Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I said to the committee, we're even waiting for John, but I don't want to necessarily wait if the committee wants to move ahead with this. So let me just ask if anybody would like to make that motion to concur with the Senate proposal.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: I know he did.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Are you are you

[Rep. Mike Brown (Member)]: okay. I know he did. House

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: rules. Well, let let me just second. I guess not, but let me just see, is further discussion? Representative Burtt. I

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt (Member)]: just recently voiced that I would not want to concur with that amendment, but in talking to members from the attorney general's office, feel like if there is a need for a change, that that could be done through legislation next year, maybe in a miscellaneous judiciary bill. And I do agree that it's important to spill these concerns.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Okay. Thank you for that. Other other discussion? Okay. This is a straw poll for h five thirty six.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: H five thirty six version 2.1.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah. Set and we can just say senate proposal amendment, I think, probably cleaner. Alright. Seeing no further discussion, there is a motion on the floor, and I guess I'll ask the clerk to call the roll. Thank you, chair.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: This is an act relating to toxic metals and products, h five thirty six, concurring with the senate motion amendment. Today's date, 05/12/2026. We're ready to call the role, John Bartholomew with Addison. Michelle Bos-Lun? Yes. Jack Brigham? Yes. Gregory Greg Burtt?

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt (Member)]: Yes.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Jed Lipsky? Yes. Richard Nelson? Yes. John O'Brien is Addison. Brown Mike? There.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Chairman Durfee? Yes.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Mollie O'Talley is seven yes, zero no, one absent. And who will be reporting Bill? It's Richard Nelson. I

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: thank you. And this is straw poll. Yeah. Alright. Thank thank you, representative Lipsky. Thank you to the committee for your work on this. I procedurally Patricia, you can maybe help us out here. I don't know that we need to do anything as far as reporting this to the clerk's office. So we will be on the floor tomorrow, and when it comes up, Reverend Nelson will give an abbreviated floor report just highlighting the differences in the version that the senate sent us

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: compared to what we passed. Do I mention anything from here from industry again today? And You can speak to yeah.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: I think you can speak to who

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: The senate. We heard from. Pledge counsel. Yeah. K. Yeah. Again.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: There may be questions, but I'm sure you'll be fine with

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: have this or you just have it accepted?

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Okay. Great. We're gonna move on and appreciate the patience of our next witness, who I'm gonna invite right up to the table. So all the way from Burlington? Yes, from Patricia Keaton? Yes, exactly. With UV opening. That's right, yes. Well, so we're gonna spend just a little time this afternoon hearing from academia and then from the Department of Forest, Parks and Recreation on the U. S. Forest Service's reduction in staff and funding. There were sort of offline conversations about the impact this might have on the state's forests and forest products industry, etcetera, etcetera. So I thought it might be helpful to hear from some experts. We did reach out to the Forest Service directly and they declined to testify, but-

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: I don't know if it all.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: No, actually we did get an actual response, but we thought maybe there'd be others who could give us some information. So thank you for joining us. We are live streaming the testimony today, so you can go back later and watch your We listen to your words. I think what might be helpful is if we just let you share your thoughts and we'll hold our questions until the end, but I expect there will be questions.

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: That sounds great. Well, first of all, thanks very much for the invitation to join you today. I'm not quite as prepared as I would normally like to be for something like this. It's the very end of our semester at UVM. I just got back late last night from a conference in Gainesville, Florida. So I pulled together a few thoughts, and I'm going to do my best. But I think a discussion at the end actually would be really helpful to flesh this out a bit. So I'll just get into it. So again, thank you for the invitation to testify today about the cuts and elimination of scientific research capacity within the United States Forest Service. I've been on the forestry faculty at UVM for twenty six years. And over that time, I've cooperated with Forest Service scientists on numerous projects and have worked extensively also on the US Forest Service experimental forests, most specifically the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire. But previous to my time at UVM, I was in the Pacific Northwest for ten years out there and also heavily involved in federal lands management and scientific research on some of the experimental forests in that region. And so this experience, both in New England and across the country, has given me firsthand knowledge and appreciation of the public benefits and impacts of the Forest Service's research program, how important that is to the state of Vermont, to the region, and to the country these days. I also, just by way of background, serve as UVM's liaison to the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire. I will be mentioning that place a number of times today just because it's something like a world class research facility, flagship experimental forest. And even though it's in our neighbor next door, a lot of folks here in Vermont, especially at UVM, work there and benefit from that relationship. So I'll talk about that a little bit today as well. I have five key points I'm hoping to get through today. Maybe I'll just kind of list those off, and I'll go back through those and provide some additional detail. So the first key point is that custody US Forest Service research branch, as I'm sure we're all aware of to some degree, represents an overall retreat from science across the federal agencies. And we're seeing that manifest in a number of different ways. And the cuts to the Northern Research Station and the unit in Burlington are just one small part of that overall retreat from support for science. The second key point is that US Forest Service science is somewhat unique and different from the types of research that the other federal agencies conduct and has been really an essential part of the Forest Service's mission to sustain the nation's forests for the greatest public good since 1905. We can talk about that more a bit later. So very unique research that the Forest Service does. Third key point, U. S. Forest Service research stations and experimental forests, again, in New England, and really it's important to put this in the national context, so across the nation, perform critical and groundbreaking research that we depend on so much these days in so many different ways. Talk more about that. I have many examples to share with you of those benefits today. Fourth key point, US Forest Service science research provides direct benefits to local communities in Vermont across New England, and also direct benefits to academia and to our universities through our cooperation and mutual projects. Huge benefits that we experience at UVM, for example. And then the fifth key point, and here I'm really hoping we can have some discussion, is that I do see a role for state legislatures in supporting the US Forest Service Science Program. I have a few ideas, maybe, you know, things that I could suggest, ways in which the legislature could support science at the federal level, but, I'm hoping we can discuss that a bit towards the end as you please and as you're interested in. Okay. So back to point number one. We're seeing a retreat from support for science across the board. I'm sure most of us are aware that The US, United States has been recognized as an international leader in virtually every field of scientific research since roughly the early 1950s. The National Science Foundation was established in 1950. And as we withdraw from that role and defund the agencies that conduct that research, we're seeing our competitors step in to fill those gaps. We're seeing China, European Union, other parts of the world seizing that ground, seizing that territory. And along with that, we've seen a large exodus of some of our best scientists from academia in The United States. As we lose the federal funding, as we lose those cooperative relationships, We're seeing scientists going abroad and moving their research labs and their research programs to Asia, to Europe, to other parts of the world. So that represents a drain brain, you know, that will have long term consequences for our economy and and many other aspects of our society. There are a couple exceptions with this to to that. We've seen a continued emphasis at the federal level in terms of funding support for artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and for a few other fields. But the areas in which we continue to invest are narrowing, and we're seeing an overall loss of support and funding, especially in the natural biological sciences. And that's true, not just funding from NSF, but also funding from National Institute of Health, NIH and many other fields. And like a whole scale retreat of support for the social sciences. We could talk more about that as well. So examples of this retreat from this critical role that The US has always played in science, 55% cut to the National Science Foundation budget this year, elimination of entire programs at NSF, severe loss of staffing support in many areas, complete elimination of the interagency global change research program, which by the way, includes a lot of things like research in forest fire, fire risk reduction, fire mitigation, resilience, and other sorts of things. And along with this lack or withdrawal of funding, there is, you know, and this is not my own opinion, I'm just paraphrasing what is really everywhere in the media these days, you know, has been the sort of development of some degree of a climate of fear within academia, a climate of fear among academic scientists about speaking out on some of these issues and speaking out particularly about topics for which there is no longer support at the federal level, such as climate change research. And again, that might be contributing to some of the loss of our best academic scientists from The United States. Other examples of retreat from science, the administration this year has proposed zero funding for the research and development branch of the United States Forest Service. So zero funding. They also zeroed that out last year, but Congress plugged that gap a little bit. You could look up the numbers. I think it was with something like a $300,000,000 appropriation, still far less than the historic funding for the research branch or the Forest Service. Well but congress hasn't responded yet in terms of federal funding this year, so we'll have to see what what what happens. But I'm here today to speak most specifically about the March 31 announcement by the US Forest Service that it would close or consider foreclosure 57 of its 77 research sites across the country. That's three quarters of its research facilities, and that includes both research stations or units of what we call the research station. And just to be clear, here in Vermont and at UVM, we have one unit of something called the Northeastern Research Station. I'll just refer to that as NRS. So it includes the research stations. It also includes the experimental forests, of which we have several across the country, including Hubbard Brook and Bartlett Forest in New Hampshire and others. Okay, so this represents a loss of those physical installations, long term monitoring, instrumentation, capacity to maintain critical long term data sets on almost everything imaginable, forest fire activity, stream flow records, flood records, datasets on changes in wildlife habitat and timber production and harvest and all of these datasets that we use to understand changes in the forest sector, changes on the landscape, and to make predictions about the future. So the installations that maintain those data datasets may be lost. It also includes, of course, the the personnel, the employees at those institutions, in those installations, whose positions may be eliminated. Now, of course, what I'm talking about right now is a review of those those sites, so 57 of the 77. And there's still the opportunity to, I'll use the word save or prevent closure of some of those as part of this review process. So that's again maybe where a legislature can play a role. Okay, so that's how I just wanted to frame the context then for what we're seeing with the research station as part of this overall retreat from supporting scientific research at the federal level. But now let's talk about the US Forest Service specifically and how the science they do is unique and critically important. So the the the science mission of the Forest Service has been around since nineteen o five, since the very earliest days of the Forest Service. So that's one hundred and twenty one years. The first science research facility was established in 1908. That was in Arizona. And the research structure of the US Forest Service was codified into law in the 1920s and 1930s. And I'm giving you a little bit of this history just to illustrate how science has always been the foundation, the bedrock of the Forest Service's mission as a science based land management agency tasked with sustaining the nation's national forests, but also providing critical advice and scientific knowledge to private forests and to state forests through the state and private forestry program. So this has always been a science based mission, science based agency. So the research and development arm or branch of the Forest Service has provided this critical role that underpins every other aspect of the Forest Service's mission. According to a recent article in the journal Nature, this is one of the world's top scientific journals published in The UK. The only other comparable journal in the world is the Journal of Science published in The US. So the most prestigious journal in the world. The article is titled entitled World's Largest Forest Research Agency Faces Severe Cutbacks by Trump Administration. According to this article, which I would like to submit for the record, if I may later, the research and development branch of the US Forest Service is the world's largest forestry research organization, or at least it has been until now, with roughly 1,000 employees at 77 sites. Its scientific track record includes, relevant to our region, identifying the exact species of fungus that causes white nose syndrome in bats. That's a really important issue for our wildlife communities here and creating woodland fire models that are that are used around the world to predict fire hazards and fire behavior and to to plan, you know, fire suppression activities. Those are just two of thousands of examples of the research that the r and d branch has produced. So we've benefited since, you know, the nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties from the world's largest forestry research, organization in the in in in the world. Okay. So and okay. Why else is this research unique? Because it's applied research. So, yes, the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, they fund both applied and basic research. But the forest services research is almost entirely applied, meaning it addresses critical issues of national importance, of regional importance. So examples would be research on sustainable timber management and silviculture culture and best management practices, fire risk reduction, which I'd love to talk about more today because the mega fire problem in The Western United States is arguably one of the most pressing problems that our nation faces, and the Forest Service provides critical research in that domain. And yet we're seeing the closure of some of our best fire slabs out West, for example, in Wenatchee, Washington and elsewhere. Blood protection, control of invasive species, management of wilderness areas, wildlands, outdoor recreation, adaptation to climate change. These are all critical areas of applied research that we rely on forest service scientists to perform or we rely on their cooperation with university scientists to perform. Okay. So that's the unique role that the Forest Service fills. Number three, research stations and experimental forests. I'd like to quote a little bit from, senior conservation director with the Vermont Nature Conservancy, Gus Goodwin. I may enter a letter from him into the record as well. This is a letter that, mister Goodwin sent to WCAX, the television station, about the closures. And and he says in his letter, US Forest Service Northern Research Station provides essential leadership, technical expertise, and resources to help address some of the greatest challenges facing forests in Vermont in our region. He he discusses a specific project that the that the Vermont Nature Conservancy is engaged with that is a cooperative, project with the Northern Northern Research Station here in Burlington as well as UVM, a station to breed and reintroduce elm, American elm, that are resistant to the Dutch elm disease, the blight that eliminated elm from our landscape. I'm sure you're all familiar with this, the history of elm and how important that species was. The Nature Conservancy has conducted a decade of research in collaboration with the Northern Research Station on resistance to Dutch elm disease. They've launched a huge new project to rear something like 6,000 disease resistant elm, and then reintroduce those into our floodplains and backyards across New England. Again, this is cooperative research with the Northern Research Station, and it depends on their support.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Do have a question, representative Burke?

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: Oh, yes.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Please.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt (Member)]: Briefly, talked about elm trees.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah. Our farm has

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt (Member)]: the largest elm tree in the state. It lost a third of its crown in a storm and the county forester came out and measured it and

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: it was still the largest on the

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: state. Were they collecting age? Yeah.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: They measured.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah. Were they

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: did this program collect seed from that tree?

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt (Member)]: Like shoots and

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: Uh-huh. Okay. Great. I don't know

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt (Member)]: what came, but that's Yeah.

[Rep. Mike Brown (Member)]: I'd like to challenge that

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: with one of Derby Laughing. Yes. We've got

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: Everyone has their favorite album.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt (Member)]: It's it's sense sense the whole thing

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: is beyond. Yeah. It's Don't you

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt (Member)]: know how much fun it is to split helmets? Oh my god.

[Rep. Mike Brown (Member)]: Oh, that's the thing.

[Rep. Gregory "Greg" Burtt (Member)]: Largest helmets state. Oh, yeah.

[Rep. Jack Brigham (Member)]: Even with a splitter.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: So a splitter doesn't have the horsepower. It needs multiples to extract.

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: No, I appreciate that. I mean, just shows, you know, how important elm are to people in the state. You know, everyone knows of an elm somewhere that has survived somehow. And it's from trees like that that we're able to, we may be able to bring that species back. Yeah. So I appreciate that you shared that. So just a couple of final comments, again, coming from one of the state's leading conservation organizations. US Forest Research has played a critical role in understanding forests of the Northeast from understanding basic forest dynamics, identifying best practices for timber harvest, tracking the impacts of acid rain, and learning how to improve wildlife habitats. The US Forest Service has been a leader for decades. The current research by scientists at the Burlington Lab helps us understand and address invasive forest pests and pathogens and many other critical issues. So again, you know, words directly from practitioners as to how important forest service research is. I also have a number of bullet points that come directly from some of the folks in the Burlington lab. And again, this doesn't represent any kind of official statement by the US Forest Service, just examples of some of the things that they've done over the years. I thought you might like some facts and figures and some numbers. So the Burlington Lab of the Northern Research Station currently employs five full time US Forest Service employees. It supports four UVM students and three joint positions with UVM, so positions that are jointly funded by UVM and the US Forest Service. So it's a relatively small group, but they have an outsized impact, small but effective. And they leverage those five full time employees through these other cooperations and supporting students. That lab has produced some of the leading forest scientists in the state. I'm sure you're maybe familiar with Josh Mollman. He's the state's experts on pests and pathogens. He's the forest health lead at Vermont Forest Parks and Recreation. Kendra Collins, director of forest programs for the Northern Forest Center. Ali Kasiba, you mentioned Ali to me earlier, extension assistant professor at UVM. So some of our best scientists across the state come out of that lab in Burlington. Millions of dollars in funding annually are cycled through the Northern Research Station from the Northeast Northeastern States we Research Cooperative. That's USDA funding that comes from a congressional appropriation. They've produced hundreds of research papers. For many years, NRS scientists secured funding and created joint venture agreements with the Rubenstein School at UVM. They've assisted us in hiring technicians and work study students and through many other avenues. And then also just a bit of background history to remind you of. In 2013, the research lab in Burlington moved into the Ruth Hardy School's building, called that the Aiken Center. And they basically transferred to us the former Forest Service, research lab on Spear Street. That's the Aiken Forest Science Lab. And through this relationship or this agreement, moving their employees into our building, that saved UVM and the Rubenstein School something like $13,000,000 that we would have had to spend by building new lab space in our building. So that was an extremely important agreement between UVM Northern, and Research Station. And it's been very productive in terms of forming this research cooperative where we have people working side by side in our building. Don't know if you're aware of this, but there are a number of similar cooperatives around the country. So again, a cooperative is like a relationship between Forest Service scientists and academic scientists. And some of the most productive groups anywhere in the country, I'm thinking of the one at Oregon State University in Corvallis, have come out of these cooperatives like this. So they sort of swing way outside their weight class in a sense. So you asked me about impact to the state. So if we lose that, we lose far more than just these five employees. We lose that cooperative relationship that has been so productive. Okay, so moving right along. Point number four, direct benefits to universities and communities. I think we're all aware of the severe forest fire risks that this country faces and the severe mega fire problem out west, but also the increase in large scale fire that we're seeing in other parts of the country now too. Just came out of these severe fires in Northern Florida and Georgia, where I just got back from. Unprecedented. We're likely to see fire risks increase in our region in the future. The Forest Service has played a critical role in understanding the mega fire problem and producing the tools and practices that we need to address that problem through fire risk reduction, controlled fires, civil cultural practices like thinning and fuels treatment, the various different computer models that the profession uses to predict fire risks and to plan fire suppression activities, to conduct those fire operations. There's so much of that research capacity resides within the Forest Service. So that represents very, very tangible, important benefits to the local communities around the country that face these risks from forest fires. I hope I've made that point clearly enough. The Forest Service performs critical research on silviculture that, guides everyday practices in the woods. Our loggers, our forest sector, forest products industry in Vermont and the region depend on things like silvicultural guides that come from the United States Forest Service. We depend on the research of the wood products lab in Madison, Wisconsin, based at the University of Wisconsin, another cooperative. We depend on a daily basis on on the research that the US Forest Service produces. We depend on their their, their research to help us control invasive species. Again, probably everyone in this room, especially being an agricultural committee, can appreciate the risks that Vermont and the region faces from invasive species. In the forest sector, that includes beech bark disease, hemlock woolly adelgid, emerald ash borer, Asian longhorned beetle, so many others that are really profoundly changing our forests, our forested landscape. And we depend on forest service research to try to mitigate those risks or stay abreast of them. I also mentioned earlier that critical research that supports the state and private forestry arm of the US Forest Service. Lending expertise directly to landowners and the forest sector on privately owned lands, again, a critical role that the Forest Service provides. And then, again, sort of bringing this back to Earth in terms of the Northern Research Station here in Burlington and the tangible benefits of that lab, those scientists co teach classes at UVM. They've participated in advanced field based learning seminars. They guest lecture at the Rubinstein School and College of Agriculture, College of Arts and Sciences. They interact with the UVM community in innumerable ways, and they have currently, cooperative research projects with multiple UVM scientists, not just in the Rubenstein School, also in the Agricultural College and Arts and Sciences. Okay. So I've I've mentioned those points a couple of times. And I'm almost to the end of my comments, which I think fits your schedule well, I hope. Okay. So

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: you have plenty of time.

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: No huge rush. Okay. Great. Okay. So hopefully, I've convinced you that that Forest Service research is invaluable to the country and to the state. And it's, you know, that value expresses itself in in multiple ways. So point number five is that, in my opinion, state legislatures can support the US Forest Service science program. There are things that this body could consider doing. And I'm just going to use as my example what has transpired just in recent weeks at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest next door in New Hampshire. So just refresh one more time. Hubbard Brook is world class research facility. They've been conducting, research on ecosystems there since the late 1950s, early 1960s. It was the very first place in the world to perform something called paired watershed study. That's where you put one whole watershed down, you see what flows out the bottom, and you compare it to a watershed next door that is untreated as a control. And since then, the research at Hubbard Brook has just increased exponentially on every aspect of long term forest change and disturbances and sustainability. So Hubbard Brook was one of the experimental forests threatened with closure, along with Bartlett Experimental Forest in New Hampshire. It's sort of its twin sister there that serves, slightly different roles. Through a very, very substantial effort brought by the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation working with the New Hampshire congressional delegation, so New Hampshire's congresspeople and senators, they were able to have that threat of closure withdrawn. So the Forest Service has agreed not to close Harbor Brook and to as I understand, this was just announced yesterday. I think Bartlett Experimental Forest will also be spared. Although, you need to check me on that one. This represents an example of how a congressional delegation can work with the Forest Service to maybe reconsider some of these closures as part of this review. Now there could conceivably be a role for state level legislature, you'd have to tell me about how this works, to encourage the congressional delegation to provide that kind of support. So if there was a voice that came from the legislature, I'm sure our congressional delegation would hear that voice and could per perhaps work with the Forest Service to reconsider some of the closures here in Vermont as well. Okay. So, again, Harbor Brook is a tangible example of of how that might work. And then finally, I think that there's a role for the legislature to work with UVM in terms of supporting the research that we do. Budgets are always a problem for us. That's always an issue. So, you know, any support from the legislature is always appreciated and support for investments in the kind of cooperative research that I've mentioned, cooperative research with the Forest Service, but also with state agencies like the Department of Forest, Parks, and Recreation. So support for that kind of cooperative research from the legislature is also critical. So I'm sure there are other ideas, but those were a couple that I had. And with that, I'd be glad to open it up for questions. And again, I really appreciate the invitation to join you today.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Thank you. If you submit anything to Patricia, things you mentioned, she'll be happy to post it. Okay, great. As well as your clear testimony.

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: I'll clean these up a little and paste Yeah, them to

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: thank you. Representative Lipsky. Thank you, professor.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: You know, I've followed Hubbard Brook for sixty years, and it's I wanna thank the Hampshire delegation for making that happen. You know, our senator Peter Welch, four years ago when he was first elected, senate's first visit back to Vermont, he came right up to this room. He go to the governor, didn't go to the lieutenant governor, didn't go to the speaker. That was a big honor, and he was has been very engaged with this committee. Beck and Ballard Mhmm. Cares and and Bernie as well. So we have a good delegation, but and I think I'd love to propose that as a committee, if we have an hour to write a letter to our three congressional delegations. Ruth Nelson's a large dairy farmer. He's got senator well, chunk speed dial when he gets he gets up and has service up on smugglers' notch. They dial up, and he pulls out and blocks traffic

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: for ten minutes.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Anyway, we love engaging. We we can't get slow camp pass, you know, for a dollar in our budget. Our state is our fiscal capacity is very constrained, but we do have unanimity of purpose. And more testimony was so disturbingly alarming. There are several things, and I worked with, you know, Oliver Pearson. He's You haven't met,

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: but he's

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: the FPR, Montforce. Mhmm. We all work collaboratively Montforce, future strategic roadmapping, all of those wise folks at PR that are critically important. And right now, we are dealing with issues, and you've named all of them, like invasive species, the climate resilience. Obviously, clean water and water quality is number one on that list, but all these complex challenges. And Oliver and I were in a meeting last week, the other side of Montpelier, and it was all there was a lot of discussion about active management and which creates a lot of diversity of structure and early succession, etcetera, but also what we can do in collecting data on invasives as the climates shift. We've watched and suspect in every out at the FDR talking about UVM, professor, Doctor. Lamoille talking about actual seedling production for adaptive, and we always relied on dormant seed choices. We have the most complex of the 57 forest types in North America. You know, diversity of species and when we talk about, I remember back in the sixties when they clear cut a swath at Hubbard Brook just to see how much turbidity hit that lower watershed. Right. And it was remarkable how resilient. Yeah. It was. So all these things we at FDR and we, the working for as practitioners rely on not being full of BS or old platitudes. We need to know the changes and challenges that are going on today and tomorrow. Mhmm. That data, we, the timber harvesting, the forestry community, is very much taking full responsibility for

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: use those data on a daily basis in this And just to sort of riff off something you said in terms of invasive species. And so much of that information is produced synergistically by scientists at our major universities like UVM working with Department of Forest Parks and Recreation and Forest Service scientists. It's this synergistic relationship that increases the impact of that research exponentially. And we depend on it every single day. Right.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: I I still have a lot to recover from, but this is activity over the past month. And, you know, this community may not realize the Green Mountain National Forest may be the largest block in the Finger Lakes region. Hey. You know, the Northeast are very vulnerable, don't have the same where you have these monoculture forest types in the West, Idaho, Montana, parts of the country that they have a greater fire risk than LaLonde Pine Belt and the Georgia Florida Pantheon. We're a little more like horse, our parent, a little more with droughts. We need the intel You

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: didn't get the benefit of knowing who we were, and I'm not going to do a round of introductions now just in the interest of time, but I will say, provost is clear, representative Lipsky is a practitioner and an active practitioner. Engaged in the whole. And to your suggestion that we, as a committee, could draft a letter to our congressional delegation, I think that's appropriate. And senator Welch sits on the committee that jurisdiction DCA. Yeah. Yeah. I can.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: You know, full transparency chairman, I was scheduled to fly to Washington the 05/18/2026, the American Lawyers Council meeting, cancel it because I cannot be MIA to the end of session, and we're going at least through the twenty second.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: It's and we will meet with Becca's office with Peter Good. Bernie's office. Maybe we can bring you maybe you can hand deliver the letter.

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: Well, I'm not gonna be there. I'm gonna be here.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Oh, okay. You know? Maybe somebody else from the

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: You can go out west skiing or go go do whatever you want and still get scolded for. But if you're MIA for the all the big bills and all that, you don't deserve to be

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Representative Bartholomew. Thank you for the presentation. And if

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: That's the kind of presentation you do when you didn't have time to prepare, I would be impressed. Obviously it's kind of disturbing news. Literally you don't understand how expensive ballrooms are. In any case, I just want oh, I'm just curious. So in forestry, what college is that in? Is that ag or is that It's it's

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: it's in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. And we're actually a school, and we're our own independent unit at UVM. Yeah.

[Rep. John L. Bartholomew (Vice Chair)]: I just wasn't You never know where these disciplines get stuck.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Thank you. Yeah. Hope Jack.

[Rep. Jack Brigham (Member)]: When you were talking about the elm trees, during the river back, I was reminded of my first job out of college was at probably the same one as George Aiken place on Spear Street. Yep. And I was a research assistant for a year. Were doing, we were growing maple saplings with a really high sugar content and studying evaporator efficiencies. This was all US forest service and maple tubing. Was just breaking up and that was a very interesting time. Decided to go into Perryford.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Oh, really? You kept

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: the handle on that. You're freaking voice.

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: Shiny example of what I what I mentioned,

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: you know, this this outsized impact. That was in the seventies. Yeah. Thank you, chair. How much of this

[Rep. Mike Brown (Member)]: funding conundrum is locked down to this administration? And do you suspect that couple years from now, things will change? Of course, a lot of damage could be done. I I realized that as as a farmer and agriculture, witnessing the damage done to my industry right now.

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: Could it be undone? Could it be reversed? Is that what you're asking?

[Rep. Mike Brown (Member)]: And you suspect that it'll come back around. I mean, they're they're hitting it.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Rep. Mike Brown (Member)]: If you unless you're producing something of, you know, Bitcoin, they don't seem to have any industry in the rest of us. Any interest in the rest of us. And, you know, I'd I'd love to see the forest service bring back the American chestnut.

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

[Rep. Mike Brown (Member)]: That a squirrel used to be able to start down in Georgia and run on all the way up into Ohio in the canopy.

[Prof. William "Bill" Keeton (UVM Professor of Forestry)]: The forest services worked really actively with the American Chestnut Foundation for decades to do just that. So actually, that's another example of research they've been involved with. So that's a difficult question. And before I answer that question, I just realized that I neglected to mention the administration's argument for these reductions. And I just feel like to be balanced and fair as a scientist, I should just mention their argument. Their defense of these closures is that they are trying to address a multibillion dollar backlog in deferred maintenance. So that's the budgetary justification, deferred maintenance. But I'll just point out that places like the research lab in Burlington don't have deferred maintenance. Our lab is in the Aiken Building. It's part of our school. So we don't have any maintenance issues there. Other places like Hubblebrook Experimental Forest don't have a maintenance backlog and receive tens of millions of dollars in grant funding every single year to maintain those facilities. So that argument is really a red herring when it comes to the research installations in our region. And there's a scientist, a former director of the research branch, bloated in this Nature article referring to the deferred maintenance in the research branch as a drop in the bucket in terms of, you know, the overall federal estate. So, this article will will present both sides of the of the argument just in the interest interest of balance and fairness. Okay, then to your question, could it be reversed? Budget funding could be reversed. We could certainly, you know, future administration could, allocate more to NSF, to NIH, to the US Forest Service. Absolutely. Like the funding could be brought back. But when we're talking about physical infrastructure, research stations, labs, specimens, things that are stored in refrigeration, physical installations like experimental forests and all the instrumentation that has to be maintained out there that's on the landscape. If we lose that, we shutter those installations, close them down, some of those losses could be irreparable. And if you start poking around, you'll find many, many people bemoaning that, that this threatens these long term data sets, those could never be brought back. Well, that's the thing with a forest. Any research in a forest is long term. Yeah. And if it's continuous, if there's a break

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: It's generational. A problem. It's generational.

[Rep. Mike Brown (Member)]: But it you know, a tree that you started today,

[Rep. Jed Lipsky (Clerk)]: your grandchildren might see it to fruition, I mean? Yep, absolutely.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Right, well thank you for the seemingly thorough presentation, so appreciate that. Pleasure. And you're welcome to stay. We're going to now bring up Elvigrant who directs the Forest Division at Forest Parks and Recreation, and is going to dig into this a little bit more with a presentation that is on our committee page.

[Patricia (Committee Assistant)]: So we're gonna have a break before 04:00, because if we're not gonna have a break, then I'm gonna go myself.

[Rep. David Durfee (Chair)]: Does anybody need a break? I need a break.

[Patricia (Committee Assistant)]: Let's take Five five minutes. Okay, yes.