Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, likely House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry)]: Okay. Good. Good morning, Cameron. Do you wanna do you have sharing permission? Sure.

[Cameron Wood (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I can ask him. Let's see. Looks like I do. Alright. I'll take it away if that works. Yeah, please go ahead. All right. For the record, Cameron Wood, Office of Legislative Counsel, happy to be back. We're going to talk about S-three 28, which is an act related to housing and common interest communities, which was the housing bill that came out of Senate Economic Development. It had some floor amendments and then ultimately made its way over to this chamber. So let's see. I'll share my screen. So first, we'll talk about the language in the bill itself. And then I'll back up and make a few comments. So this is section 9A. So this was actually an amendment that was done on the floor. This wasn't part of the bill as it came out of the committee directly. But it is a session law provision. And as you can see there, it's on or before 01/15/2027. The Vermont Housing and Conservation Board shall provide an update to the farm worker housing needs assessment of 2021. The update shall describe the on farm housing program established by the board following the initial report, evaluation of the program's impact on farm worker housing in Vermont, and identify barriers to improving and expanding on farm housing. So the language here, very straightforward, requiring VHCb by January 1527 to update the assessment from 2021. Now a few things. First off, my understanding is I think VHCb has some tweaks that they would like to see with this language. And I'll let them I know they're coming in later this morning, and I would let them speak to that directly. I believe they provided some additional language to the House General Committee, so I could pull that up and show you. But I'll let them walk through how they feel about this. Yeah, that's right. If you think there's some clarification they'd like to see. Because what are we talking about here? And that's where I figured I would just take a quick second to remind or inform. There is this farm worker housing needs assessment that BHCB did back in April 2021. And my understanding, you both my review and then confirming with BHCB this morning, VHCb did this on their own. This wasn't a statutory request or a requirement as part of some funding that they received, etcetera. This was something that VHCb did back in, as I said, April 2021. It was contracted out to have consultants do the work and then provide the report directly back to BHCV. And I'm sure that you all have probably reviewed or heard from this over the years, if not this biennium. But just very quickly, I was going to comment on a few things. I reviewed the report last night, and it does have some information about the scope of on farm housing for farm workers. So one thing to point out is they found roughly 2,000 hired farm workers in Vermont, live and housing provided on, were immediately adjacent to the farm. And there are roughly five fifty nine separate employee housing dwellings. And my understanding from this report is a lot of this is somewhat estimated because one of the findings that they had is it's very hard to gather this type of information throughout the state. And then in the executive summary, they went through and they highlighted some of the key challenges with providing both quality and quantity of on farm housing. And as you all are much more familiar in this area than I am, I'm sure that you're immediately aware of a lot of the challenges that would face farmers and providing on farm housing. But just to walk through quickly on the report, uncertainty, the first bullet here, uncertainty and economic challenges facing farming generally. And keep in mind, this is back in 2021. I'm sure many of those challenges have done the opposite of abate. So that still clearly exists. There's some discussion here about the workforce that you're talking about direct lease, some of them being seasonal workers, many of them being migrant workers, and then even recognizing that many of them may be in some sort of questionable legal status here. So the concerns and the issues associated with that. There's discussion here, this last bullet point on this page, about not only throughout the report, they talk about the low wages that some individuals may earn as on farm employees. But it also talks a lot in the report about the economic challenges of the farmers themselves and how many farms a very, very small amount of farms. I think the report talks about making above even $50,000 for the farmers themselves. And so the challenges not just the economic challenges of the individual workers, but the economic challenges of the farmers directly. And then oops, my apologies there. It goes through and it talks about some of the restrictions regarding current use and being able to build on farms with associated current use restrictions and other covenants and restrictions that may exist on the farm. And then one of the other challenges here on this bullet point talks about, as I mentioned a second ago, just a lack of reliable information associated with not only how many on farm housing there is how much on farm housing there is, but how many employees you're talking about or on farm workers directly. And then it goes through I'm not going to keep walking through directly, but I'll just comment in the executive summary. Again, for those who may not be familiar with the report, it talks a little bit about what are the problems, the housing problems that exist, overcrowding, cleanliness, safety, temperature, moisture control, etcetera. It talks a little bit about the scale of need that was found back then at the time. So it talks about this is their estimations here on how much would it cost in order to try to address the overall bringing the total number of on farm dwellings up to some sort of adequate standard of living. And that was actually one of the other things raised by the report is there's not really a consensus about what is a consensus definition of adequate on farm housing, what standards should be applied. But anyway, just mentioning here, they found there's some information about they estimate that between 150,200 dwellings would only require some small scale improvement of under $5,000 each. Another one hundred and one hundred and fifty thousand dwellings could require between $5,000 and $50,000 And then 75,000 to 100 dwellings could require some major renovation or replacement. So there's some information there. But then the things that I want to scroll down to and focus on are these recommendations here. So this is on page nine of the report. And the consultant provided these recommendations to BHCV at the time. And I'm really just going to focus on the top three, which were having some sort of organization as being the entity responsible for planning and coordinating long term efforts, developing a stakeholder community to have key multi year commitments from those entities to help the coordinating entity and developing an action plan to be able to move forward. And so there are other recommendations here. I think there's 12 total. And it provides some examples of potential funding solutions that other states have looked at. It provides information on what funding opportunities currently exist under federal law. So a lot of good information. I'm bringing this up, and I'm mentioning the recommendations, and I'm focusing on the first three, because that's my understanding of what the intent of the language in the bill was to do, was to not necessarily have DHCB go in and redo the report. This report, I imagine, took quite a long time to pull together, do the surveys required, gather the information, develop the report, etcetera. My understanding of the intent of what the sponsors were looking for was based on the recommendations that you've been given in the report, can you give us an update on what you've been able to do in implementing those recommendations since 2021 and provide additional information on how you all can continue to improve the on farm housing that exists throughout the state. So again, I would defer to BHCB on whether they feel the language needs to be tweaked or changed. But that's my understanding of what the goal of the legislation was to do, not just to say, give us a brand new report.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, likely House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry)]: Did you can you say, did you work on this amendment?

[Cameron Wood (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I did not. I didn't work on the amendment directly. It was a colleague, but that's because there were other amendments that were in her area. And then because it's housing and involved the HCV, I told her that I would take it after it passed from there.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, likely House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry)]: Good, so that's it, right? When I said there were not very many words Yes, that's it. Of that paragraph. Yes, sir. Okay. Good, any questions? We have the report, the one that you just pulled up is on our web page and so helpful for you to have sort of given us an introduction. I think we're spend, I think we're gonna, DHCP is also gonna have us take a look at the report. So good to have had that. One thing I noted was that their their estimation is there 600 housing units. Is that right?

[Cameron Wood (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Spot, I believe so. Yes, sir. Yep. That for farm worker housing in Vermont. It said that the Vermont Department of Tax's current use registry for 2019, so seven years ago at this point, lists three forty five farms with five fifty nine separate employee housing dwellings. And it says that the registry captures most of the employee housing dwellings on farms in the state. And so they, I think, just kind of were rounding that up a little bit with an estimation of about 600 at the time. And one other thing of note is they identified that 70% of those are in Franklin, Addison, and Orleans County.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, likely House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry)]: Where is this report? I can't see it. Is on today's page down at the bottom there. Yeah. So it's the assessment. Oh, here. Yeah. It's under Poly majors. Okay. Good. Yeah. I think I didn't realize that it was done that recently, 2021. Mhmm. Okay. Good. Thank you, Cameron. Sure. We will will have to wait another hour or so before we come back to this with DHCP, but we will have a number of folks joining us, I think in person, Patricia. Is that your understanding? Or are people coming?

[Patricia (Committee Assistant)]: Yes, there's a couple of the speakers will be online, but the main group is coming in person. I think they're in house education or house health right now.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, likely House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry)]: Okay. And they know that we only have as much time as we have?

[Patricia (Committee Assistant)]: Yes. Exactly. I've emphasized that.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, likely House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry)]: Okay. Are they do you know whether they're gonna wanna share their screens? Or I just wanna get that out of the way before we

[Patricia (Committee Assistant)]: I've sent them the link, but they didn't provide any any presentation. I think they're just going to speak.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair, likely House Committee on Agriculture, Food Resilience, and Forestry)]: Okay. Alright. Good. Well, why don't we why don't we pause? We can I think we can