's like the maple grant program for the country, and obviously we do a lot of, as the largest and best producer of that product in the country, we get a lot of that funding. Dollars 5,250,000.00 for the three institutes of rural partnership, of which the Lahey Institute at UBM is one. So the work that that institute is doing to integrate the research and information and business development at UBM into rural communities is funded and can keep going. Katie mentioned $5,000,000 for the Lakie Farm to School program, and then level funding for the food system centers, which UBM is one of. There's also $50,750,000 for the USDA reconnect program that's doing rural broadband development in Vermont and across the country. It sets the minimum build out speeds for that lower than we would like to see. Peter is committed to the fastest connections possible for rural providers because they deserve it. Then, okay, I'm sorry, I told you it was a little laundry list, but there are going be a few more things. Rural development was funded at $4,100,000,000 There's more funding for some of the rural development housing programs, which maybe not, have not been the emphasis

[Representative Richard Nelson]: in Vermont,

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: but there is funding there available for that. 1,800,000,000.0 for rural business and industry programs for economic growth. And what else? That's probably The conservation title, $850,000,000 for NRCS. And it continues to fully fund the conservation technical assistance programs, are essential and are under threat. ARS is fully funded, the Ag Research Service is fully funded and there's an increase in funding for food safety and I'm trying to find this. $50,000,000 increase for the state meat and poultry inspection and cooperative interstate shipping programs, which is good. We have a lack of meat inspectors in the state and USDA work closely together on making sure that work's happening and people are getting the products they need, producers are able to get their products to market and it's all safe and so forth. So that is positive. That's all positive. The hemp changes Peter voted against or voted for the motion to table that part of this. It's dramatic, it will be a dramatic change for some very large investments in rural communities, farm in South Europe, farm in Harvick, places that have invested because these are the rules that were set and this change in rules for some of these hemp producers will make a dramatic impact on their profitability, whether they can succeed or not. And so we haven't given up thinking about what that means. It's too important. We can't afford to grow those investments away in this dramatic change, there's a sense that it was sort of all or nothing in that vote in terms of how we want regulate the industry. And Vermont for its part has taken quite a sensible approach to it, and the farmers I've heard from were telling me that if federal law looked like Vermont law, they'd be quite happy and they could succeed. And so that's TBD. And then the last thing I think I'll touch on is, I'm sure there's more, but the drought is, we're obviously still feeling the effects of the drought. If you want an update, Representative Nelson's Instagram feed is a very informative source and a great follow-up. So there's been a drought disaster declaration for two counties, in the contiguous counties. Our FSA office has requested a statewide disaster declaration. Our offices have sent a letter of support for that request. And now that the government has reopened and FSA is literally back to work today, we can start pushing that to make sure that the resources available to farmers to respond to the drought are available to everyone that was impacted because it's not just two counties, it's widespread and the impacts will be ongoing. So I will stop there and take questions at the end. I'm sure I'll make more things.

[Chair David Durfee]: Actually, yeah, stay right there. Justin, before we switch over to Thomas, I think we've got a couple of questions, I'll ask one. Just assuming there is a statewide drug declaration and that there will be resources available, what are those resources? Just very high level.

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: It's low interest grant loans through FSA. So there's a couple specific programs for drought impacted farmers. In a

[Representative Richard Nelson]: lot of

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: ways, it's very positive that those are available, and it's access to capital to help purchase feed or supplement the things that you would need to cover the losses from the drought. But in a lot of ways it's not as responsive to Vermont scale agriculture as it should be, because that's true for most of our disaster programs. They are designed for commodity crops. And so if you're doing anything at a lower scale or diversified, you're really piecing together bits and pieces.

[Chair David Durfee]: Go ahead and follow-up and then Representative O'Brien's got a question. Contact your FSA

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: office is the first step.

[Representative Richard Nelson]: Yeah, talking to the head of FSA in the state, Wendy Mowton, she was fairly confident that we could have something. And in a far region than Vermont, it's New Hampshire, it's Maine, it goes right out across New York State in that band. A corn price basis is like a 1.7 that's added on to the bushel price, our grain prices, which we need to buy corn because of the drought affected us, in our quality of our crop, and everyone said well corn's cheap this year, well not when you get it to annoying them, because of the basis price, it's right where it was the last two or three years, which is great for my corn growing friends. It saved them, It saved them for an absolute or any of this thing. And then I have other questions, but if you want to continue on.

[Chair David Durfee]: Yeah, let's go ahead, representative Brian.

[Representative John O’Brien]: Thanks, Brian, because I don't understand how things work in Washington. Sure. Could you just annotate, they're not even traditional budgets the way we sort of understand them there. Annotate how these numbers you just went over in that laundry list and say start with the Dairy Business Innovation Center. Was there an agreement sort of on a number and now coming out of the shutdown, the money committees there just went through and said, I will give them half, we'll give this fully. Right.

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: Yeah. The preparations committee has been sort of doing their work in an ongoing way and working through these. And so typically what happens is there's an agreement on a top line number. There's an ag approps subcommittee that's working on the ag approps bill, and so they're given a number by the chair of the committee essentially that's working towards some broader vision of how it all shakes out and where the money goes, where they cut, where they spend. And then they sort of leave it to the subcommittees to work out how to get to that number. And it's like any budgeting process, it's a give and take. And so it really depends on who's in the room who's talking about those things, whose interests are at stake. And so we got those three, four dairy business innovation centers. Oh my gosh, I should know this up. Wisconsin, Tennessee, Vermont, Northeast. It's not Vermont, it's Northeast. Wisconsin. And so, it's like any sort of legislative process, do those, do people see the collective interest and not collective interest in those centers to give some power in the Northeast because our innovation center has been extremely successful and extremely successful in getting money out, not just to Vermont, but throughout the Northeast and making those relationships. So have a leg to stand on. That's basically how it happens, and then it depends who's the majority, who's the minority, what sort of rises to the top. The last thing I'll say on the drought, which I just remembered as we were talking, is we have some block grant funding coming into the state eventually from USDA, which was sort of put on pause by the shutdown, but the agency is expecting it somewhere in the realm of $30,000,000 And the first question I got asked was, can we include, can we use that to help respond to some of the drought impact this year? And the answer is generally no, because we've written into law that that's for 'twenty three and 'twenty four disasters, and so anything that was declared this year would fall out of that. But we'll see what happens from there.

[Chair David Durfee]: I think we're going to hear later from the agency about the status of that 31 ish million debt will be It'll sound familiar because it was almost a year ago that we first heard in this committee how that money was about to arrive. Yeah. So we'll we'll hope that it does shortly. I do wanna just I see Katie's hand is up, and then I wanna let Thomas have a a chance to speak. But, Katie, go ahead.

[Katherine “Katie” Becker Van Haste (State Director, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders)]: I was just gonna make one quick clarifying sentence about the budgeting process because I heard part of the question was about how did the shutdown affect the total number. And because the ag subcommittees appropriations bill passed for a full year, that one so all the money that Ryan was walking you through is full year money. So it essentially looks backwards pretending it started getting funded on 10/01/2025 and is providing a full year of funding until 09/30/2026. Other programs that receive funding through other pots of money, other subcommittees appropriations bills, or only have a limited pot of funding that covers them from back to October 1 until January, when the short term funding bill expires. So it's a mishmash in the bill that we passed this week. I hope that's helpful, not adding confusion.

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: EPA funding, for example, is amongst that. That will end on January 30, and obviously, like a lot of the water quality work, we're utilizing those funds. There's what is relevant to this committee is included in multiple parts of that.

[Chair David Durfee]: All right, Thomas, good morning from Representative Ballant's office. Can't hear you, I don't think I see you're not muted, but can't hear you.

[Representative Richard Nelson]: No.

[Chair David Durfee]: God. Be up faintly.

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: We

[Chair David Durfee]: should have done a sound check earlier. Sorry about that. Could have been working on that. We'll let you keep working on that, and then Representative Nelson, you had another question, I think, for Ryan.

[Representative Richard Nelson]: Oh, we could go on. Yeah, you know, you're given out funding numbers for one year, so but you know, the dairy innovation center, know, that $11,000,000 for one year, read this all the other day, and that's probably not too bad a chunk of money for a year, well, eleven months, ten months now. That's total.

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: So we'll get a quarter of that, something that'll be

[Thomas (Staff, Office of U.S. Representative Becca Balint)]: Oh, that's what it's

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: gonna be? Process of dividing that number amongst all the innovations.

[Representative Richard Nelson]: All the, okay.

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: So it's, know, we got somewhere in the range of eight to 10, I believe last cycle. I need to confirm that, this is off the top of my head. And so it will be lower than that, but it's not nothing, it's not nothing. It's important funding period that the program didn't go away, The which is

[Representative Richard Nelson]: firm bills typically 85% programs for PE people and rural development whatnot, 15% for farmers, that's how that's easy way I look at it and I always have great arguments with people in my field saying, you know, when people look at the farm bill, say you farmers getting all this money, well, no, we get a portion of it, the rest of it is for feeding people and and all the other crucial work is done out in the rural centers. And I had held them and said, look, this this is gonna happen this way because this gets the red and the blue everybody to vote for. So, you know, good good work on that. Is there any money to continue our water quality work that we're doing on the fram? You know, we all tapped out, tapped into that and used that up. So in this next year extension, is there any money available to farmers that have already cleaned out the old farm bill?

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: Yes, so it eliminated the cap on EQIP. And so anyone that hit their $500,000 cap in EQIP, it now has funding available to them again. And so, am getting this wrong. There wasn't a cap.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: When the old Farm Bill expired, they eliminated the cap. So we haven't had a cap since one of the extensions, one of the Farm Bill extensions, they just didn't have a cap. So you could do multiple contracts each up to $450,000 with NRCS. So are we saying there's

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: a It eliminated the cap on the contract.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: It eliminated the total farm cap, but kept the contract cap. So there's a per contract cap of 450,000 and a total farm cap of 450,000 per farm bill. It eliminated that per farm bill cap because we didn't have a farm bill. So the lawyers at USDA determined without a farm bill, there's no farm bill cap. Could get up to, we could do multiple contracts of up to 450,000 each. And so are we now setting at a $500,000 cap for the duration of?

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: No, my understanding is, we'll clarify this. This is like my understanding is they have removed the cap on the project costs because projects are becoming more And the critique of that is there'll be fewer projects, fewer larger projects because the pot of money has not changed or is pretty much level funded. But the actual contract cap has gone away also.

[Chair David Durfee]: All right, let's, I think maybe we don't want to get too far down. I will get

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: our subject matter experts to figure that out.

[Chair David Durfee]: All right, Thomas, you wanna give it one more shot?

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: No. No. Maybe you could call if she called.

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: Well I don't know. There you go. Here you go.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Oh. Now we hear you.

[Thomas (Staff, Office of U.S. Representative Becca Balint)]: You can hear me. Good. Alright. Perfect. Hello, glad that finally worked. I know that we are over our time now but so I'm just very thankful that Ryan and and Senator Walter on the ag committee and we're able to give such an extensive breakdown. I did just want to, you know, share, you know, the house as we've been looking at this. Although Snap was funded, it was funded at a lower level than it was funded in f y twenty five. So I just think that's something that's gonna be important for us to be thinking of as we're talking about SNAP being technically fully funded, which it is at the president's request, in the one big beautiful bill, but that is less than than FY twenty five funding by about $15,000,000,000. Additionally, on top of that, the contingency funds that Snap usually has of about $9,000,000,000 which would fund about a month of Snap. We're funded at $6,000,000,000 so, if we were to find ourselves again in a in a shutdown in FY twenty six, there wouldn't be enough money to carry over any snap payments. So I just wanted to highlight that fact from from house ag. I sent forward to Megan. I'm not sure. I'd sent it a little bit late yesterday afternoon, so I'm not sure if you've all seen it. But just a one pager on this from the house ag committee that you can all take a look at. Some information isn't as relevant to Vermont, but there is some important info on there. And just primarily, you know, really wanted to thank you for all you have been doing. You know, the chair mentioned that we haven't seen each other since the summer. The house hasn't met a bunch actually since I was with you last. The ad committee has actually only had two hearings since the summer when when I was here with you all. So, not a ton of work being done on my side of the house unfortunately. But again, I'll I'll leave it there. We're we're over time, but Ryan really covered everything for us. So thank you very much.

[Chair David Durfee]: Yeah. Representative O'Brien, probably have

[Representative John O’Brien]: a delegation here. I think I heard on the radio this summer that somebody who would know this sort of thing said, we may never actually see another Farm Bill pass. So there's such disfunction. When was that last sort of

[Representative Richard Nelson]: a real official Farm Bill?

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: 2018 was the last Farm Bill. Mean, it extended its five years. We've extended it over the years since 2023. I don't want make predictions, but I can tell you much of the work that would be done in a Farm Bill cycle, which is like negotiating funding for how much goes into feeding programs, like food security programs, how much goes into agriculture, and what those things are. A big chunk of that work got done in the OBDD, where a lot of the policy work was done there, where it's like the changes to SNAP eligibility that could make it harder for people to actually access the benefit. That was done, that would normally be done in the Farm Bill and then was done in that budget reconciliation process. So it deflates a lot of the demands to have that political conversation about the Farm Bill itself, because they reference pricing for commodities off the table in that. So it's like, you're just left with some of the smaller, less sort of foundational parts of the Farm Bill, which are very, very important to places like Vermont, and still very important to work on a Farm Bill, but the sort of political demand to address it was deflated in that conversation. So I'm hopeful, because we give ourselves another year, and these programs are very important, we'll take it seriously and do the hard work of passing a new farm bill, because farmers deserve it and people that rely

[Representative Richard Nelson]: on those programs deserve it. Yeah,

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: we all deserve it. And so I'm hopeful, but I don't know the answer to that.

[Chair David Durfee]: Other questions?

[Representative Richard Nelson]: Just a statement, I want to thank Brian again, express my gratitude to Senator Welch for taking my college and talking to me and being proactive on the travel and whatnot, really the farmers in the state of Vermont really appreciate that and I know he does, he's doing great work for everybody in the state of Vermont in the Farm Bill and trying to, he understands, he gets it, thank

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: you for that. Yeah absolutely.

[Representative Richard Nelson]: And I'm trying to get him a seat so he and I can sit together when they have the grand opening of the ball. All right.

[Chair David Durfee]: I wanna say thank you then to the the delegation for joining us this morning. And you're welcome, of course, to stay on the call or, Ryan, to stay here as as you have time or or pop in later too. We're gonna we're gonna be here all day. Yeah. And and there may be some interesting conversation. Thank you. All right. We're going to move right along and invite Michelle Monroe up to the table.

[Marlee Root (Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation)]: Hello.

[Chair David Durfee]: And I don't know whether we've met before, whether you've been in the committee before that is.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: I have not testified before this committee, but sometimes people recognize me because when I was a journalist, was on Vermont this week with Stuart a lot. So sometimes people think that they've seen me on Zoom in meetings and it's because I was

[Chair David Durfee]: You look famous.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Yeah. Yeah, I had a very embarrassing moment with senator, with one of your colleagues on the Senate side who was convinced that she had met me before, it was like, that was the reason why. So I look familiar. I also, until March, worked in Senator Welch's office on agricultural policy alongside Ryan, so that's why we were back and forth a little bit. So I am with the Vermont Association of Conservation Districts, I'm here to talk about the impacts of loss of staffing at NRCS. Over the last couple of years, we had a new state conservationist who worked very, very hard to staff up at NRCS. Ryan can tell you that he and I were hearing across the state about the impacts of low staffing at NRCS and inadequate staffing and how that was blocking work from getting done. So Travis, our new state conservationist came in, he put in a tremendous amount of effort at bringing staffing up. So we had, I can't give you exact numbers because I've been asked not to share those, but well over 100 people at NRCS as of January 2025. Between what happened with Doge, the deferred resignation program, and the reduction in force plans that were issued by USDA, we are looking at NRCS numbers in the low 60s for staff across the state. So almost a 50% cut in staffing at NRCS. And this has generally been hit. They've lost new staff, young staff who were just getting started, and they've lost people who were close to retirement. So they've lost the folks who were planning on building careers at NRCS, and they lost the folks with lots of knowledge and experience. And so those impacts have been felt. One of the biggest impacts has been in engineering. So this touches directly on drought actually and on flood mitigation because we just don't have the engineers engineer those water quality. We don't have the engineers to engineer those practices. And so we're really feeling that across the state. The districts through VACD have hired an engineer to work out of the Rutland office at NRCS to provide some assistance. Some of the funding for that is actually coming from the state, from the agency of agriculture's end of student program. It's a jointly funded state and federal position. And the Agency of Ag, it also stepped up and has hired, in some cases, engineers to assist with that work as well. But that is really putting us behind in the ag sector. And the other area where it's a real problem is the emergency watershed program. So out of the 2023 and 2024 flooding, we had 150 projects in 60 municipalities across the state where the flood had endangered property. It had endangered a building and it endangered a road. It had created a need for emergency intervention at 150 locations that qualified for NRCS's Emergency Watershed Program. The engineer who had spent decades working on that program left NRCS. He took the retirement. And that has meant that, I mean, he couldn't have done those 150 projects himself, but they lost the person with all of that expertise and experience in a really complex program. So now they've been having to pull a lot of engineers from other projects in on top of having lost a substantial percentage of their engineering staff. And I've heard from towns like Hardwick that it's really a challenge because now that I work in engineers who just don't know all the I's that need to be dotted and all the T's that need to be crossed. So it's slowing those projects down. So NRCS also had an opportunity earlier this year to identify some critical vacancies where they could get someone to transfer in from DC as they were doing the cuts there. So they've managed to pick up two people, a conservation planner working on in Wyndham County, I'm in the Brattleboro office, and a program assistant who's going to be starting this week up in St. Albans now that the government is open. St. Albans is my nick of choice. So we're happy about that. One of the vacancies they couldn't fill was a GIS specialist and they're not being allowed to hire. They still can't hire. They won't be able to hire until at least January. So the only way they can pick up staff was through these transfers. So they had identified a GIS specialist as a critical vacancy. They couldn't fill that internally and we filled it. We've hired a GIS specialist. We started on November 3. GIS? GIS, which is the geospatial mapping systems. This person will program a lot of field tools that lets the staff take their phones out and gather data that normally they would have painstakingly gathered on paper, then gone back to their office and reentered it. Instead, they're able to gather that new field. So it's all of this support that needs to go around making projects happen because they have to map out your fields. They have to gather all of this data. This person is in charge of training and supporting people to do that and creating more efficient and effective ways of playing.

[Representative Richard Nelson]: So I don't mean to be available statewide to Sarah, Ted, or Vermont

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Yes, and because he's working for us and is going to be doing training, actually through the Vermont Ag Water Quality Partnership, we're going to use him to train staff at all of our agencies who are part of the water quality partnership. So that's very exciting because he just got finished a PhD at UVM, so we're really pleased to get him. So the other piece that saw a really big hit from the loss of staffing has been wetlands. NRCS for much of 2025 had one wetlands person. We're looking at triple the amount of funding for wetlands that NRCS normally has in FY twenty six. So this has been a really crucial area. So we had one wetland staff working as a district person, she was one of our staff. So now they've had some folks who are going to be resuming work in wetlands, but it's still going to be a challenge. And the shutdown was also really helpful for wetlands work.

[Chair David Durfee]: Michelle, sorry to interrupt, but I just want to be sure that, and maybe you can just clarify this, you're talking about district people, your staff, as opposed to NRCS staff.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Oh yeah, I should have

[Chair David Durfee]: explained the distinction there.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Yeah, we have staff that work for BACD. I'm their boss, I pay their salaries. We have district staff who work for districts, but are all embedded in NRCS. They work at NRCS offices, they have NRCS computers, they drive NRCS vehicles when they go out to do site visits. So from the outside, they look like NRCS staff because they are functionally NRCS staff. But they work for either the districts or for the ACD.

[Chair David Durfee]: And maybe everybody knows this. I sometimes don't remember. So we have 14 conservation districts in the state that are quasi independent.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Are units of state government. They are subdivisions of state government. Just like they're essentially a county level government. They have elected supervisors.

[Chair David Durfee]: And then NRCS is a federal agency.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: They were created at the same time to be partners. So when they created the Soil Conservation Service in response to the Dust Bowl, President Roosevelt sent a letter to all of the states with some model legislation saying, please create conservation districts to assist NRCS. So in Vermont, that law passed in 1939 that authorized the creation of the districts.

[Chair David Durfee]: And the headcount that you mentioned at the beginning dropping from 100 to 60 again, that was at NRCS. NRCS alone.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Yep, that's under sixpence. I apologize for, I was trying to be fast and I may have skipped over some fundamentals.

[Representative Richard Nelson]: But just to follow-up,

[Representative John O’Brien]: are the reductions in NRCS part of an administration target to say you can do the same amount of work with half the employees? Or is it just like, let's see how low we can go?

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Yeah, I think it came out of that initial First, we had that sort of initial federal employees don't do anything, let's get rid of them any time as we can, attitude that we saw at the beginning. And then that has been followed by this planned reduction in force that was pretty close to what they had actually lost already. But I think that there's a real desire to switch the work away from government staff and our departments like the districts and NOFA actually does some of this work as well. So there's a real desire by the government, by the Trump administration, to shift work away from federal workers and onto private nonprofits, conservation districts, other organizations to actually do that work. They're also very interested in doing work with technical service providers who would be private companies that would get hired to do this work. Sometimes district service, technical service providers, but they're very interested in outsourcing engineering and planning work in that way. But that's really tough in Vermont. We don't have private sector engineers who are going out designing animal waste management facilities and doing all of the planning and all of the work that's involved in that. Have to have all these other plans as well, inventory management plans and application plans for the manure, and there's a whole bunch of pieces. We don't have engineering firms in Vermont that are interested in doing that generally.

[Representative Richard Nelson]: Well, we have Mr. Royce from over in New York, he comes over and he's very, very, very good and then you know we all work with, we all have our nutrient management specialists that we work with, and we work extensively with the Williams County Conservation District and they've

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: been great partners. Yeah, mean Sarah has been, Yeah, done a lot of work with you. Yeah, think that the districts do a lot of the nutrient management planning, but that engineering capacity, even with Mr. Royce in New York, there's a couple of firms that have been identified in some New England states, but they don't have the capacity to service every farm that's going to need it. So that loss of engineering capacity at NRCS itself and the idea that we could just pick that up with private companies just isn't really the case. You've never been in it. Mr. Rice is never going service all the farms you work to make in New York. You can't even pick up the farms that we don't have the capacity for in Vermont anymore, especially since New York is also losing capacity. So it's a real challenge. Engineering in particular has been a challenge. And so the districts are also, as I mentioned, we do a lot of nutrient management planning. They do a lot of training for NRCS projects. They help shepherd through applications, but then you get to the work that they can't do. They can't rank the applications, they can't decide who gets funded. That's an NRCS function. There are four things that are NRCS functions that can't go out to partners. So an issue.

[Chair David Durfee]: How many

[Representative Richard Nelson]: of your conservation districts are still off office right within NRCS, which became a problem? It became a huge problem. And we finally got it so they could get their mail.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Yes, yeah, it was a challenge for many of them. So I don't have the numbers. I would have to think through it and get back to you with the exact numbers on how many are still housed. Franklin County is no longer housed. Orleans is moving out. Over now, yep. Many of our other districts are looking at ways to move out, that holding that away is not housed, co housed. Bennington is not co housed at USDA offices, but many of them are. So that meant for one of the challenges, they couldn't access their equipment that they needed to do in soil sampling and things on farms during the shutdown. And they also, they couldn't get their mail, which Sarah had some clean water projects going on that she was getting mail about. Stormwater projects or other work gets tangled in these USDA shutdowns. It's a challenge, so we are actively looking to move each other's space.

[Representative Richard Nelson]: They finally made all allowance and opened the office one day a week so they could go and get the mail with Jim. Thankful for Yeah, FSA did that.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: So we've been responding to lots of conservation planners as well. They do the planning for all of these projects and they a lot of the, they do grazing plans, the districts do the nutrient management plants, but overall we've just lost conservation planning capacity. We lost eight staff in Addison County alone. NRCS lost eight staff in Addison County alone. So the districts have been stepping up in a variety of ways. We have between the ACD and the district seventeen conservation planners across the state who work with NRCS either that's all of their work or that's part of their work. So we've been looking at things like we had a state funded ag resource specialist in Addison County, and it was like, okay, can we give 40% of their time to NRCS, to help NRCS? Can we take, we had a couple of districts that had positions where they have added half time, half of this person's time is now going be working with NRCS. So we're really trying to bolster that as much as we can. And we're strategizing now about funding, identifying funding. What are the goals? And we're working closely with NRCS on that. What are the highest priority goals? What do we need to fill them and how do we get funding to do that? So that's an active and ongoing conversation. And I would just highlight one of the things that Well, I'd highlight two things. One is that I want to make, and I always try to give a shout out to our program assistants because as Richard will know, these are really complicated, big contracts. It takes a lot of time from application to contract. There are a lot of I's that need to be dotted and T's crossed. And so the program assistants at NRCS, they're the people who are making sure that all that happens. And in January, we had nine of them across the state. By the time everything shook out, NRCS, of its five program assistants, they had two left. Fortunately, the ACD also employs four program assistants and we had all four of them still there. So we went from nine to six combined with NRCS and the ACD. And so that has been a real increase in workload. And they also lost somebody who'd been doing this for thirty years and who is the person everyone else meant to get the questions answered. So just to let you know that there's that burden, again, that's a place where we've stepped up and really have stepped in to help better success.

[Representative John O’Brien]: Represent McBride. So we hear from the Conservation District heads that pulled us all off through grant funding mostly too because the state doesn't give them much money. So are those grants now, are they stable or are they going to be cutting out?

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: Right now, our grant funds are stable, but they're time limited. So then we've got to look to how do we replace those. So we do have a couple of grants that support the TA work. Some is the Agency of Ag's Ag CWIP program provides some base funding. We also rely on our core services money, which we'll be talking to you about over the course of the session. We're hoping to match what we got last year and maybe a slight increase to account for inflation. And then we also have direct agreements with NRCS. But again, those are for time limited. They have a day of expiration dates. So VACD has some rooms that we then share out with some of the districts to fund their work. Some of it funds direct VACD employees. Some of it we give out to the district to fund their employees who work with NRCS. So we are looking at having to put together, I would estimate about $2,000,000 to fund the staff at BEC and at the districts for FY twenty seven with the addition of some additional engineering and conservation planning capacity to offset the losses. So looking if we just add two conservation planners and a second engineer and fund our current stats, we are looking at about 2,000,000 just for FY27 to fund that work. So that's the funding package that we're strategizing now about how do we put together. It's a lot of money to pay folks to do this work. Yeah, go ahead.

[Chair David Durfee]: I'm going to have to go back and look at my notes, or maybe somebody else in the room can help. But when the Joint Fiscal Committee met last, not yesterday, but last month, I thought there was something around $8,000,000 it was cut?

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: That was the next thing I

[Chair David Durfee]: was going to talk So

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: that's a Regional Conservation Partnership Program grant to DEC. And Marlee Root, who oversees that grant for DEC, is here as well. So that was $8,000,000 in financial assistance, directly to farmers and other landowners. It wasn't just farmers. But the overall rent was $10,700,000 so that supports some staff at DC to manage it. And then it was $1,000,000 $300,000 for the districts and $700,000 for Red Star Forestry to do the planning work for those projects. So the planning work was underway. We had actual contracts for the technical assistance piece and we're actively working with landowners across the state on that when the funding was pulled on September 30. So that stranded a number of applications on the ag side. That's a little easier for us because I can take the staff who was working on that and I can pull in a separate source of funding and they can continue working and that will go through the regular NRCS EQIP funding process. And they'll have a little more competition, but hopefully those projects will ultimately get funded. But on the forestry side, it creates a real problem because there are only two coasters at NRCS. And so a lot of the projects that Red Start was planning, and they had 90 that were in progress when the funding was pulled, there just isn't a way without Red Start to get the planning done that's necessary for those projects to move ahead. And this RCPP was focused on flood mitigation, water quality, and wildlife habitat. So all of the practices that it was paying for support of those things.

[Chair David Durfee]: So was this restored with the reopening No. And the short term?

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: No, this was a separate decision. This Regional Conservation Partnership Program grant was funded originally with IRA money. And so even though So first they froze it when they took office, so we couldn't do any work on it. And then they said, Well, you don't have any grants, any contracts funded with this money, so we're going to take the financial assistance away. Well, then there's nothing to spend the technical assistance money on. So that was the justification. And I'm sure, I don't know, Marley has things that she'd like to add. At your convenience, Jim. If you want to hear more about it, happy to. Or if, yeah, more detail.

[Chair David Durfee]: Yeah, I think maybe if you wouldn't mind, since we're a little, if you can stay right there, if that's right, just introduce yourself.

[Marlee Root (Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation)]: Finally grew back water quality with Vermont DEC. This was a huge loss to the state. Yes, there is EQIP funding, but this was an additional $8,000,000 going out directly to farmers and forestry operations for very critical water quality and flood resilience work. As Michelle also said, this was a million dollars in technical assistance to both the ACD and Red Star, but it was also yanked. And Red Star is going to be losing two people as a result of it as well. This particular grant, RCPP, is unique because we have the ability under this grant to prioritize and rank projects solely in the way that we think is most appropriate and addresses the greatest needs in the area unlike EQIP that's much more of a statewide ranking process. It also provides up to 100% of the funding for the practices whereas the NRCS practices are usually closer to 75%. So yes, it is a big loss to funds. We had about 140 applications come in and as Michelle said, since it was frozen, we weren't able to contract any of those but then that was the reason that the administration said they were taking the funds back was because we hadn't contracted the money, we had five years to do the contract before. We have put in an appeal, we are not terribly optimistic, but we have submitted an appeal because we did not have the opportunity to do the contract. And also because of the technical assistance money being taken back, that's $2,500,000 that we've got the partners as well. And under the law, under the RCPP law, does say that if these funds can be used to support other NRCS related work, we should be able to keep the funds. And this money could have been used to move these projects forward in the EQIP program. So we have put in an appeal and

[Ryan McLaren (Senior Advisor, U.S. Senator Peter Welch)]: see what happens with that.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: But for us, when I talk about that 2,000,000 we need that loss, that's $300,000 of it that just went out the door.

[Chair David Durfee]: So I can imagine that there will be some across state government, across our budgeting, there will be some requests for state funding to plug the gap to fill in where federal funding disappeared. And we're going to be hearing later today perhaps some examples of that. But we might be inclined to say, if something was 75% done and the project funding was pulled, may be something that collectively the legislature would say, oh, Okay, we can step in and we need to help with that. That makes sense. It sounds like these are projects that weren't at that point yet.

[Marlee Root (Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation)]: They were not under contract yet.

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: They haven't started to be

[Marlee Root (Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation)]: but another gap in this too is with this technical assistance funding, we're talking about the engineering backlog. This funding would have covered the engineering costs, hiring private engineers to cover the engineering costs, another humongous gap. Did

[Chair David Durfee]: you have more that you wanted to present?

[Michelle Monroe (Vermont Association of Conservation Districts)]: No, I just wanted to say that publicly I want to just thank the Agency of Agriculture, which has been very supportive of us and NRCS through this process and helping us be really flexible with funding that we're getting from the state to be able to move that to help support the NRCS work. I just want to say that and that you will be hearing from us again about funding for districts for the next year. We had $862,000 in the current fiscal year, and we're hoping to match that with an increase of 10% in the next

[Chair David Durfee]: year. Does anybody have any other questions? All right. Well, you very much for joining us. Thank you. I didn't schedule any breaks. Usually, we put them right there so that everybody knows. We will take a break, and I think maybe we'll take a short break right now, and I mean, five minutes. Say short. Will that work for everybody? Just a stretch, really. So don't go far. It's 10:32. So at 10:37,