Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: All right, Graham, thank you. Yes. Thank you

[Graham Unangst-Rufenacht (Policy Director, Rural Vermont)]: all for having me. My name is Graham Munang Sroufenac. I'm the policy director at Rural Vermont, and I'm here representing Rural Vermont and also this broader coalition of agricultural organizations who you've been speaking to about this issue, the municipal exemption. Maybe I'll start by saying, I think that we're really heartened by the work of the league on this. I think we're relatively close. There's some big places of agreement. Like the two main ones I can immediately see are that we can agree that it's right to grow food for plants in particular, which is a whole new ingredient. And the second is that we don't have to open the RIPs to address this. So they're like two big, I think, notable places to focus on. And I also think that even in terms of their identification of a lack of interest more broadly in towns regulating agriculture and really trying to hone in on what are the specific aspects of ag in which areas are we concerned about. I think that's really where we're trying to get. You'll see in number two here, our effort is to clearly enumerate the specific zoning subjects that Town can apply in tier one areas to farming and food cultivating practices. So we tried to do that in this latest proposal. And as you'll see, I mean, we briefly talked at the end, representative Burtt asked about other positive things we could do to sort of encourage towns to get more into this. And I think I can't speak as much to number three here, but this was a draft of some language speaking to what we could do to maybe encourage towns to more proactively think about agriculture. And Caroline could probably speak more to that. As you know, she's also a member of the Regional Planning Commission. To get right into the language, we did add some new findings, but I want to focus perhaps most on this one, two and three here, just to remind us of where we're at. It is longstanding legislative intent for decades that agriculture is exempt from municipal authority. All agriculture everywhere. The Supreme Court made a decision about the letter of the law, read the RAPs. We are not the legislature having to respond to that. We think baseline, we should be going back to where we've always been. That should be where our starting point should be. That's where the legislature has decided for decades to be. And that's sort of what we really try to emphasize in the first part. And then as we heard that there were some questions from you all about what types of food production we were considering to be included in the right to grow food or not, you all were talking about for personal use, etcetera. And then we just wanted to clarify that we were talking about anybody producing any food under the farm definitions. You could be selling eggs and getting a few $100 a year, which you're buying some feed for, donating to your local four H club or whatever. We just wanted to make sure that all those things were protected and that was communicated. And I think the league came in here and affirmed a very similar stance. We did include some findings related to sort of the scale of production and why it's important. So what we did is you get here is at the very top of this. You can see that we just got rid of the farm structure designation as the point of focus, where you all honed in. And then if you go down further, can see where we started to try to enumerate those aspects of municipal ordinance or zoning that we thought would be appropriate to apply. And this is where I would say this is an open invitation. Maybe how could we work here? What are these specific things? Because I think what the league has suggested is a different place in the municipal zoning code where similar to churches, etcetera, there's limitations on what a town can do. And I think we still have some concerns about what a town creditor can do with that authority. Could we take the time, and if we don't have it right here, that's fine. But could we more specifically enumerate those specific allowances towns have? We heard a lot about biosafety, about safe ingress and egress, vehicular traffic, pedestrians, certain siting of infrastructure, etcetera. So those are things we included here, but open to conversation around that. I'm just looking at number three here. That is, I think, a provision that was added. And I can't speak as much to that one right now. I'm sorry. And I'm just gonna bounce over from this document, has those sort of main changes we made, including the one to ensure that the right to grow food is about anything under farm production. And I just wanna give a sort of summary here. I think we disagree that if we don't address tier one or tier 1B, we'll be facing ongoing problems, or maybe that the solution to this problem is to further limit where ag and the growing of food can be. To us, you all know that we think that we need to respond to this by further affirming people's right to grow food anywhere in Vermont and plan for more farmland, protecting current farmland, more farmers, as Heather Darby noted yesterday in testimony, and a thriving economy of farmers and producers to farm that land. And maybe to address some issues of Act 181, if there are issues there that seem unreasonable for towns to address. But we expect these concerns expressed around tier one A or B and whether or not one B will become tier one A in many cases and farms having to adjust is just another reason to allow farms to make sure that farms are not regulated at all by municipalities at the very least for now, if there's so much uncertainty. If that's the case, then maybe this question could be put to a study committee in terms of whether or not a certain aspect of agriculture should be regulated. It sounds like there's a lot we don't know about it. These places haven't even emerged yet. Again, that gets to our feeling that baseline, we should be going back to where we've always been. The legislature makes law. The judiciary does not make law. Again, said sort of these places of agreement. Then there's a couple of issues. The main issues we see this issue of the right to grow food and livestock. So if it's not included in the right to grow food, maybe this is another issue that we could send to a study group. We know that even the municipalities have been regulated many local animals in some aspects. There's on the loose laws, there's animal welfare laws, all this stuff that's been being talked about. And there's this discrepancy of what's an animal for food and what's not. We also know that the culture around livestock and agriculture has changed, there's more and more threats to people being able to keep livestock in particular areas. So setback requirements, building requirements, they can be reasonable, but they could also be a means of functionally prohibiting reasonable numbers of livestock for particular areas or even whole classes of livestock. And those might not have to do with public health or safety. They might have to do with aesthetic sensibilities or even prejudice in some cases. And we need to ask what is more important, reasonable regs for growing food or aesthetic responsibilities, and just make sure that the towns are given the authority to ensure that it's reasonable and it's not based on the latter. The second issue is agriculture and tier one As. And so if we follow the logic that we should stay with how things have always been livestock and municipal ordinances, then why don't we follow that same reasoning for municipal authority and farms? Let's start there. That's the longstanding precedent. Right now, see at least one town, the town of Essex Junction, clearly denying the right to farm in broth swaths of its town. I'll show you the Essex regs. I'm glad we went through some of them. But we can either work to enumerate down to very fine details the powers municipalities might have, or we can go back to things R, or we can send this question to a study committee. From what we understand, Tier one A areas will not be formed for a while. Maybe Rutland will have one sooner, it sounds like. And folks don't think there may be many existing farms have a part of it. So there's some lack of urgency here. Right? There's some time. Even if we did identify Tier one A areas, essentially those areas haven't formed yet. There wouldn't be any municipal regulation of farms until those areas form. So there's an ability to rather than put it in statute now and we don't know the consequences, to actually think more deeply about this question and just go to where we've always been. Yeah, so we don't know the degree of municipal regulations that we permitted under the current proposal for regulating Agony's areas, the section they just walked you all through. We don't know if it would effectively limit regulatory authority to reasonable things, public safety right away, or allow greater authority. I just want to take a minute to show you a little bit of what we found around Essex Junction. This is municipal regulations for agriculture. So now agricultural activities are only allowed in use areas designated as planned areas. So not allowed in areas designated as residential or any other type of designated use. This is the land development code for SX. If you go down to agriculture right here, you can see that the X means it's only a permitted use. So it's not only an allowed use in explained agriculture areas. You have to pay money and go through a permitting process to have agriculture anywhere in the town of Essex and only in there. So Jason was in a residential area. There's no agriculture allowed in residential areas. By agriculture, mean falling under the RAPs. They were only able to do this after the Supreme Court ruling. Poultry ordinance. We have one exception based on what we could find. You have four laying hens if a permit is obtained for $35 fee, there's yearly fees after that. And you can go into further parts of this ordinance which require certain things about the structure and setbacks. Even I'm not sure where the language you all were looking at came from, but like around the horses, it said like 300 feet from the property boundary or something. We don't feel like all these regulations are necessarily reasonable, have to do with public safety or some of these other things. They do functionally, indirectly, right now at least, are directly prohibiting agricultural activities across all residential areas. The concerns and priorities they center are not really public safety. And you can see what I'm saying here. So we just want to make sure that we know where we're going, how people will be impacted. We don't see any reason why we can't return to where we have been for a long time, hit the other places we agree on, which is the right to grow food around plants, which is not opening the REPs. And then we can send these broader questions, whether it's about animal ordinances and how much around livestock under the farming threshold should be regulated by a town or not, or whether it's about how much authority municipalities should have in tier one A areas. These seem like questions which we're still swimming in what the impacts of them could be. But otherwise, we have longstanding precedent and some places of clear agreement. I guess I'll leave it there for

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: now. I don't think that we have this document or what was just on the screen. Maybe if you just send us that document, whatever you'd like us to have. Right that way. Yeah. And we do have the statutory language that had come over, but I don't think we have this information. Yes, That makes sense. Questions for Graham before he wants to head out. So, I mean, I appreciate that input and appreciate that you've been having conversations for some time. And I will say that I do sort of feel like there was no study committee. There hasn't been a study committee, but there was a lot of conversation taking place over the last eight months. And short of us, short of the legislature and the executive branch coming to an agreement to return us back to where we were, which is what we'd have to do. Right now, the law is what it is. Me bear that in my teeth. Thank you. Thank you, Austin. Right, well, the agency of agriculture may have something to add to. I'm not sure, Steve, would you want to? It's up, I can

[Graham Unangst-Rufenacht (Policy Director, Rural Vermont)]: come back another time or I'm happy

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: to let you know. We've got twelve minutes before lunch. Sure. Yeah, think while we're thinking about it. Okay, great. And if you'd like more time later, we can do that too. Okay, great. Thanks.

[Steve Collier (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: Well, thanks so much. Steve Collier from the Agency of Agriculture. I want to keep this as simple as possible. When this first happened, when the Supreme Court first ruled, we wanted to do is return the status quo. So what we really wanted to do was go back to where we were, which mostly worked. There were some deficits, but it mostly worked. But there were some concerns about doing that, for legitimate reasons. And so we really tried to take an objective look at how the current system worked. And the reason that we're proposing something that's, I think, quite slightly different than it was is because there were some legitimate gaps in our opinion about how the other system worked. The way it was supposed to be was farming was exempt if you had four acres. And the four acres was an intentional number because if you have four acres, you have enough space to manage your waste and you have enough space to manage your buildings, your structures, all of the issues you have setbacks, setbacks, water quality setbacks. So that seemed like that was a reasonable place to say that that is farming. However, there were also the two other kind of caveats that were there and that's the $2,000 in sales or the Schedule F. Both of those things though mean you're farming. They mean that you're commercial farming. So it's a high number, 2,000 and Schedule F can be even less than that, but it does mean that you're in the commercial business of farming, not just that you're raising your own food. So when we looked at that system, we'd often thought about the $2,000 is kind of a problem potentially, but we didn't want to take it away because we didn't want to prohibit people who could farm from farming. So when we looked at that structure, we've really found two gaps in the structure. And one is that it was important to fit within that definition or you had no protection. So in other words, not not to say that municipalities wanted to, but if you didn't fit within the farming definition, you were vulnerable to even being prohibited from doing anything if a town wanted to. So we were reluctant to raise that bar because we didn't want to stop people from being able to grow food. So that seemed like a gap. So what we thought about how to plug that gap was, well, let's give people the right to grow food, including poultry. And we presented that to the league and we were delighted that they agreed with it. We presented it to the farm groups and they also agreed with it. So then if you do that, the eligibility requirements aren't as important. The eligibility for farming aren't as important because you're saying it doesn't matter who you are, where you are, you can grow food, you can have some backyard poultry. So then the next question is, okay, what else do we need to care about? And that was livestock primarily. And livestock is where it gets trickier. And we had this four acre threshold in general, and that's very manageable. But we also had the $2,000 in the Schedule F. So that led to the, I talked to you about it before, sheep in basement or the goats, sorry, the goats in the basement on a tenth of an acre, and they were milking the goats and making soap and they could meet the threshold, but they had no land, no place to manage the animals. And moreover, like the REPs just don't work in that kind of a setting. So what we didn't have in that four acre threshold with the 2,000 and the Schedule F was we didn't have any requirement that you have land other than enough land to be there. And so that to us was a legitimate gap. Not that we don't want everyone to be able to use their land when they have it, but there's a difference between having 30 pigs in a quarter, you know, a subdivision of 100 units with quarter acre lots than there is of having them outside of town. And we don't want to stop anyone from having pigs if they have the land to do it, but it's also, it gets, there's a certain scale where it's so small that it seems like a better discussion between the community and the town and the agency of agriculture. We regulate farming and we have a limited staff and a huge mandate. We have like 140 people and we have a lot of different things we do. And we have limited, much fewer who work on this, really only one person who issues quote unquote farm determinations, and then a water quality staff that goes out to respond to these. And we were spending a lot of time on things like the ducks in Essex on some other issues, which not that they're not worthy. We want those, the ducks in Essex to have a place, but it's not necessarily the best use of our time when we're trying to make sure that farms across the state are able to comply with water quality. So we thought that the fact that you didn't need any land was probably something that wasn't quite right. And it wasn't, I don't think it was even intended. I think the 2,000 and the Schedule F was kind of more of an attack on, but it read or so if you do that, you're covered. And so in working with the league and understanding their concerns about density, it's true. I mean, if you're in Downtown Montpelier, if you put 30 pigs there, it's probably gonna cause some problems on a tenth of an acre lot or a third of an acre lot. If it can be managed and if the town's okay with it, we're fine with it, great. But it's just not really where the, in our opinion, we don't have the resources to be able to manage that properly. And you can't manage 30 pigs on a quarter of an acre unless maybe you're exporting all the manure. And you could, you could do that. You could export it all. So you're not actually discharging across your neighbor's property lounge or property lines, but there's bigger issues with pigs and that kind of density. And they're all more nuisance type issues, which don't really fall within the type of things that we regulate when we're regulating farming. So that was the second gap. And so we could have just proposed going back to four acres and said, you know, that that's easy, that's farming. But that didn't really seem fair either because you can definitely have livestock on less than four acres and you can do it responsibly and reasonably. So we, what we suggested and we also want this to be simple. We don't want, you know, if you're, if you have to analyze every site for everything, it just gets really tricky. So even though clear lines aren't always the fairest, there's some, benefit there's to having some clarity. And we decided on an acre because you've acres a decent amount of land, you know, it's maybe 80% of a soccer field. Like you can definitely have livestock on an acre. Can't have a lot of line of stock. Then it depends on how the acre is set up. But you've also, if you have an acre, there's some distance between you and your neighbors, not maybe not a lot, but there's some. So that just seemed like a place where if you have an acre, we'll say that potentially you can have livestock, but we're not going to just say you can have a thousand cows on an acre. So we suggested that you leave that to our discretion to determine whether or not what they want to do from one to four acres, whether or not they have enough land to adequately manage the nutrients and waste for the number of animals they want to have. And if they do, we'll regulate it. And if they don't, then we could say you can't be there or we could allow the towns to regulate it on that spot. So that's it's really we try to make it as simple as possible. If you can you can grow food, you can have chickens wherever. If you want to have livestock, you need an acre unless the town let you have it. Town, if the town will let you have livestock under an acre, great. But that's an issue for the local community, not a statewide, because we're we need to think statewide, what is farming in the state? And we want people to raise their own chickens. We want them to have their own pigs or goats. But if you have two goats as pets, that's not something that necessarily the agency of ag needs to be there for. If it can happen where they are, great, in the town, but the town, we think if we're not going to be regulating it, then it only makes sense that the town at least has a say. So if somebody is managing it horribly on a quarter acre and there's smell and flies and rats and, you know, all kinds of problems that we're not managing it, it doesn't seem fair to us to preclude towns from that ability to do that. In towns, as was discussed earlier, are responsive to their communities. So in those kinds of small scale issues, it seems like an appropriate community discussion. But when someone is farming, you know, in the state of Vermont, we want them to face the same standards wherever they are, and we do think that it's our role to do that. And so that's those are the lines we're trying to create. The whole tier one a, tier one b discussion completely understand it. From our perspective, it's sort of looking for a problem that's not there. Not to say that the concerns aren't legitimate, but towns have never had the authority to regulate farming. So, and it's worked pretty much. So from our perspective, before we start talking about future maps that don't even exist, let's just say you can farm if you have enough land to do so in this way. And if future problems come up in tier 1B and tier 1A areas that are not being addressed by the RAPs or by zoning, we're open to talking about those, you know, maybe, and we already said, even in in the the, one to four acre plot, we'd be happy to consult with the town about their thoughts about whether or not whatever's happening on that land makes sense. Welcome that dialogue. And so artists, we would have the discretion to decide, but we'd still be talking with the town to try to make. And we do that with farm structures already when we're granting a variance or considering a variance for farm structures. We talk to the towns so that we can understand if there's an important reason because all farm structures already have to meet municipal setbacks unless we give a variance. So for the issue like the farm, you know, the the sight lines that are being talked about that create a, you know, a concern, setbacks have to be met on a farm already unless we say it's okay to do otherwise. But we have to talk to the town about that. So there's things that we have to consider before granting a variance, and that would be one of them. If it's not safe, then that would be a concern. So I don't know if that makes sense, but

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah. No. Thank you. And think that you've been consistent when we had you in earlier, and and it it does make sense. The you I think we're here when the league earlier this morning was talking about its suggestion and that tier one a slash b grandfathered farms that we're currently operating that we recognize as farms today through some definition would be would be excluded, would be exempt from the exemptions. Do do you have a concern about that, that they would be are you concerned about the farms of the future not being able to get started? Or it's just not the way you're thinking about it?

[Steve Collier (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: Well, it all depends on the final language. I think if you're going to adopt that tier one A language for construction, we should all be very thoughtful about how to apply that. But as you mentioned earlier, Chair Durfee, right now the law is that towns can zone farming. They can't zone water quality on farming, but they can zone farming. So if you choose to do so, you're going to have to change that. So there's going to be this gap in time from the Supreme Court's decision until whatever law you passed when towns have legally had the authority to zone farming. I don't think they've been jumping on that. Maybe there's a couple of instances, but I suspect in part they're probably waiting just because they know this conversation is happening. So I'm not worried about it because I don't think it's really happening. And also if you make it clear going forward, then even if they could have zoned prospect, you know, during that year, let's say prospectively, they would not be able to. The other thing I just wanted to quickly say is the whole of this fear of opening up the RAPs. I don't honestly understand it, but I did draft some language that would instead of amending the RIPs, it would just amend Title VI and do exactly the same thing. So to me, it's a distinction without a difference, but if you'd rather put it in statute, the eligibility requirements in statute, and I sort of tightened it up a little bit because when you're amending old language, it's

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: a little different than when you're, you know, writing new language. If, you know, the language that's in the, in the bill and the other body that is that what you're talking about? Or this is different from that?

[Steve Collier (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: It is that in its language. I sent a draft to this committee as well, but yes, it is an s three twenty three and it would amend the just the eligibility requirements of the RAPs just because we didn't want the RAPs to be wrong. So that that was the reason to suggest amending the RIPs instead of just doing it in statute. But we could write, you know, the Section 3.1 of the RIPs are repealed and replaced by or, you know, something like that. It's the same thing, but if it makes people more comfortable. I agree. I don't want everyone talking about the requirements that exist, the substantive requirements that exist in the in the in the RAPs because there's a lot there.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: But you say everybody, you mean legislators and.

[Steve Collier (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: Well, just we believe that they're they're working well and there, but there are people who want to make them a lot stricter and we understand the arguments, but we don't. This is a that's a different argument to us than this is. This is zoning, farming zoning, where do you draw the line, period? This is not about whether we should be requiring a bigger setback on a field as an example. So I think the fear that I've heard is that people are worried about getting into all that other, those other things. Well, that's always, that always can happen here. So, you know, if all of you want to do that, you'll do it. But we're just trying to fix the boundaries between zoning and farming.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Thank you very much, Steve. I think we'll pause here for lunch. We'll be back at