Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Pull the report up. And in your testimony, Polly, is also on our web page. And with that, I'll turn

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: it over to you. Good morning for the record, Polly Major. I'm the director of policy and special Projects for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. And it's really lovely to be here with you all this morning to talk about farmworker housing and the work that we've been able to do on this over the last several years with our partners at Champlain Housing Trust. I think what I'll do is zoom to the end of my presentation and ground us in the language in S328, and then go back and do the history of how we got here. So, excuse the quick zipping through slides. And there we go. So S328, Senate Economic Development Committee's omnibus housing bill this year, and an amendment got added to that bill in Senate Natural asking BHCB to provide an update to the farmworker and housing needs assessment to describe the on farm housing program that exists and evaluate it. I have highlighted here some recommended edits to that language, and the main reason why I recommended these edits is because the program that we established was focused specifically on farm worker housing as a really high need and unique population. So it's designed around that. And we'd like, now that the program's been operating for a couple of years, to evaluate how's it doing. Are there ways that we can change the program or enhance the program to keep it doing its good work and meeting the needs in the state? And as we do that analysis, we do often hear about the connected issues that impact on farm housing, so we would just want to share those out as well in the report, but not have that be the focus of the report because our program is focused around this pretty targeted population of on farm farm workers housing.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: So just before we leave the slide here, can you isolate what the distinctions are?

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Yeah, sorry, I didn't do a kind of line edit here. So the distinctions here is that in the old language, it's shall provide an update to the farmworker needs assessment. The new language would be shall report on the progress made towards meeting the goals identified in the farmworker needs assessment. And then it gets a little bit more specific in my suggested language saying the report shall describe the farm worker housing program as established by the board following the initial report, evaluate the program's impact on farm worker housing in Vermont, and identify barriers to improving and expanding on farm housing.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Okay, and the language in the bill uses, and this is on the third line of the language in the bill, uses the language on farm housing program established by the board. You're just making the point that it's not limited to on farm housing?

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: On farm housing would include farmer housing as well, rental housing, not a farm that was short term rental. It's just a much broader term. The program that we established coming out of this needs assessment was focused on farm worker housing. There are other needs out there, absolutely. This program is focused around that one.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: So farm worker housing specifically, Yeah. Not just all Okay. Representative, broadly? And

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: just to expand, what if they're off farm farm worker housing? Is that

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: included in the sort of campus? It is not included in the program that we stood up because it would take a different type of program, and that's something that we can discuss next session with the committee, certainly. There are very broad needs on the rural labor force in general that are not all captured in this initial needs assessment, not all met by this existing program. I will say that this program is not one that receives direct appropriations from or a direct appropriation from the legislature. It has been funded out of the one time appropriations that BHCV has received from the legislature for housing in general, so balancing the needs across the housing spectrum. That we do not have a one time appropriation for housing in the budget this year because of budget constraints. And so I think we're at a point where we're both going to be acknowledging the great need for additional investment on farm housing, the need for rural labor force housing in general, and at a point where the state has declining fiscal resources to meet all that need. And that's, I think, something you want to balance as you're contemplating whether we want to invest in a needs assessment or we want to continue to invest in the existing program.

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: Just so I better understand it, farm worker housing is not exempt like the rest of agriculture from Act two fifty permitting.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Is that right?

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I am not a land use expert, and so cannot speak to that. Discussions around this, there's interest in looking into that, and I think that's also HCV is maybe not best placed to lead that research project because we are a housing funder. We are not a land use regulator.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I think you're correct, though. Yeah, the housing is not included in the exemptions. Right. Other structures are, but housing is not, whether it's farmer or farm worker. That's

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: my belief. And then as far as jurisdiction of say rental housing or in kind housing, guess, Is there a difference between that sort of commercial world and farm worker housing as

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: far as

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: the agency of human services or health who would potentially do inspections or code type stuff? Is there a difference just so we understand?

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: That's something a little bit in the needs assessment, includes the rental housing code as an appendix there. I will say the enforcement for that code is the town health officials, and so this is often a voluntary position. So while we do have a rental housing code that could apply here, There's not the enforcement mechanism to it that leads to it being followed all

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: the time.

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: And landlord tenant rights on both sides, Is that pretty much the same, or is it broken out for farm worker housing? It's just a whole different angle.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I can't speak to that as much. Our role is really into development and rehabs of housing.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Can I a whole tutorial on personal counseling? Yeah, so we, in fact, that's part of my, I'm hoping that we will, this will help launch some of those questions. And we'll have more testimony today and then more not today too. To answer it, you're allowed nine units before you trigger out two fifty.

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: Rental units?

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Nine units in that division.

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: In a 10 acre town or just everywhere? And

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: that might be one of the reasons why we're not seeing Act two fifty as a barrier to this. So just to step back apace, the HDB, as you're familiar from our time coming in here earlier, invests in both housing and land protection and in agriculture through our Farm and Forest Viability Program and through our Easement Program. And so farm worker housing really lives at this intersection of housing and conservation that we get to work in, and I think that's one of the reasons why BHCB really leaned into this work in 2020 in creating the first needs assessment. So in 2020, there had been a number of policy conversations in this building and outside of it around the needs for quality housing for farm workers. And so VHCb, as an independent board, commissioned a study to pull together the various research pieces that were happening around farmworker housing into one broad needs assessment as kind of a baseline for this policy conversation. This was not a report that was commissioned by the legislature. This is one that the board decided to take on this project and fund, again, because this lives at this intersection of housing and conservation that we care so much about. So we commissioned this report in 2020 and released it in 2021. The report, as you'll see from the report which is posted on your website, is really a synthesis of the existing research that was happening around the state on farm worker housing. It was building off of research done by UBM, and I know you'll hear from Dan Baker later today, but also Bridges for Health, Migrant Justice, others who had been doing a lot of work on farms with farmers and farm workers over the previous decade. And what it found is that there was significant need to improve and expand decent housing in roughly 600 on farm dwellings. And that need that was identified in the farm worker housing needs assessment led to the board putting out an RFP to identify an entity that was willing to create and then administer with VHCB funding a farmworker housing program. And CHD responded to that RFP. They had the best proposal that we received and have been running the program ever since. The chair

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Champlain Housing Trust.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Champlain Housing Trust, yes. So the chair asked me to go into a little detail about what's actually in the farm worker housing needs assessment. And so I have a couple slides just that walk through what was found when the consultants did that analysis of the other research that was happening. They also did a survey of farms and farm workers. I'm going to pull out some key observations that they had and then some of the key recommendations that they included in the report for future action. So there was a clear theme of physical problems in on farm farm worker housing. And those were around things like noise and overcrowding, especially in dairy farms, when you're having workers work on shifts but living in the same space, they're needing to sleep at different points during the day. But in a crowded setting, that can be really difficult and that has a serious quality of life and health impact. There was a theme of cleanliness and maintenance where the living spaces that did have issues were not up to the standards for health and safety there. Temperature and moisture control. Septic capacity came up a lot as well and inadequate appliances. And is I think one reason why we're focusing on farm worker housing is that it is a little bit different than the challenges that face rural workforce housing, which are real and are really related to lower income and the amount it takes to build, own, and operate housing, the difference between that. On farm farm worker housing has some of these more unique qualities. Like, there's a lot of single workers who are living together in cramped spaces, and that's leading to really unique needs. Also, often you can have non legal immigration status that might make it harder for workers to report problems off farm, like to the town health official. There's also, for the few families that are living in farm worker housing, there's also issues that were identified around needing adequate space in separate bedrooms, especially for children, and also a real lead abatement need that was coming up. And BHCb actually administers a lead paint abatement program that's federally funded as well. There's a nexus there. And when we looked at quantitatively what the need was, the researcher looked at the twenty seventeen Ag Needs Assessment. So we're getting to older data here. But there's about 2,000 hired farm workers who live in housing on or next to the farm, and about 600 on farm employee dwellings on three forty five farms. And then there's about 6,500 workers that are living independently from their employer off farm. And there, you'll see really the challenges of finding affordable rental housing in rural areas, which is, as we know, a serious challenge in Vermont. And then the chart here, you just see the breakdown of worker types by immigration status. And when they look at what are the systemic challenges to improving on farm housing, the first one that came up was economic constraints, which I'm sure is not going to come as a surprise to anyone on this committee. The really slim margins that farms are operating under make it hard to invest on farm buildings, in housing. It also makes it hard to sustain and operate those. Fuel costs are going up. And if fuel costs are going up and milk prices are going down, it makes it really challenging to maintain this housing. Another systemic challenge that was identified that I think could use more exploration is around land use regulations and the capacity to add housing on farms or add units on farms, which again, that septic constraint kept on coming up there. And then the financial constraints of being able to go to a bank and take out a loan large enough to cover the costs of doing significant rehab or adding housing. And this one I'll dwell on for a second. A couple, because it certainly came up in the comments from farms, Several years ago, the legislature established the Missing Middle homeownership program that is designed to meet what we were seeing in the housing market as a gap between what it costs to build housing and then what the housing appraises at when it's built. So it costs a lot to build, especially in rural areas. It doesn't appraise as high as the construction costs. And so there's a value gap between what you can get from a bank, which is going be that appraisal cost, and what that construction cost actually is. So we created a program that's run through the Vermont Housing Finance Agency that, for single family homes, covers that gap between appraisal and construction. And that gap is really felt on farms, especially conserved farms, where the price of the farm there's a legal instrument that's used to make farms affordable to the next generation, called the option to purchase at ag value, that sets the value at the use of that land as a farm and not as, say, a second home or an Airbnb. And so it can't sell for as much, it can't appraise for as much, so you can't go to the bank and take out as much as you need to build that home. So that appraisal gap is large in rural areas, and on some farms, can be especially large because you're trying to keep the farm affordable.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Everything I'd break in.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: I don't know if it's still going on, but for a number of years, farm service agency had to house, could build a farm worker housing for 1%. Is that still an effect to you or more?

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I'm not sure about the farm service agency. There is a federal program through USDA Rural Development that can finance on farm housing, I think off farm housing as well. It hasn't been used recently in Vermont. It's been very difficult to use in part because it requires verification of legal status of all the workers living in the housing. It also is a highly technical program, so you'd want to use it for a larger scale development. So it works well in big agricultural communities. California uses it a lot because they're housing a lot of workers in one place. Vermont's farms, for the most part, with a few exceptions, don't have those high concentrations of farm workers that would allow you to do a large multifamily project that could leverage this funding source. There might also be a requirement around year round workers as well. I worked for USDA about a decade ago, and so I'm thinking back into my knowledge

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: I know of that that up in my area, lot of bigger farms use that program to build some really nice structures on their farms for their workers. It was very popular, like you say, I haven't heard of it in quite a while. Just wondered if it was still available.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I know the USDA one is that it's been very difficult to use. We haven't figured out how to use it here in Vermont. And USDA Rural Development, when I worked there in Vermont, had 50 workers, now it has 12. And so I'm concerned that the ability of the agency to provide the technicals needed is diminished.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Representative Brian. Oh yeah. When

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: a farm is conserved, say, so it has to stay agricultural and it has farm worker housing, is the farmer prohibited from, say, renting out farm worker structures to the open market, but keeping the farm going, just because they could get potentially a lot more as rent rather than

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: When we conserve a farm, we do include exclusions from the conservation easement. And those are negotiated. They use what those parcels can or what the section of parcel can be used for. So I think it would be I don't know if there's a hard and fast rule. Think it would be as they work through what are the exclusions, what are the uses of the exclusions.

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: And on the other side, in VHCb, instead of when VHCB say gets funds from Act two fifty mitigation, instead of say working with a land trust to conserve a farm, are there any statutory limitations on potentially using some of those funds to invest in farm worker housing?

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: My understanding of those mitigation funds is they're because prime ag soil is being developed in one place, the idea is prime ag soil would be conserved in another place. So I don't know the regulations there. I'm skeptical that that source could be used for farm worker housing. That's one of the reasons why we have used general funds for housing and could look at using the housing conservation trust funds to build housing on farms, as we've been doing.

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: General funds, is that like when we talk about fully funding the HCB, like the 35,000, those are general funds?

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: No, so when you talk about fully funding the HCB, HCV the is funded out of the property transfer tax. The idea of when property gets more expensive, it's harder to get onto land for farmers, it's harder to get into affordable housing for Vermonters, and so we're investing more in those. That goes into the Housing Conservation Trust Fund and funds our ag and conservation and housing programs. With the surplus dollars that the state has had through the COVID pandemic, there have been appropriations of one time general fund dollars to VHCb to build housing. And in the appropriations language for that, it says to preserve and create permanently affordable housing. And then it has this section that says, And to prioritize these vulnerable populations. And it lists them out as refugee housing, recovery housing, and farm worker housing is one of those that is in there. So that is one where the legislature has really directed us to use part of those one time dollars to fund farmworker housing. That's how we've been able to sustain the program at CHT. Without those dollars in the budget this year, we have a much smaller housing budget. We've been investing about 60,000,000 to $90,000,000 in housing each year. We're looking at maybe $30 to $40 this year, depending on federal funds. And so it just means that farmworker housing is going to be competing against the need for shelter, recovery housing, rental housing, homeownership, the other suite of things that we do with housing dollars in the state. It's just a hard funding landscape. And this is a really important program that is a lot of bang for our buck. We touch a lot of units and a lot of farm workers for a relatively small investment year. CHG has done a lovely job standing up the program and, I know, has a strong pipeline for it. So I think the board really wants to continue this work. It just has harder choices to make balancing this against the other needs without that one time dollars that have been sustaining it.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: All right, we should probably

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Move along. Move along, yes. I want to get to Julie, because she's the real expert here. So for the record, some quotes that I pulled out from the report that you can read at your leisure, but really a theme of we could really use investment, that need to cover the gap between what you can take out from a bank and what the building is ultimately valued at. In terms of recommendations, I broke the key recommendations in this report into three buckets: strategy, the investment need, and the programmatic need. So in terms of strategy, it really pointed to the need to have a coordinating entity that is pulling together the first stakeholders in the farm worker housing space and continuing focusing on what is the need and how do we meet that need and how do we ensure that when we have a program that meets that need. So that's one group of recommendations. And they really point to this need for this multi year action plan. I think a lot of this is happening organically. This recommendation didn't lead to an action plan per se. And that's sort of the need you're still hearing from advocates like In Buster Caswell as terms of the investment level, it looked at what are the dwellings on farms that need investment and how big is that investment, and actually found that a lot of the investments are in this kind of moderate rehab to substantial rehab and replacement level, and that helped inform the program that CHT developed to really meet that green and yellow need. And the recommendations that BHCb as a funder took and ran with was around building out a program to address farm worker housing needs and how can we utilize the existing network of nonprofit housing developers in the state to support this. So that's where you see Champlain Housing Trust, which is a core partner of ours, come in and submit this proposal and run this program. And there's also this, I'd say, still unmet need that we're looking to explore more as we look back at this program of what is the technical assistance that farms need in order to take on this type of construction project to access this financing. And so before I turn it over to Julia, just say one of the reasons why we're supportive of this language and interested in doing this programmatic analysis is the board stood up this program a couple of years ago, and it's always good practice a couple of years after a program has been in operation to revisit it to say, How is it doing? We know we needed to reach 600 dwellings roughly. How many have we reached? How many farmers have we reached? And what are we hearing from people who have successfully gone through the program or maybe who have started and then didn't complete their project? What can we learn about how to, in an era of fewer resources, run the most efficient program possible and continue to, at the end of the day, improve living standards for the people who are helping to grow our food. So that's what we're hoping to do with this analysis and what the language that we submitted hopefully would enable us to do. And maybe with that, I will turn it over to Julie Curtin from Champlain Housing Trust, who can speak to the program they've stood up and it's meeting the need identified in the needs assessment. And I'm happy I'll stick around and come back and answer questions for you.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Thank very much. Yeah. Julie, come on up.

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: Hello everyone, as Mollie said, I'm Julie Curtin. I'm the director of homeownership at Champlain Housing Trust. It's great to be back with you, and I've enjoyed my previous visits often during the board's legislative day to talk about the program. And my purpose of being here today is to maybe give a little refresher for those of you who've heard about it before, or for those of you who haven't. Some detail around how we have taken the needs assessment and operationalized it in a particular way to improve farm worker housing on Vermont farms. Just a snapshot of what we've done to date. We have had a lot of interest from farms throughout the state of Vermont. You can see some of our dairy heavy counties having the most projects and applications, but we really have been able to work on farm worker housing throughout the state. We have two programs and I'll give some detail about how each of those programs work in a moment, but we're just providing some of the results for each of those programs here. And you can see that as far as repairing farmworker housing, so homes that farmworkers are living in that can be repaired to be brought up to that rental code, we're working on in some state of either completion or application or construction. We have 74 projects that will improve housing for two eighty three farm workers.

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: Pretty soon in. Just quickly, when you look at these statistics, where did these projects originate? Was it, did some of them on a farm apply? Were they complaint driven? Generally, where do they come in through BHCB and the housing trust so that you can go out and do these repairs or replacements?

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: Really, we receive applications from the farm owner. We do work with a wide array of partners and we have done a lot of work to build networks and do outreach so that there's just broad awareness throughout the state between advocates and agricultural communities that the program exists. But to get to the program and the funding, we do have an application online on our website that farmers complete and submit to us. There are times when we have heard about farms that someone in the community knows could benefit from the program and we have actively reached out to them, sometimes just saying, We want to be sure you're aware of this program. Our partners, particularly with UVM Extension and their regional coordinators, who are staff that are on farm often meeting farm worker needs, a wide array of farm worker needs, they're trained in the program. So we have sometimes gotten referrals from them. Dan Baker, who's a professor and staff at UVM, who you'll hear from this afternoon has been a really great connector between farms and our program. And then finally, I'll say the Milk with Dignity Standards Council is that we're in frequent communication with them, particularly around farms that need totally new homes. We've worked with them and some of their program participants. And those referrals have come sometimes through them, sometimes through the farm, or sometimes through Efficiency Vermont, who's done a lot

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: of work in this space.

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: Does AFM get involved at all, the Agency of Ag?

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: Agency of Ag has been a really fantastic way of disseminating information to the ag community about the program. We, at least once a year, more often, work with the comms director at the agency to send an email blast out to their contact list, and then we often see an uptick in applications.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Just by the way, Dan, it's not going to be joining us this afternoon. He wasn't able to get here until later in the day, so we're gonna reschedule his testimony.

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: You can see we also have 15 replacement projects in the pipeline that will impact 70 farm workers. I wanted to give you a sense of what types of farms are using the program, and you can see here that about two thirds are dairy farms. Because our program is improving on farm housing, we've just seen a really big need from the dairy sector to house larger number of workers, but also given the nature of the work, they want their employees close to the barn. And we're touching on just about every other I'm not an expert in Vermont's diversity of agricultural types, but we have touched on a lot of different farm types, and we're serving a lot of different seasonal workers in, say, the orchard sector, as well as H-2A workers and vegetable farms, all are being housed through projects that are benefiting from the program. This is just a little recap of what you've heard from Polly to give you a sense of how long we've been operating the program. Did respond, the needs assessment came out in April, We responded to an RFP in November and stood the program up pretty quickly in the 2022. Started accepting applications in February 2022, saw a a large large amount of interest and because of that subsequently received funding from the board. Also pretty early on in the program, we were hearing from farms who couldn't repair their homes. Often these are mobile homes or structures that in such disrepair, they need a whole new home. And so we added that to the program in 2023.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: And so far through three or four fiscal cycles, whatever it's been, dollars 5,600,000.0.

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: And that is to fund both programs and the cost of operating program. Just a little bit about how the repair program works. We offer loans ranging from $3,000 to $30,000 We anticipated initially we'd see a lot of smaller loan applications for smaller loans coming through our pipeline because of the data that Polly showed earlier. And in reality, farms seem to be only interested in taking advantage of the program for larger cost projects. So at this point, I think I am accurate in saying that 100% of the projects are coming in for that full $30,000 Sometimes the costs are a little bit less, but once we get into the home and assess the full needs, we are seeing that the full scope is closer to that $30,000 mark. And that can give you a sense of what the project numbers and the funding and the project numbers are reflective of the larger costs of the projects. We wanted to make the funds also meet the economic needs of farms, as Penny probably talked about. Also, the margins are thin for farms to do this kind of work. And even though we're offering a loan product, so our funds are secured against the real estate, we forgive the loan balance by 10% every year that the farm continues to use the housing to house their workers and stays in agriculture. So it's really a declining balance loan that converts to a grant over time, with the main requirement being that this is not going to be an Airbnb or a rental property, this is going to louse your farm labor. We also found within the first year of the program that a lot of farms have more than one farm labor house, and if they had a good experience with us, they wanted to come back and fix up another home. So we do allow up to two loans per farm.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Got it.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Can farmer owners use this on their own houses?

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: No, this program is currently designed to serve housing for farm employees. We have certainly gotten inquiries from farm owners interested in expressing that similar need. And we do sometimes see farm employees who are related to farm owners, but the program to date has exclusively focused on farm employees. Elder

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: John.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: It says no payments due, they have loans, but

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: they don't have to pay anything on the loan?

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: Yes, that's correct.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: And after 10%, with ten year term, 10% is forgiven, so after ten years, they don't owe anything. Correct. So this is like a loan. That's a grant.

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: Yes.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: To maintain for ten years.

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: Essentially, it's a loan and it would get paid back, say, if the farm sold. And whatever the balance was, it would be paid back at that point. But otherwise, it's not like a mortgage financing where the farm is actively making payments to us.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: So it effectively is a grant with some conditions.

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: Correct, yes, and those conditions are secured with a mortgage, the farm.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Representative Brittenden? So

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: can the farmer himself build the house for his own labor?

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: Have typically no, but we have seen a number of farms who have that expertise and have developed a policy to allow for that, provided that there are safeguards in place, that the construction will be good quality and whatnot. In limited circumstances, a farmer could do work.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Christina Bos- Yeah,

[Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun (Member)]: I was just wondering, in terms of the idea of it being basically a grant as opposed to a loan, why don't you, I mean, in terms of making the dollars go farther, have, like, a matching program or have some kind of farmer buy in where they would contribute to the cost? I mean, is it is it truly the farmers have no margin to contribute at all? Because it feels like you could do more work if you had a little bit of a buy in match.

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: In reality, we do see most of these projects do have budgets that exceed that $30,000 So we are seeing farms make significant investments on the repair and the replacement, definitely on the replacement projects. We do a wide range of work on farms. And one of the reasons Champlain Housing Trust submitted a proposal when the board requested proposals is that we do have experience in programs that are these sort of loan grant programs and doing project management to help property owners improve their housing. We administer the Vermont Housing Improvement Program. We also administer a home repair program through the Vermont Community Development Program. So we're sort of combining that expertise here to provide support for farms to do a wide range of projects. And we have seen all of these types of repairs and projects that have come to us.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Representative, correct.

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: So heating is not one?

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: If heating, the air sealing and heating should be on your, would definitely be. Yes, absolutely.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I just wanted to give

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: you an example so you could see kind of a tangible project. This is a farm in Orleans County that's a combination dairy sugaring farm with a very a lot of these farm labor homes are like 100 year old farmhouses. So this was one of those. And you'll see, I think in the picture, better in the words that we did a kitchen remodel, quite a bit of work on the interior and the exterior, and the total cost was $50,000 Because we were working on the outside and the inside, I wanted to show you what the project looked like before and after both on the exterior and the interior. So here's the outside before and on the after you can see the siding's been replaced and is much improved. On the interior, we completely redid the dining area and the kitchen. You can see the kitchen was in pretty rough shape. There had been a fire at one point in time. And after the project, much improved new appliances, new flooring, fresh paint cabinetry. Our staff is going into these homes and uses an inventory to make sure all health and safety needs are met. And so if we went into a home and the farmer said, I need the kitchen fixed up, but saw that the bathroom had mold, we would also address the mold. Real quickly, the replacement program is a little bit more cost intensive, but because some of these employee housing units are just really not repairable. We have a suite of those where we can make a larger investment. Pre-nineteen seventy six mobile homes are very common on farms and you just can't fix them up. Homes where there are too many people living there and you just can't expand them. And we've also done replacements where the farm workers were living in makeshift apartments in the milking parlor, for example. So here's an example of one

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: of our news. This was

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: a zero energy modular home in Franklin County where the workers had been living in one of the pre-nineteen seventy six mobile homes. Because these projects are much more expensive, we do have a larger loan that would go up to $120,000 However, the forgiveness is the same. So the portion that gets forgiven is just $30,000 And then the remainder, the $90,000 balance is secured with a mortgage on the farm that would be repayable on transfer out of ag or if the use no longer was for farm workers. We do require that these new homes are essentially fully energy efficient. They have all had solar panels and heat pumps and systems that are state of the art for energy efficiency with a lot of input from efficiency Vermont.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Representative Lipsky.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Yeah. Julie. I understood certainly no recourse along with the conditions for the repair. Is this also in essence a no nonrecourse loan if you continue to use it for farmhouse? Yes. For a farm worker housing? Yep. And don't sell

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: it for non fun. Yes, that is correct.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: And what term is this? Is that also a ten year term?

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: So this is an indefinite term essentially until twenty years. Yes, again, because we don't have a term that we're requiring payments to print school back, it's just as long as it's being used as farm worker housing and the farm is continuing to operate as a farm.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: This is a great program, and I know it's a lot of difference, a lot of farmers saying, Champlain has some trusses, suppressive.

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: What happens if the farm, a lot of dairy farmers have gone out of this assay in the last years, what happens then? Is the loan due or does that have to be renegotiated?

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: The loan would come due And if the farm is sold, we would be paid back from proceeds provided there are proceeds left to pay us back. This, our financing, we are not requiring our loans to be first position because farms often do have other financing that they're using to operate business. But yes, we would be paid back from

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: the proceeds of the sale.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: What's the verification process to know who's actually living there over time and what their association is with the farm?

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: We do require an annual certification from all of the farms in the program. And so we do require that they provide us with information, not names, but number of people living in the homes, demographic information. So they're certifying that I have these five workers living in this housing once a year. So it is an annual compliance process.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: With self certification?

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: Yes, coupled with, have committed, Chippling Housing Trust has committed to doing on-site inspections at least twice during the ten year forgiveness period.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: So then do you find that there are people who are lying about it or not?

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: To date, we have not. We are in year three, so we're getting due for doing an on-site inspection. The other thing I did want to add with these, these projects are half million dollar projects. So we do often. They can be less, particularly as manufactured housing has come a long way with the energy efficiency. We can see projects that are closer to 250,000. What puts the price tag higher is you're often adding in septic capacity, doing site work and drilling new wells. So these projects bringing the are farms have to either get their own financing or seek other grant sources in order to make them pencil out. And I think that ends my presentation. I did want to provide just my contact information for further questions, as well as the lead staff person who would be the primary point of contact for any farmers in your district who would like to reach out to us

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: and apply to the program.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Good, thank you, Julie. If you wouldn't mind just scrolling to the next slide, back to where we started, and just wanna be sure that the committee I will report to the other committee and wanna be sure that we're all comfortable with the suggested change here. And if there's any questions before we let Polly and Addison, anything else you wanna say or add?

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I'll just say, just again, the suggestion change just, I think, clarifies that we're going to report back to you on the existing program, how it's doing in meeting the needs identified in the needs assessment. And in doing that exploration and work, if we hear things about other barriers for on farm housing, we'll include a section that is just, here's what we're hearing for more discussion later.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: So there may be an interpretation of the language in the bill that some people could say means you're gonna go back and reassess, do a new assessment or

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: And that's why I specifically have language setting progress made towards meeting the needs. Okay,

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: good. We'll see what happens with

[Rep. Brian Cina (Member)]: that job. Julie, has there always been enough funding for the program or are there projects to sort of get to the end of a budget year and you're like, we sort of maxed out and we have to wait for a year.

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: So far, the amount of funding that we've received from the board has been sufficient to meet the demand on an annual basis.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Right.

[Julie Curtin (Director of Homeownership, Champlain Housing Trust)]: I think we will go forward in subsequent years, we will need additional added. All

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: right, good. Thank you for Very helpful. We will break now for lunch and after lunch we're turning to back to the composting question and Yes, sorry. Yes, House Floor 1, very short House floor, We've got one thirty scheduled to be here. We've composting, we've got camp, and we've got farmworker housing on the agenda this afternoon. So starting at one? 01:00 on the floor.

[Polly Major (Director of Policy and Special Projects, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Oh, that's right.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Soon as that's done. Minutes. Yeah.