Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Committee Chair (House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry)]: So we can just Okay. So We're gonna come out of executive session. Yes. Yeah. So a motion to come out.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: I move to come out of executive session at 03:25. Second. Second.

[Committee Chair (House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry)]: Any discussion? All in favor? Votes? Six zero two. That's great. Thank you very much. You. Good day.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Thank you.

[Committee Chair (House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry)]: All right. Just a couple of housekeeping items. First, did you have anything?

[Rep. Heather Surprenant (Vice Chair)]: Yeah, I did give a quick update. I mean, was called down to appropriations by, it actually was by the committee. It was by somebody who was in the room, but who saw that they had been, they were looking at an amendment. It started as the grading amendment on our S-sixty And it ended up being very, very minor language changes, but they actually did a couple other changes to S60, basically things of the nature of removing the word climate and just leaving resilience and that kind of thing, like changing the language to make it most friendly for our current world events. And so very minor changes. It did incorporate the grading amendment and they're actually, I mean, got down there and I was there for like eight minutes or something and then they stopped. They were like, oh, okay, we're gonna vote on this at 04:00. So it sounded like they're ready to vote it out of committee. And I actually didn't hear what number they were designating it with or the initial leader, but it's actually looking good that it's gonna move forward.

[Committee Chair (House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry)]: It might not be a number right now. Possibly it may still be zeroed and then later on. We'll see if they can. Possibly, yeah. Okay. Yeah, good. All right, well thank you for leaping up. I mentioned the other day that we took some testimony on the Bridges to Health program, and it mentioned that we were going to sign on to a letter. And I just wanted to share the letter. It was drafted for the healthcare committee, and it just basically says that they support, and there's a dollar amount, 162,000, I think, and that our committee also supports it. So before we before they submit that letter, I wanna have make sure the committee does support it. And I know John's left, and we can if anybody has any objections, we can hear those or anybody wants to have any discussion about it rather, doesn't it to be an objection? I'm not sure which bill you're talking. So maybe, I'm not sure, there's not a bill. So this is, let me back up a little bit. We had a Nora Horton come in and officers' testimony on the Bridges to Health program and a request that the healthcare committee was intending to make to the appropriations committee to include some funding in the BAA, Budget Adjustment Act, to support the Bridges to Health program. And rather than write a whole letter of our own, it seemed like we could just sign on to the letter. It's fairly straightforward. It's like four sentences. And I have Patricia post it and then we can make it official tomorrow. It is just a very short story. What else did I have? Field trip. So we were working on having a morning sometime either next week or the following week in Randolph to do two things. First is go to the new meat lab at the Randolph campus of Vermont State University pool. And we've heard over the last few years updates on that. It's now up and running, so we thought that would be a good thing to see. This is to train the next generation of meat cutters and butchers, and we're always hearing that there isn't enough of either. Yep.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: If it bothers our member of the Westminster or whoever, can we give her a free pass on that? It's being

[Committee Chair (House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry)]: conscious of your Yeah. I'll I'll be okay. You're much much more sensitive than I am, Richard. I appreciate that. Then once we've had that toured, then we'll go across the street. This is, we're playing anyway, to the weights and measures lab at the agency there. So I know we've reached out. I don't know if we've gotten confirmation yet.

[Patricia (Committee Assistant)]: No, not yet. The agency has reached out. It'd be relevant to the similar Excellent. So

[Committee Chair (House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry)]: this would be a Wednesday or Thursday, either next week or whenever we can

[Patricia (Committee Assistant)]: Can I update on the date a little bit? The twenty first is not possible for the bushery.

[Committee Chair (House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry)]: Okay.

[Patricia (Committee Assistant)]: And the twenty eighth and the twenty ninth are the pending decision dates, so that's the following week.

[Committee Chair (House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry)]: Okay. Okay. Wednesday and Thursday.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. The twenty second, I do have well, it's Northeast Kingdom Day. What time would we meet there?

[Patricia (Committee Assistant)]: So Week after.

[Committee Chair (House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry)]: It'd be the following week, looks like. Not the twenty second. Okay. We would meet we would meet here, we'll you know, carpool from here at nine, meet there at 09:30. That's a that's a guess.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: The twenty ninth, I do have a CAFO meeting in

[Committee Chair (House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry)]: Williston. What time is that? 09:00 tomorrow. Okay.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: I am Wednesday is great for me if it's great for

[Committee Chair (House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry)]: everybody else concerned. And then so that we're sharing some options, then the following week would be the first week of February, if we need to do that.

[Rep. Heather Surprenant (Vice Chair)]: So I'm actually going to be gone on the first and second, and I would be very sad if I missed that. So it would be fine. Think that first might be a Monday, but I'm I'm gonna be out of town until I'll be back on the third.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: First is a Sunday, second The Monday. Is the Monday's grandma's

[Rep. Heather Surprenant (Vice Chair)]: I'll be I'll be back the afternoon of the third or fourth.

[Rep. Richard Nelson (Ranking Member)]: And so far, everything looks good that first week. Okay.

[Committee Chair (House Agriculture, Food Resiliency, and Forestry)]: Alright. Do we have any other housekeeping things? This is look at the agenda for their state week. We are here tomorrow at 09:30, first of all. We're going to take some testimony in the afternoon on the municipal regulation of agriculture issue. Is testimony from some of the farm groups who have an interest. The next day, we're going to have the agency come in, and they were in last week to talk about the issue, but they're gonna come back in with actual proposed language. And then, Legislature Council will stay, is the chair, they have thoughts on that language and have a discussion with us. We've also invited the League of Cities and Towns to come in and there'll be other foreign groups coming in either later in the week or next week. My hope is that after we hear all that testimony, we'll be in a good position to have a conversation amongst ourselves, see what other testimony we might feel we need, but then to draft our own proposed language or whatever it might be. So that's municipal regulation. We're hearing another report later this week. We've got an update on the organic standards after hearing something about that the other day. Fish and Wildlife Department is coming in. They wanna talk about food security from their perspective. We've got the Vermont Food Security Roadmap on the schedule for Thursday afternoon. And then possibly some input or feedback from the professional logging contractors. We have a couple of open slots still. I would say plan on being here Friday afternoon, at least for a little while at this point. It looks like we may fill that in. Any questions? Alright. I know we haven't had much of a break. We've done straight pretty much since one, so maybe we can wrap it up there. Let's see if anybody's got anything else. We're at school board meeting at 05:00, Kelly. I'll be there right on time. All right, we're all set. Patricia, thank you.