Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Speaker 0]: Good afternoon.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: This is the House Appropriations Committee. Is Wednesday, 02/11/2026. It's just after 1PM. And we have with us today, this afternoon, the Agency of Commerce and Community Development. So welcome. We've been here before, so We you know who we

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: have the

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: new Vice Chair, Martin, you're from Arizona Feltus. Great. For

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: the record, I'm Nancy Curley.

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: I'm the Secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development. And I'm here today with our team to present our FY27 recommended budget. Sitting with me is, you wanna introduce yourself again? Dan

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Dickerson, ACCD Director of Administrative Services.

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: And throughout our presentation, we'll bring commissioners, Jefferson, Farrell, and Pelham up as appropriate. Talk about certain departments. So I just wanted to do a little table setting. Our agency, as most of you know, are engaged in activities to help employers and entrepreneurs start and grow their businesses here in Vermont. We help with a variety of things like navigation services, site location, workforce, you name it. We just help our businesses grow and succeed here. We promote our state for both visitors, as well as people who might wanna come live here. Through our services and programs, we support communities and helping making them more vibrant and safe. We do this with the help of around 100 staff members in our agency. We are small, but we are mighty. And everything we do is with the intention of generating revenue for our state. So we generate income and our budget that we're about to propose is a total of 74,200,000.0. And the increase in the general fund runs just slightly north of 3%. And we can talk about what's in there. We had aimed for 3%. But also on top of that, we are asking for $4,000,000 to be added to our base budget so that we may continue the very successful BHIIP program. And so we'll talk about that. Commissioner Farrell will talk more about that. And then we have a couple one time expenditures that we are asking for, and one is $800,000 that for the the manufactured home improvement repair program. And that is a program that's been very successful in keeping vulnerable Vermonters housed. And again, Commissioner Farrell will talk more about that. And then from Commissioner Jeffson, you'll hear about the $150,000 proposal to continue our importexport and trade relations going. We have an office or a consultant in Montreal that works with us to help us recruit businesses who are interested in coming to The US and specifically Vermont. I'm trying to think if there's anything else. I didn't bring any notes, so let me think. I think at this point You sound

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: familiar to me, the one Yeah. You

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: I think at this point, I can just hand it over to Dan to take you through more detail of the budget.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Hi, good afternoon committee. I guess before I dive into the details, I do want to spend a few minutes just sort of at a high level setting the table, basically going from this slide in your book where it shows those new initiatives. I want to spend a few minutes talking about

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So this is the cover? Yeah.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: There's a bigger budget book. Actually, step back. We have a slideshow. I think that's going to serve as the basis of the discussion today. There is a more detailed budget book that is available as a resource for you. If folks look through it during the testimony and have questions, I'm happy to jump into that.

[Speaker 0]: For this presentation?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Oh, I cannot. I didn't need my laptop.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: I can do that.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Okay, awesome. Used to I

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: have mine too.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Folks having things electronically.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah, I'm sorry to say we'll just get this set up and then I think you'll just need hosting authority whoever's

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: I think Secretary Perlin will need

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: this. Okay, so why don't you start and then we'll just join.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: So in one of the slides, in the slideshow we provided, there's pie chart that basically shows the breakout of funds that we're seeking spending authority to use over the course of the year. I want to start telling a story around the federal funds. If you look on that, the federal fund share is about 43% of our overall budget. Although I do want to note that a big chunk of that is made up of community development block grant disaster recovery dollars. So we're seeking about 20,000,000 of spending authority to issue grants and then support staff who are working on that initiative. Without those funds, the federal share would be about 23%. Looking back to '26, that federal share was about 32% without CDBGDR, 25% that was about 46%. So just over the two year period, and there's some nuance there, but I do want to tell the story of the federal funds that we have relied heavily on to do a lot of really good things are going away. That certainly creates pressures for us to where we see that there are important initiatives that we want to continue, try to find other funding to support that.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So, you just said the federal funds increased over last year, but that's the CBD. Do you guys have the money?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: We don't have the money in hand. It's a reimbursement based. We federal draws. But yes, we have an approved granting plan and we have submitted, I think to date, two or three draws and we've actually gotten money back.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: That's pretty cool.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Not everybody does. Was

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: a little bit of stress during the big government shutdown, but once that ended, things have flowed smoothly.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: Can I

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: just maybe it's a more philosophical question but upon a time like 2024 up till 2024 you would make applications to CDBG and they would be approved or not approved at the federal level but once they were approved rest assured that they would show up on time and from what you just said it sounded like to me that you applied for CDBG grants from the federal government, they approved them and then you sit there with your fingers and toes crossed wondering and worrying whether or not they're actually going to send it to you?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Is that like a daily thing now? No, no, it's not a daily thing. Yeah, I do want to I want to create some separation between the CDBG Doctor, which is a special appropriation from the federal government and our normal CDBG program. That has continued and we haven't had issues with that. I guess I can dive right in to a little bit of the federal dynamic. The president's budget did propose eliminating a few programs. But in the bill that passed congress, those programs, at least that would have impacted ACCD are funded. Now does that mean that there may or may not be complications between passage of the bill and us actually getting the dollars awarded? Maybe.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: We've heard of that from several agencies already. They're waiting for money for at least some of them for eight, nine, ten months.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: We've not had those issues. There was a delay during the shutdown, but I think that was across the board just because there was no staffing at the time. Other than that, by and large, we've had we've continued to have a good working relationship with our federal partners at HUD that manages CDBG, the folks at EPA that manage brownfields. So we've we've continued receiving the federal funds. I mean, they've been flat, that's and a part of the story here. But those programs have continued. I don't know if that

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: Oh, that's fine. I can't imagine we live a life in this building where people come in and they say, we really want some stability here,

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: we really want to make sure

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: that things are we all want stability, and I would imagine you do as well when you are working to try to get these funds for Vermonters, and if they don't come, or if they don't come when they're supposed to, what does that do to your business model? What does that do to your day to day personal, job oriented stress levels, and in terms of what programs get affected if there's a delay in federal funding and it you know to me that's chaotic and chaotic is not stability.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Yeah we I mean certainly at the '25 and I think when we were here back in February 2025, there was a little bit of that uncertainty just because of, you know, you could read the news and for a lot of different things. Since then, at least for ACCD, and I can't necessarily speak for other agencies, things have continued to go and we've been okay. We're very thankful that the CDBGDR money came through and we've now been able to deploy that. So, I mean, certainly the rug could get pulled out. But as of right now, based on what we've experienced, things have continued moving. We'll continue we'll continue running the programs.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Great. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: Can you define those two CDBG programs? CDBGR and regular CDBG, what are they?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Yes, so the regular CDBG program, that's a long standing program where HUD basically issues block grants to different states, to all 50 states plus territories, to issue grant awards to municipalities for community development initiatives. That program has like I said, been a long standing program, and it has continued and was funded. That was one of the programs that the president had proposed doing away with in his budget blueprint. Congress funded the program. So we hope and anticipate that the funds will fully through eventually. So that's about I think it's about $8,000,000 a year that we get roughly for mostly grants and a little bit of admin. The CDBG disaster recovery is tied specifically to the twenty twenty three floods and was a completely separate appropriation made by Congress to Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide to the state of Vermont. We've gotten that award and we're Is that money gone? It's not gone. We issued about 50,000,000 in grant awards, and we're working through the actual agreements. We authorized about 50,000,000 in grant awards last fall, And then I think the anticipation is we'll issue about another 20,000,000 of grant awards this spring. Spending authority on behalf of the '27 budget is really for those grant awards that will be issued this spring. We anticipate that the actual grant agreements creating the obligations won't be finalized until FY '27.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So to follow-up on those questions, this is only for the 23 floors?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: I think yes. I don't know that maybe Commissioner Farrell could clarify. I don't know that anything from '24 got wrapped up in

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Or '25.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Or '25.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So we have really tricky. Of Vermont got denied the second time, as you know, for FEMA and for certain towns. And I'm just wondering if any of this money could be used to help with that. Not appropriate.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: I don't know how important it is.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I use the record just.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Sure. Yeah. Okay. The record, Alex Farrell, Commissioner of Department of Housing and Community Development. So

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: the justification for the appropriation was based on damage from '23 floods. And so that's how we

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: use data to establish the areas that are approved for us to award grants and then we essentially got to broaden based on against the data specifications in other areas before we go work rates. That's based on the '23 floods. However, we weren't only making awards based on that damage from '23. So as long as areas were included in that geographic constraint, could make a wards based on a twenty four to twenty five day condition.

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: If it fit in a geographic area, you could still apply some of

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: those funds twenty four and twenty five counties. Yeah the geographic area

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: is set by county. So if you fell in one of those counties that were approved by HUD then yes

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: you would apply. There still had to be some, you have

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: to demonstrate some nexus. There's quite a bit of leeway to demonstrate that nexus. For example, it's housing development. A municipality or a county that has lost housing stock, that could be the nexus to the twenty three months, even if the day that you're trying to compensate was actually about '24 or '25.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Maybe I'll speak to you separately.

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: I'm thinking more about throat construction.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Convenient for batteries, that's my opinion. So infrastructure was absolutely allowable use and there were substantial infrastructure awards. So infrastructure housing and then mitigation were the primary buckets. The bulk of the funding went to housing, which also included infrastructure to support housing. So again, pretty broad bucket, but I won't

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: say 15,000,000 went to

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: just infrastructure aside from housing.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: We can come back

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: with a specific CVG Doctor presentation.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I don't know if we need it, but you've been talking about Feltus. And then we'll see if we need to go from there as a whole committee

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: or not.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Other One more question, sorry. Just to

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: make sure my mind's straight for you. I see this other sheet that has ARPA funds. You're talking FEMA funds? There's that that wants two different flows of federal money coming through.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Well, actually you're getting into a third different flow of federal money. The CDBGDR.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Why don't we pause on that one until we get Yeah. So

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: going back to the pie chart and back to the federal funding piece, I just want to get back to emphasize the message yes, our federal fund share is strong, although most of that's driven by the CDBGGR award. Below that, while I do maintain that confidence that the federal funds that have supported the mission of ACCD will continue. Those federal funds have been flat, which has created pressure on on the general fund appropriations that we receive. But, you know, in order to be responsible stewards of of state dollars, as secretary currently noted, we you know, aside from the extra money we're asking for for VHIP, we've maintained our general fund budget with only a three and a half percent growth. So we try to be as responsible and while also continuing to support, you know, the the federal programs and continue to support our our state programs, which is just a testament to the the great staff that we have at the agency and and the thought and care that goes into building the budget and being as responsible as we can. So with that, unless there are questions on this slide, I'll move to I'll skip ahead and talk about Oh, yes.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Talk about where the special funds came from?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Yes, I can talk about special funds.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: High level is great, but what are your special funds?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Yes. So a few primary sources then a few smaller ones that I won't speak to. The sources, the big one is, one, we get a piece of the property transfer tax revenues that goes to the municipal regional planning fund, And we send those funds directly out to municipalities with our municipal planning grants and then to the regional planning commissions through their annual operating grants. So that's most of that money. Want to say it's in the 9 or 10,000,000 range. And then at a smaller scale, and something that I'll speak to in more detail as we get into DD, because I think there's a piece of it that you may hear from finance and management about that needs to change. A few years ago, we had gotten a one time appropriation for a rural industrial development initiative. It was about $5,000,000 A piece of appropriation language indicated that if properties that receive funding through this are subsequently sold, those funds need to be paid back to the state along with potentially some of the if there's a gain that comes from that, some of that gain as well. What we had then planned to do internally is, if we get money back, we'll try to reissue and continue to get the money out the door. The FY '26 construct had about 2,500,000 in spending authority, no funds to back that up, it's spending authority so that in the event that if funds came back, we can push them back out the door. As it turns out, that construct doesn't work just because of the nature of the fund that the appropriation was made from. So that 2,500,000.0, I think, will end up falling out of the budget. And I think you'll probably hear from finance management on that. So the RPC muni funds and then this fund, that's most of the special fund dollars. We do have the historic sites operating funds. We do receive some money from the captive insurance supervisory funds. And then a few smaller funds where we get Sometimes DHCD staff have little conferences where there's a registration fee, and we'll bring that fee in and then use it to fund the conference. But those are really. And then there's a piece of transportation fund that I'll get into in more detail when we get into CHCD. So with that, I will move to the administration division. And so I'll I'll go into detail on this budget. This the division is made up of of the secretary, deputy secretary, support staff for them, and then the the finance administration and and contracting and grant staff that's rest of the agency. So in f y twenty seven, that's that's 15 positions. We've gotten a question yesterday on vacancies, so I'll just note at this point, we do have one vacancy, one exempt position is unfilled, and we're working to get that filled in a timely manner. And then also, we also currently have two limited service positions that are helping to support the spend down of those ARPA dollars.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And then what happens when the money's gone? Is that

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: We done by have a large number of limited service positions that expire at the December.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So that's built into the budget. Okay, thanks.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: So I'll dive into the wonderful ups and downs document that I

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: don't need a lot of detail about anything really big and different in it

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: far as

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: is pretty standard stuff.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: As far as admin is concerned, it is pretty standard. The only change I'll focus on the grants. We had received a request from UVM Census Data Center for some additional funding in their past the the past grant that we give them. So currently, as of FY '26, we give them a $50,000 annual grant. Looking back to 2020, which is the last time it was adjusted using that inflationary factor, I calculated that, you know, they were due for about a $10,000 increase. So that's what we were able to build in. So they would now be at 60,000 in FY '27.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I can.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: Just to backtrack a little, those positions that you're going to lose, how is that going to affect fulfilling your mission?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Those positions were created to implement and carry out the programs that the legislature authorized when we got the ARPA money. And so some of those positions have, like VHIP, for example, that program has transitioned to a state funded program. Especially what I was asking before, because

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: she's got

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: a guy over there that's doing some great work. Yes.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: And we just wanna make sure

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: they keep doing that great work.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: The hope is that if we receive the the 4,000,000 of base funding, that we would carve out a piece of that and and use it for staffing. And so we would go to the pool, the physician pool and try to get two positions to support that program. So that's our hope. Same with the manufactured home improvement and repair program. We received base funding in FY twenty six. And so we went to the pool this fall and received a position that we finally have in place that we can recruit for. But the other positions have supported programs that when the money's gone, the programs will have to. So the students would have to go.

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: If I might, I really appreciate you raising that because that is we've been grateful for the one time money in VHIP, but it is really hard to have continuity in your staff when people think they need to be looking for a different job. So this program has proven, and Commissioner Farrell will talk more about it, but I just want to acknowledge how important it is to us to keep this team and to keep this program going.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Agreed.

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: Thank you.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: That's really it for the admin budget. If you don't have questions, think, onto the ED is next on the agenda.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So So, I'm Mr. Jebsonade, and I'm not sure you all know each other, so he'll do introductions. But now you're in charge of

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: I'm pushing the button.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: Of you is.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: Oh, your eyes. I can take you.

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: Bruce, watch the button. Doesn't pass the safety

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: back. Why don't we introduce ourselves, because you have not met yourself before?

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: Lyle Jepsen, Commissioner for Economic Development, was an RDC director for prior to this position in the Rutland region. Prior to that, an educator for I won't tell you how long. And primarily in technical education, which brings me to a lot of the work that's going on right here, which is exciting work.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So we'll introduce ourselves to you as well, so you can meet the committee. Wonderful.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Welcome, I'm David Yacovone from Morrisville. I represent the Lamoille Washington District five times.

[John Kascenska (Member)]: I got a B. That's Sanskrit from Burr and Grapes, Essex Caledonia district in 10 towns.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: He wins.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: Michael Nigro, I represent Bennington. Born in Bennington.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: What's that?

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: I was born in Bennington.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: Tom Stevens brought a very rough saying to Washington, the Chittenden District.

[Martha Feltus (Vice Chair)]: Martha Feltus from Linden, I represent Linden and four other towns. Robin Scheu from Middlebury, this Middlebury.

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: Tiffany Bluemle, formerly of Vermont Works for Women. We worked together when you were in technical education, and represent Burlington.

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: Trevor Squirrell, I represent Hunter Hill and Charico. Wayne Laroche, Bracklin, Berkshire and Richmond.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: I am Michael McGro here in the Windham Ford District, Putnam, Dumberston.

[Speaker 0]: Hi, I'm Eileen Dickinson. I represent St. August Town.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: It's wonderful to meet you all. Thank you very much. They said I had three hours, so I'll start there. You'll see staff on the board there, 21 staff. Of those, I'm glad we're talking about limited service positions. Four of those staff members are limited service positions. Now I'll entertain the question, what will happen when they leave? Thank you very much. That was a great question. One of those we're hoping to transfer into our CHIP program. I know you've heard about that. We'll talk just briefly about it in the notes here. We will need to staff up in order to fulfill our obligations to our smaller towns as they bring forward CHIP plans. So we will do go to the infamous pool as well, and hopefully, we'll be granted a position to continue to do the work that CHIP is going to require of us, into the future.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So you haven't actually gotten approval for that? Okay.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: What we will do is we will show demand, and then we'll go to the pool. Going to the next slide. Thank you. I love the fact I can see this. I'm here. So you'll see a number there of 155. We just talked about the limited staff positions. We have three limited staff positions that are working on the CRRP and CIP awards. All of that money will go

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: out the door, hopefully by

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: the December. And so they will be doing things like site visits, following up to make sure funding is being spent the way it was supposed to be spent. That's how they will spend the next several months into the future.

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: And if

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: you could translate the letters for us.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: No. Community Investment Program, CRP, somebody help me out. Community

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: Community Recovery.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: Recovery Revitalization.

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: Revitalization. Community Recovery Revitalization Program.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: Took three of us. But when I took my job on November 3,

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: I was provided with four pages of acronyms. I know AHS has about 72 pages of acronyms.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: Well, I'm glad I'm in DED.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah, you're doing fine.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: So a great deal of funding went to all the right places with the CRRP fund and CIT. Coming from the Rutland region, we received generous contributions for projects that were vital to the economy. It was all time. And I'm watching these go through the system now, and it is statewide. All of your communities probably have in some way benefited from from these funds. The $421,000,000 piece, I'm gonna change things here, is brownfields funds. This past year, we leveraged 23,000,000 worth of brownfields funds. Again, an an important economic tool. As you hear about housing, it all starts with the dirt, and the dirt needs to be cleaned up. And there are lots of sites around Vermont that need to be cleaned up. I always am talking about where I came from in Rutland, but if we were not able to clean up what we affectionately call the pit, which is the same similar pit that Newport has, seems like every community has a pit. And the reason that they are a pit is because they are brownfield sites. And everything that comes through these programs allow for development to happen. Dollars 18,300,000,000.0 has been leveraged for through Vermont Global Export. You might want to know what the $5,900,000,000 figure is there, where it says services. The types of things that we sell are intellectual property, captive insurance industry, the travel industry, engineering services, education services. Those are the types of things that we're drawing money into the state by selling services, overseas and outside the state. 1,000,000,000 point dollars in veggie. I will respectfully ask that we repeal the sunset on veggie. Yesterday, I told another committee to keep it, which was the wrong thing to say, apparently. We need that program to continue to move forward with our manufacturing community in particular. It is leveraging. When you look at that $1,200,000,000 it's leveraging capital improvements, which are allowing for jobs. And there are lots of jobs that I'll talk about in a minute. How do we help train for those jobs? The Vermont Training Program. Over 15,000 people train through the Vermont Training Program over the last several years.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It's about 15,000 seats, because some people take more than one training program, right?

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: Right, there are seats, right?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So it's not individual people.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: It could be seats of training. Right. And what's important about that, obviously, is its enhanced pay that people get by going through that. And this is one of when I was an RGC director, it was one of my favorite grants because it was simple to get. It was not like trying to get a federal grant where you have to fill out all lots and lots of forms. A person comes, Randall Zoc comes, and he will help you fill out that form as an employer, and you will be able to get some training dollars as long as you fulfill the contract and the agreement. And I'm just going to keep going. I'd you to stop me.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: Just one back. Go back here. The veggie curtains or something moving along to repeal the sunset.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: There is a bill to repeal the sunset, and I believe it's going through Senate Economic Development. Is that where it's all through?

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: Yeah. We

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: have very you know, you've heard this people say this before. We have very few economic development tools in our toolbox. That's an important tool in our toolbox.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah. Thank you.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: And looking at program Spotlights International Business, you heard a moment ago from Secretary Hurley that we are looking for an investment of $150,000 to continue our relationship with a business called SIDEP. Don't ask me what it stands for because I even looked on their website to find out, and they call themselves Side Up. And Side Up is a Canadian company that focuses on direct investment and generation, and they work specifically for us. They don't work for New Hampshire, New York, Maine. We have an agreement with them, so they work specifically with Vermont and for lead generation.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So on this, we funded something for a year for this past year. Is that correct?

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Yes, because we've had a five year contract. Okay. And so what were the results from this year?

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: I would like to send you their report, and then you can distribute that. And you'll find that there are companies, because I thought that you might ask which companies that might have come through. So there are a couple different companies some of you may be aware of. One is Mavic in Waterbury, Canadian company. There's also Incentia, which is a heart monitor, device company that is in Burlington. What I would like to do is get a broader list for you, and I talked to Tim Tierney about that today, so that you can see the results. We need to know what the return on investment is.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yes.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: And this $150,000 is actually over two years, so it would be $75,000 for each year. And we need to get best thing is to get an extended contract, so we just don't do a year a year at a time. We'd like to get a two year contract.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So these companies that you're mentioning have actually opened offices in Vermont?

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: I'm going to need to get back to you on that figure. Anything could help.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Which one?

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: Maybe the

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: I'll get

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: some other one. They make bicycle tires or wheels.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah, so

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: to the commissioner's point, these businesses that they'll produce in the report are businesses that were identified as wanting to come into The U. S. Market and have actually set a shop in The U.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: S. And mean, there are some

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: that are still in the pipeline, right? Well,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: and I'm wondering how recent events and comments are affecting Canadians' interest in actually, coming to Vermont, which they know we love it.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: Well, and I think Commissioner Pelin can talk to you a little bit more about the return rate of Canadians at this point. It has been an influence, and tariffs have been an influence. And I can say, again, from my experience in the Rutland region, where they're trying to build a hotel right now, tariffs of $2,000,000 more just for steel really affects that project. And that's just one business. So we're hoping to continue our positive relationship with Canada. We were recently, in November, we were in Newfoundland, and it was the Eastern Premiers and New England Governors Conference, which we will be hosting this coming fall. And we want them to know that we are a dedicated and loyal partner to them.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I think I saw a mic and then Wayne. The note of this, that okay, Wayne.

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: So any of the businesses moving here due to tariffs?

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: Don't know the answer to that question, but there is outreach because they do wanna have a Vermont presence so that they can avoid the tariffs. Have they moved here since? I don't know the answer to that question. You haven't seen any change in the rate of people going to have businesses here in the last four, five years? I don't know the history of that, but since again, since the tariffs have come into effect, there are more phone calls about how do we how do we base ourselves in The United States. Okay?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Now you can keep this going.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: Moving on to Vermont employment growth incentive. We just talked about Veggie a little bit, the amount of investment that that's bringing. You see it also is bringing jobs. Tax increment financing, I know you've heard about that in the past. There are four remaining opportunities for tip districts around the state of Vermont. There are currently nine in existence. Right now, Newport is actively engaged in applying for a TIP district for their downtown, and we'll see how that progresses as the spring goes along. TIP, a $2,000,000,000 thank you very much. $2,000,000,000 infrastructure opportunity for the state of Vermont. That's $200,000,000 a year for ten years. It is a similar process to Chip, but specifically related to housing. It must be a housing project. And then the economic assistance recovery program. Again, we talked about CIP and CRRP, number of projects, and the investment is taking place.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: We wanted to find a list of projects. Would it be on your website?

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: We will have a report as soon as we get through the process. We want to show you that report. What's happening right now is we are actively engaging with all of the recipients of grants to make sure that they're going to be spending the money. If they're not going to be spending the money, we have authorization to repurpose that to current projects similar to a hotel project in Downtown Rutland, which is actually a water wastewater project. Because costs have gone up since the money was, provided, specifically around tariffs at some point. We need to repurpose that money to make sure the the projects happen if there's money left. Right?

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: Thank you.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: The Vermont training program, talked about that a little bit. You'll see there are not a lot of asks from BED. We are asking for $150,000 We are asking to maintain everything that's in the budget currently for these programs. So that's why I'm here, is to let you know these are the programs that the budget's paying for. International trade, which is the STEP program. STEP program provides for exporters to gain small amounts of money to do marketing, and you'll recognize some of the names of companies that are taking advantage of this. It's not a lot of money, but it's important money. You might hear the term or big business Ann Clark Cookie Cutters. They're in Rutland Town. They make or have made in one year 7,000,000 cookie cutters. Their only competition was the country of China, and they do that right from Rutland Town. Cabot Hosiery in Northfield also recently participated, as did liquid measurement systems and Fairfax from natural coatings and hardwood. So it is spread around, and it's interesting that it's very diversified sectors in the economy that are benefiting from the small amount of money that we provide them to go to trade shows and be overseas.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So back to the Vermont trade program for a moment. Did we put parameters on that so that large corporate corporations were not allowed to use the VTP, that it was really businesses up to 50 or 100 employees? Are there any parameters, or can any business that operates in the state of Vermont?

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: You could have Randall come in, but I think it's any business in the state of Vermont could benefit.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I remember discussions about picking up the global boundaries or something.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: There was a one time amount of money slated just for that project, that was a separate silo. But

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I'm just saying, using them as an example, big corporations have training budgets. And so using state dollars for big corporations who have training money and are based outside but just have an office here is not a high priority.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: So I don't know whether we're do that. Eliminating. Yeah.

[Speaker 0]: Memory serves me serving on commerce almost back starting in 2009. There are very strict guidelines. I don't know if they still exist, but they have salaries, benefits, a whole lot of things that small businesses did not have. So a lot of it was with people who were larger companies, Ever Ready and St. Almonds, we had IBM, you had GE Aviation. I mean, all sorts of things. There were some more middle sized companies, but very few small companies could meet the requirements that were part of the deal. And there was a drive at one point for the Northeast Kingdom companies to have a lower wage scale, because most of them didn't qualify. You had to have twice as much, two times over the minimum wage and three or four different benefits.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And they didn't get the healthy

[Speaker 0]: Well they didn't have the kind of pay scale that qualified. So there was a veggie light, but maybe it was You probably weren't here then, but that was the

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: That's what I say a lot. I wasn't here then. But one of the things that I would like to do, if you would allow me, is I'll send you the report that recently came out that Randall put together. And it would be great to have him come back and talk about this, because he is in a recent conversation, he pointed out that wage scale is not an issue anymore, that businesses, even small businesses, have to pay a whole lot more per hour just to get people to come. So as far as a barrier, there really aren't barriers like there

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: might have been before.

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: Right. I

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: think that you did. So Tiff and the Tom.

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: Yes. There were conversations some years ago about issue of incumbent worker training versus new worker training. And do you know how the Vermont Training Program breaks out in terms of incumbent versus bringing on new workers?

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: I do not. We would need to ask Randall that question. But I do, going back to how it can be used, if I may change the subject slightly, incumbent workers are trained using a contract, and that contract is agreed to between Randall and the business. And there's a period of time in which, say, there's a new piece of equipment that comes in that they need to be trained on, that would be built into that contract. Or you can train they can pay we could pay for half of the training for a trainer that's coming in to work with incumbent employees or for new employees.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: Is there

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: Can I ask a follow-up Yes, it is? Is there an evaluation and I know you're very new, but is there an evaluation of kind of the but for rationale for spending these dollars on training? Do they evaluate whether a company, I mean, any organization has to invest in training, whether you're a nonprofit organization, private health care, whatever. And so I'm just wondering, you

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: have to kind

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: of build that into your budget. And so is there a is prioritization given to companies that really otherwise couldn't provide that training? Because the technology has changed so much, or because I'm

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: going have to say, not to my knowledge. Money is used up every year. I don't know that there's a long line for that money. So let me get to Randall.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: Okay. Better answers to your questions. Okay, thanks.

[Speaker 0]: Had a

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: Vermont training program at $1,100,000 plus. We shared from

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: the Department of Labor about a bunch of job development programs that are being reverted, where money is being reverted. No relationship between this book trips training program and those that live in labor. That and it seems like they're related, right, a training program is related to what labor was talking about with their I mean they're not directly related, there's no threat except for the concept of training. They were giving a lot of money of where programs of job training were not they were not people weren't applying or people didn't know they existed or whatever it was and the money came from.

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: I haven't looked to see what they're reverting specifically, rep Stevens. But the difference between the two programs is at ACCD, we are working with employers to provide training that they need collectively. And it's not to replace their training dollars, but to sort of supplement them. The Department of Labor works more with individuals who are trying to upskill or get new training or enter the job market. So both of them serve a really important purpose to getting us where we wanna be at the end of the day, like our end goal of having people have meaningful employment that pays livable wage. But the two programs are different because we are specifically working with incumbent workers that are within a company, an employer already, an existing employee. Does that help?

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: Yeah, I'm just curious that we reverted so far. The administration is proposing to revert so many funds. So then I know that our commerce committees in Boulder Housing and the Labor Department have worked for years to try to get job training money and to see it

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: go away. How

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: are we supposed to judge the success of the program if the money wasn't spent?

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: Right. So I think, again, it'd be a great question for Commissioner Smith, but I just What I was hearing here was sort of people trying to understand why there was a difference between the two. And it's a lot of the Many of the Department of Labor programs are also federally funded or have federal parameters and guidelines. And so that's why I believe, and I wasn't around when VTP was created, but I believe it was created to be a more nimble program to use for incumbent workers and employers that didn't necessarily fall into the eligibility of what the Department of Labor can offer. So I can't specific I know what you're getting at, and I can't specifically answer. I think she would be able to help you on that. Thank you.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: My director was Northern Border's Regional Commission. And we were awarded, through Vermont, dollars 25,000,000, almost 26,000,000 worth of funding. The governor is on the commission for that and has worked diligently to push funding to Vermont. And we expect that more money will be available and considered and this is back to the will there be federal funding next year? Our expectation is that there will be federal funding for the Northern Border's regional profession. We are focusing that money, in large part, on infrastructure. And then there's the captive insurance industry. They are knocking it out of the park as far as the number of captives. We have largest group of captives in the world, at seven zero seven active captives right now, that has cultivated 500 jobs and brings in a little more than $33,000,000 into our budget, which pays for a marketing person and and the work to maintain the system. And there is money left over that goes into the general fund. And then Apex Accelerator is a group of individuals that connect government contracts with Vermont businesses to the tune of, this past year, $287,000,000 worth of contracts working with two fifty businesses.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: That used to be called something else.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: That used to be PTAC. PTAC, the procurement technical assistance I'm not sure APEX made it any easier.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: This probably sounds more interesting. Yeah. And

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: can we go to the ups and downs, unless you have questions? I'm going to send you two reports on international trade and the other for the contract, and the other will be the Vermont training program.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So I think just you don't need to worry about salaries. They aren't what they are. We

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: do have a minor technical correction that we're seeking to general funds. So if you think back to last year, we had come in requesting $350,000 to expand our international business recruitment efforts. At the end of the day, I think a bill passed the Senate that had us getting 150,000 in base funding and then conference decided that would be one time. When that 150,000 was pulled out of the DE budget, instead of being pulled out of personal services and operating where we had a budget, it came out of grants. So we're just proposing to swap that to ensure that in those expenditure categories that fall in the eight zero one of the budget, that it's the right mix of dollars. So you'll see this negative $130,000 and negative $20,000 and then a plus 150,000 under grants. That's just to fix that little technical.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So it should be under grants, not under personal services. Okay. And then the minus $2,600,000 is that a federal grant that's going away?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Yeah, so on the federal side, two things happening. One, we've had a long, I think since 2015, relationship with sub agency within the Department of Defense to provide us money to help companies diversify away from federal contracts. This goes back to the time when DoD was spending less on procurement, and so the money was to help companies diversify. So we've had a long standing relationship through this grant, and the grant has expired. This was happening prior to the new administration coming into office. It's not something that was a surprise to us. But at this point, the spending authority can fall out. So that accounts for pretty much everything but the 2,600,000.0. For the 2,600,000.0, have some funding from prior Brownfield awards that we were very close to obligating through awards to folks that are trying to do remediation work. We don't have a new grant from the federal government at this time, and that's just because those brownfield dollars are a part of a competitive grant program, and we just didn't get funding this time around. But the hope is when we get the next opportunity, which hopefully will be this year, can actually get some more money and have it back. So those are the two federal changes. But once again, it's not anything that was unexpected, although certainly we were disappointed to not get a brownfield award to start out.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: We've put a lot of money into brownfields from our money over the years, and I'm looking at the carry forward report. I know DEC has brownfield money, almost $6,000,000 in carry forward. Do you have any Maybe it's not even Well, you should love Dan. Since you're bringing up brownfields, do you have carry forward in brownfields?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: We did have some going back a few years. And the goal is to stack these different sources. Think it's one or two big projects that we're on the cusp of getting agreement on. It's really just tied to The developers have to find money from a bunch of different places. So I think it's just a matter of, Okay, the developer is feeling good. They have all the financing they need. Now we can finalize these grant agreements to do the brownfield remediation portion of the work. So the funds just hang out there until we get to the finish line as far as that being ready to go.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So you have finance for all of

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: The plan is, yes, we are very close to obligating every dime of brownfield money that we finally have. Any other questions on the ups and downs?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Hello, for the record, Alex Farrell, Commissioner of the Department of Housing and Community Development. I'm going to hand out a little bit of paper while we sort of set the table here. So I'm

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: going to pass these in both

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: directions. Sorry to use so much paper.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And one last one, I promise.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: There we go.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So starting at a high level, you can see 40 FTEs. That's reflective of where we'll be after seven limited service positions expire this year. So after that, we will land at 40 FTEs. You can see in the slide deck just our org chart. As a quick reminder, we are four divisions in the Department of Housing and Community Development. We do have a pretty broad portfolio, including historic preservation. When I came into the division five years ago, or department five years ago, the housing division consisted of just two FTEs, just two positions. Now with some expansion of limited service, thanks to the ARPA dollars. In total, I believe that's now a seven person team. After everything sugars out, we're looking to keep that stable at about I'm not going go through the names, but you have them for your reference of the leadership team at DHCP. All right, so VHIP. I've been in here for the past few years talking to you all about VHIP, and I think there's a fair amount of familiarity with it, but I've given you this stat sheet so that you all can see at a very high level what VHIP has produced, the level of investment and the average spending. As a reminder, the housing improvement program, these are grants of up to $50,000 Could be up to $70,000 of certain accessibility accommodations. The average grant through this program is $40,000 The object is to either rehabilitate a unit that has fallen into disrepair and out of the housing stock, convert a commercial space, or divvy up a space. So a large single family home, maybe a big Victorian or farmhouse and split it into a few smaller homes. What this has produced is almost 1,200 units over the past five years. The way this functions with the property owners, the property owner accepts the grant and in exchange they give us either five years or ten years commitment. The five year commitment is to rehouse somebody exiting homelessness. And again, there's a covenant on their property that remains in place until they fulfill that obligation. The other option is to double that time, so a ten year obligation. And during that ten years, they need to rent at HUD fair market rents. The reason we chose HUD fair market rents is so that this could be used with Section eight vouchers. Question that we get quite often is what happens to these units after the covenant expires, which is a good question. Our desire is that they remain on the market. And I think an even bigger win is that they remain on the market the same rents. So if you look at the stat sheet, you can see right here, there's some colored letters and it shows you the evolution of VHIP. It started with CARES Act funding, then it was funded with ARPA funding. That's when we first established the name VHIP, and then it's been appropriated one time state funds. But the very first tranche of CARES Act funding, we called this RHRP. VHIP was not established yet in statute, and so we ran what was, in essence, a pilot program. Those are the first investments that have come to the end or are coming to the end of their five year covenant. We've been very interested and have put a lot of work in having a mechanism, a feedback mechanism in place so that we could find out, See my concentration, even with the noise, stayed Doing well.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It's been going out all the time.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: We've got work under pressure.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And they're all out here. Standing around the please be quiet sign, talking loud.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Well, is recovery day, and I'm on the board of Vifor, so

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I hope folks met the Vifor people. I've met with all of my folks from Addison County who are here today.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: All right.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It was good. But I would like to know on your, how many people have actually gone from exiting homeless to being in one of those places? Do you know if you have card for that too?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: We do keep track of that. And I'm just trying to see if the number is on here. This is part of a larger stat sheet that I can send to you. So that's, I'll send you the full sheet. What I can tell you is everything that is green, almost everything that's green is a five year covenant. So there's somebody who exited at That's right. So if you look at the pie chart, all the green is somebody who exited almost with some exceptions where we had to grant waivers, where they tried and tried and tried, and the coordinated entry couldn't exist. Okay.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: But so a lot

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: fewer of the blue ones. I see a

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: big change between completed and upcoming.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: And so just to clarify, the blue ones are mixed. Some of the blue is folks who exited homelessness, and some of them are just HUD fair market rents. So the blue represents BHIP two point zero, where we began to offer the option. You could either do the five year covenant where somebody exits homelessness, or you could do double the dollar. Not that requirement, but you do have to write a fair market rents.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yes, if you can get us some numbers

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: I can, yes. I'll send the full stat packet.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: So it's been a couple years since I've paid attention to the rules on the hip have changed or evolved over time. Two questions first, when we build up to five units in a new building, is that getting x amount of dollars per unit or is there a cap on how many units they can receive a subsidy for?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah, so it's a good memory. BHIP cannot be used for new construction where there will be more than five units in the building when there is a number of so up to five units in a new building. It's just a $50,000 cap per unit.

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: Okay, so somebody could

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: the application process is actually very complicated for especially for the mom and pops of the world. You have to pay for it, you have to get approved for a project, then you have to pay for it and then you get reimbursed. Is that still the way it goes? That's right. Then again, this is something I'm not sure it went all the way through the process, but there was a proposal a couple of years ago to say if I wanted to buy myself out of the covenant, I could do that. And then the five year covenant, just to be clear, I think is that's a repayment. And if you go out to ten year, it can turn into a grant rather than a loan. Is that still accurate?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: So other way around, so the five year option is a The ten year option is a forgivable loan, where it's a loan upfront and then 10% each year. We did recently get authorization to make everything a loan, so the five year could also now operate as a loan for a given 20% each year. So

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: if I didn't want to rent to or be involved in the program any longer, can just try to figure out if exit the program, are there credits or I have to pay for the rest of the time?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Sure, yeah if somebody wanted to buy out their covenant, yeah in any event ever since the very beginning of the program, a property owner has the right to pay us the money back and release the covenant. And

[Lyle Jepson (Commissioner, Department of Economic Development)]: do you have

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: a record on how many property owners may have done that?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: We do have a record on it. It's not a large number. I only know because I have to sign off when it happens. A very small number, but we can get that data sent to the statute.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: Yeah, thank you.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Thank you. Which is a good thread to keep going down. So you also have this sheet. So you notice this color jives with the RHRP when you look at the three different iterations of the program. What this represents is the first 60 folks who are coming off of their five year covenant. Again, this was CARES Act, so this didn't have all the same VHIP rules in place, but this is our first look at data. What are people going to do with these units after they no longer have the covenant in place? And you can see 56 of these 60 units that we have data on so far are going to keep rents at the HUD for market rents. Even once they're no longer required to, they're keeping rents where they are and keeping tenants in place. Three other units, you can see there's a little bit more detail here. One of those three units that's raising their rent will come up to market rate. The other two are increasing $100 above market rents. And then somebody, one unit, the owner didn't respond. So we put mechanisms in place to keep collecting the status so that we know directionally where we had it. This is an encouraging start. We're not shocked based on the feedback that we've gotten from landlords that this has built connections with the coordinated entry folks, with the housing authorities, and with really a population of folks that these property owners wouldn't have otherwise planned to be housing from pet storage. And I guess to put a bow on BHIIP, our ask this year is $4,000,000 in base funding. I'd say Secretary Curley summed it up well. We're going to be able to staff this. The two positions that currently oversee and administer this program for the state are limited service. They expire this year. Even with one time funding, BHIP will end this year because we don't have an option to keep positions going. So base funding would enable us to go to the position pool to seek two positions to keep BHIP. Got the two physicians approved? We need base funding in order to make the request. The chicken or the egg? Okay. I

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: have a question, just

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: to clarify the point you're making, but I will just mention that I have a DHIP that It's heard me say this before, a big fan of the program. I was in one of the early we must be coming up on the five year mark. Ours, we have no intention to change. We've had the same tenant in there all along. What's different this year? I mean, because we were in the same situation last year where you were hoping for base. We gave you one time. You have been able to continue it. What's the difference between that? I mean, if it was one time.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: This is the year that the positions expire. So I was making the same plea last year because I knew this year was coming, I said next year, my positions will expire. We're here. Got it, correct. And when do they expire, July 1 or December 31? December 31. Have

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: you budgeted them for half a year?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: We've set aside admin from previous BHIP appropriations and we have enough to get us through the end of

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: the year.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: The end of the calendar year.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So you didn't budget for the rest of the year for the new positions that you're going to ask for before $4,000,000 comes through?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: That's a good question, Madam Chair. So there would be two sources. We can keep drawing admin off of the VHIP program. I assume we would have that. We also received a one time appropriation last year, just $450,000 one time funding to support limited service positions. So we're also able to draw off of that support. So you actually can get, assuming you get the positions approved through the position pool, you have the money set aside to pay for the salaries for all of fiscal year 'twenty seven? Yes, that's right, including from admin off of this 4,000,000. All right, so

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: we won't see you at budget adjustments saying if you become the second half of the

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: year for business. You wouldn't, that's accounted for. That's the only way we could make an ask at the position. Okay,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Thank you, Thomas.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Thank you for that clarification. So we'll move on to MER. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. This is a program that already was funded in the base budget as of FY 'twenty six, remains in the base budget this year. I provided a stat sheet for you if you want to dive in more as to what Merck could do. The reason we're seeking a one time appropriation of $800,000 is we had $830,000 on the books that had been appropriated to us by the E Board after the July '3 floods. That funding was to compensate mobile homeowners who weren't being adequately compensated by FEMA for condemned mobile homes, and so we covered the gap for them. That funding was very focused and constrained, and so we weren't able to expend anymore. We basically provided everybody with funds that we could. So we had $830,000 that was locked sitting in that fund that we couldn't use. So this is essentially a request that was reverted. Now we're asking to repurpose 800,000 of that into MERV, serving a similar community but now broadening to anyone that qualifies for this program.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So, for money that's reverted this, you can only get it from general fund, unless you can find money somewhere else and repurpose it. Is this just a general fund?

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Yeah, it's general fund. Just to be clear, in the language for FY '27, the reversion is built in there. And so the reversion actually happening is based on you passing the budget with the reversion and then swapping. Oh,

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: so they're both

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: steps are in this budget? Yes,

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: correct.

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: Oh, so it will be group.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Special questions on MRR, that's all I had. Do Do

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: you have any, let's see, you've got your projects. Is this across all 14 counties or?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: MERD, yeah. I mean,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: the projects that have been awarded,

[Lindsay Kurrle (Secretary, Agency of Commerce and Community Development)]: you cover all the counties?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yes, projects have been awarded in all counties. And again, like the Secretary said, we see this as our upstream investments to keep precariously housed households in their homes. So is any new housing created by this, or it's also substandard

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: prevented from falling apart?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah, it's a great question. So of the three types of awards, infill awards can support new housing. So it's not going to go into the home, but it can improve the loss so a new home can go there. So it supports new home creation as well.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And do you know when you have projects awarded, or does each of those equate to one home?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: When a project is awarded. So if it's an infill award, it's awarded by lot, and the home repair awards are awarded on a per home basis.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I'm seeing projects awarded eight fifty eight, and I don't know how that would translate to homes.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Sure. The reason we, in the summary, say projects is because it breaks down by the project type, because sometimes we're referring to a home award, so that way, other times it's to a lot.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Which will eventually become involved.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: That's right, exactly. Thanks.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: I've actually had a chance to see some of

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: the projects that they worked on this last year,

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: that they've conducted some of older places,

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: like in St. Johnsbury, but also heading north of other locations all over there, for sure.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: Yep. Yep. They've all been totally well done. Large house, two or three families. Yeah, that's super helpful. Yeah, the case of the services. Yeah, thank you.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Won't dive into all the other things we do. If you see something on this list that you're interested in, please feel free to reach out.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: Do you control downtown notification funds?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Vibrancy funds, downtown vibrancy funds do flow through us, yes.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: And how are they being funded this year? I got an email from economic development of Waterbury, they're advocating to make sure that the funding is still there. I'm not sure yet. There it is. Yeah, that's a

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: great question. Yep, it in our budget. Dan, do you want to talk about it? We were able to essentially increase the fund to fund all the downtowns of the

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: program by moving money around within our department budget. So the practice has been that every designated downtown has access to a vibrancy fund, a vibrancy grant of about 25,000 every year. We've figured out a way to continue supporting that. We do have four new downtowns coming into the mix, but we budgeted to give a $25,000 grant every town that's part of that designation.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: There was an article today about eight zero two Homes. Yeah, it was. And it talked about spending $500,000 to do the designs. Was that just part of your budget for this current year,

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: or was

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: it just built in here?

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: It was budget. It was

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: funds that we received in interdepartmental transfer FY20. I

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: think or even earlier. I think there are funds that came to us from AHS. And I can't remember what year exactly, but we've been slowly spending it down through the different iterations or phases of

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Alcoholics For All program. I

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: heard you were doing it in Essex Junction, I knew that. And then you've got Manchester and White River Junction.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: That's right, Hartford, yes.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: So,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: how far along are they all happening sort of at the same speed, then they will just be able to The towns have to agree to the zoning. Is that the idea? Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yeah, absolutely. And so for those that are maybe less familiar with Home for All, it's a three phase initiative. The first was a toolkit that we published in '4 that teaches folks who are interested in becoming a small scale developer. It's a textbook that walks through all the steps how to do that. Phase two, I can send a stand out around. We're doing hands on training, both in person workshops, training folks to become small scale developers, as well as online curriculum. So I can email this to the committee after. But the third phase is eight zero two Homes, which is where we're developing a catalog of building designs from ADU up to four unit. And the idea is these will be open source designs. So we can save a builder that chooses to use these designs 10% of their budget just by using these. The development process of creating these designs is a partnership with three communities, three that Madame Chair just listed off, And we just had our, what we're calling charrettes, which is our initial engagement with the communities. One is actually happening today in Hartford. And this is an opportunity for the public to show up, look at some design concepts, not building footage yet, and give their input as to whether or not they feel that these are designs they'd be comfortable with being by right, as in there's no discretionary review, it's preapproval. So that's exactly right, Madame Chair, is that once these pilot communities have participated, once the designs are set, they're agreeing to accept these preapproved. So if somebody comes to build one of these ADUs or up to four unit designs, they just go to the zoning administrator, get the approval, they can go build as long as they comply with setbacks and other requirements.

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: So you're you're actually have a program to train developers.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Oh, remember that article that was came out, was it last fall, about Jonah?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Yes, that's right. In Radford.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Jonah Rakesh. We all want to clone him. So

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: my concern is that Land Access Opportunity Board is saying the same thing. So is there any? It is. So phase two is coordinated with the Land Access Opportunity Board. So what we're trying to do is braid together the training, the designs, and then the capital. So Land Access Opportunity Board is interested in doing more direct TA. So this is curriculum, general curriculum. People can come to the classes and get broad training. For emerging or BIPOC developers, the Land Access Opportunity Board can provide technical assistance and then direct grants to help capitalize these folks who might not otherwise have access to capital. The reason VHIP is such an important part of this overall strategy is VHIP is also a capital source for the project itself, whereas LARB, you want to hear more from them than me, but they're interested in capitalizing the operation of these newer BIPOC developers.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So I think that you're all looking to try to coordinate. Lynn?

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, thank you. Are these single family homes, these small scale?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Good It's ADUs at the smallest and then two, three and four unit buildings. Oh, So, I don't have an image on this, but the goal is for these to be infill. And so in many cases, you may walk by one of these four unit multifamily buildings, but it'll look and feel like a single family home.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Nothing

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: huge on these ups and downs. It is broken up across two pages. Under general funds, I think the significant pieces are BHIP. You see that flow through both as $240,000 for staffing. I think we've set aside $10,000 for what we call operations, so we need to go do site visits, things like that. Two positions, yes. And then 3,750,000.00 for grants. Oh, I do want to point out this transportation fund piece that's new for FY '27. So you may know that in statute, portion of registration fees for EV vehicles and a portion for actually, I think 100% of the registration fees for EV vehicles and then a portion for hybrid vehicles is supposed to be directed to DHCP for build out, EV support equipment build out. So that had been in statute, I think, for a couple of years. And so when we built the FY '26 budget, we constructed it so that basically, Etrans is still getting the transportation fund appropriation and then they're passing it along to us. This year, what we're doing is proposing a direct appropriation of T fund dollars to the HCD. And then you'd see in the governor's language, actually wrote down E923.1 language allowing the T Fund to support this program.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It's really important to people to do that work.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Working with AOT, just based on the environment right now, they're anticipating that registrations are probably going to level off and possibly even drop. And so, we budgeted for about 1,700,000.0 in FY twenty six, we're actually anticipating it'd probably be closer to 1.4. We're being pretty conservative in just asking for a million. And then I think in working with finance and management, the understanding is if we need an excess receipt to spend more money down the road. Federal, the big piece is CDBGDR. You'll see 18,900,000.0 of new spending authority for grants. I think the hope would be is we'll get that obligated in f y twenty seven, and so that will probably fall back out again next year when we when we come back to you. And, yeah, I think that's really it unless you have, you know, specific questions on the moving pieces.

[Speaker 0]: Yeah, there is one question here right under the grants. The very bottom reduction, EDSC reduced and moved from IDT to T fund. Is is that off $7,000,000

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: Is that off of $7,000,000

[Speaker 0]: No, it's at 1,700,000.0 It's the very last one off the balance.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Yeah, so we It's a transfer. Yeah, so the way we had budgeted in FY '26 is the EV funds would flow to us from B TRAN, so it would be an interdepartmental transfer. The construct for FY '27 is a direct appropriation transportation fund dollars to us. That way it cuts out the need to negotiate an MOU with AOT and then have the funds transferred to us. So you see gonna get

[Speaker 0]: back to the T fund.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Yeah. So you see there's a column for transportation fund where we've now added a million dollars for Etrans. And we're reducing it because Etrans is anticipating there'll probably be fewer of these registrations.

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: So ties back on. There's some appropriations from the T Fund? Appropriations from the T Fund, yeah. Because I saw there's an appropriation from the T Fund to VGS on the interstate, warning centers on the interstate. So as opposed to just a transfer, so when they're doing a transfer, they're doing that with an MOU.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: That's, well, at least for EV and HCV and DHCD, that's how we've done it is there's work out

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: of number MOU. For your appropriation would be in the B section.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: It's in the B802, which is DHCD's section of the I'm just trying to

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: get straight because it seems like they're doing it both ways, and I'm just wondering what what what the difference is. It sounds like the MOUs is the key point.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Yeah. That's I don't know how B TRANS is working now with BGS, I do know the investment BGS is making is in those welcome centers, whereas the investment we're making is around residential developments having the support equipment there. It's a little bit different endgame, I guess.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: On to tourism.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: All right. Well, hello, everybody. Heather Pelham, for the record. I'm the commissioner of the Department of Tourism and Marketing. So thank you for the time today. Yes, starting right off, we have a staff 12. We had a couple of limited service positions that we were utilizing as we were spending down an EDA grant. We have expended that money, so we don't need those two positions. They are going away, but there's not an issue with those. And then as we get to sort of like really top level on the next slide, this is really what the visitor economy is all about. So just to kind of frame everybody, there's, I'll give you the punchline here. There is not a budget ask here, but I do want to reinforce what it is that the visitor economy supports. And we are bringing 16,000,000 visitors here on an average annual basis who spend $4,200,000,000 in the state. Dollars 4,200,000,000.0 is 9% of the state's GDP. As we look across other states, the national average is travel and tourism is about 3%. So it just shows that Vermont is three times more dependent on travel and tourism trade for that visitor spending than other states.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Three times better to come to.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: Yeah, we just need to make sure that people know about us. So the third stat there is one that I think is vitally important for folks to understand. Visitors are bringing in and this is just both the $4,200,000,000 and this $300,000,000 This is just direct spending. On the $4,200,000,000 visitor spending, if we were to include indirect, so supply chain, or induced purchases due to wages, that would be almost $7,000,000,000 6,950,000,000.00 So I'm being very conservative here in terms of the impact. But direct spending, visitors, I do affectionately refer to them as temporary taxpayers. They are bringing in $300,000,000 a year in direct tax revenue, which is the equivalent of over $1,000 per Vermont household. So as we think about how to keep Vermont more affordable, I would hope that you would keep in mind that our visitors are helping to keep Vermont more affordable for everyone.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So how you How do you get to the $2.93? So I'm thinking you have the meals and works tax, but Vermonters go from Middlebury to JP. You can spend the night in bed and breakfast and have Vermonters go out to dinner. So how do you separate Vermonters spending this raising your tax revenue versus tourists? So we contract with a professional firm, Tourism Economics, to

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: do our economic impact study. That's where these numbers come from. That full report is on our website. I'd be more than happy to share it with folks. It is based on an in plan model, which is very standard in terms of how those kinds of economic impacts are calculated. But they are based on as much raw data as we can possibly get. So yes, from some meal stacks, but also our occupancy rates. If it's visitation at state parks or at the welcome centers, we basically feed tourism economics every and any piece of data that we can so that is as accurate as possible. So they have

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: to make some assumptions about, of the people who go out to dinner this year, how many are tourists versus how many are locals, and the same

[David Yacovone (Member)]: with state parks. Yeah, and they

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: look at day visitors or overnight visitors, I mean, there's lots of things that go into that category.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yes, yes. That beach. So I saw Dave and then Tom.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: If you recall several years ago, we were upstate in a different form, I'm pretty sure there was an economist with you and he explained it, they analyzed credit card data. Does that ring a bell?

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: It was probably Ken Jones, who was an employee of the agency for many years. Yes, card spending data is part of what we provide to tourism economics when they do their analysis.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: Two questions. So there's two ninety three drugs. Every industry will say, we're responsible for, like the craft beer industry brings in X amount of money and the wine industry will say similar, but how do you differentiate between what those separate industries claim that their impact is?

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: Sure. So if you I can provide copies of that for the community if you'd like to see it. Our economic impact report breaks down all of that spending by sector. So yes, some of it certainly is in the combinations of food services. And whether you're looking at direct spending versus indirect and induced, it does switch. So sometimes, if it's an induced effect and it comes from wages that someone makes because they're working at a hotel, they might be spending that on health care or education in different sectors versus direct, which is mostly in retail, accommodations, food services, recreation, and so forth. So in that report, it breaks down how they have come to those numbers to accurately reflect where that money is being spent.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: These numbers that are up on the chart are from 2024, 2025, we saw a proposal to have a fifty first state and that country didn't really like that. So it affected quite a few industries especially in Northern Vermont. Just curious now to, for instance, Chesterfield cheese got hammered by not having the North, but I'm sure that there are others. When will we know what the final figures of the effect of proposal to be the I most

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: appreciate the question. It is frustrating that there is such a lag in data that 2024 is the latest that we can provide. Some of that is that our home tax data is not available till the next summer, so we won't be able to provide 'twenty five for quite some time. But to your point, 2024, we saw the benefit of the total solar eclipse. 2025, we saw the opposite effect of federal rhetoric. And yeah, it was a doozy of a year. We have seen that our credit card spending has down basically in half. So we are down year to date 48% in credit card spending from our Canadian visitors, which basically calculates into a loss of about $75,000,000 in visitor spending at 2025. Visitation from Canada is about 5% of our total visitation. But to your point, it is felt much more acutely in the northern part of the state. Doing what we can do to mitigate that, we've really done a number of things, and a lot of this detail on all of our programs is in that very thick budget book that you have. Our department takes that task very seriously. So there's a lot of information in there. So I will just encourage folks that on anything I'm speaking today, if you want to know more about that, it's in the thick budget book. But in terms of our response to the situation with federal rhetoric is, number one, we were able to make sure we had the best available data. So we've been tracking Canadian visitor sentiment, how likely are folks able to come can come here or not. We work with the Chamber of Commerce to set up basically a portal for businesses who are interested in offering a discount potentially, entice folks to, if they're willing to come across the border, a way that we can direct that information to visitors. We've thought a lot about messaging and what we can do and what we can't do and what we can affect and what we can affect. And everything we see from the message testing is that, yes, our neighbors basically do love Vermont, but it's a line they can't cross at this moment. So we're really focusing on what we can do to make sure that when they are ready that they will come back. And we did launch a program in the fall when things had piled down just a little bit, a digital display ad that basically was what we called our numbers campaign. So we were both English and French Canadian, we had ads that said was just like, compare two numbers. So like 18,000 miles of trails, 100% love for Canada. Two fifty two welcoming communities, 100% love for Canada. So we're doing what we can to make sure that our neighbors know that we want to welcome them with open arms when they feel they can. But will the twenty twenty five numbers show a decrease? I definitely expect that, yes. That's a lot if you're saying 48%. You could

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: use a credit card. You have indicators now. We

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: do 70 have

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: $5,000,000 And we also have an exchange rate that benefits us from Canada and not in Canadian. Absolutely. It

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: is multilayered. So there's concern about the rhetoric. There's safety concerns at the border. There's the exchange rate. It's not just one thing. And we, as Vermont or as the Department of Tourism, don't have the ability to really affect those root causes. But we're certainly doing what we can.

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: That exchange rate, I was just looking at it in the past five years, it's gone 25% to 40%, so it's been trending upwards. People don't like losing 40%

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: of their dollar when they come down.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: No, they don't. And so when we look at travel sentiment, I have the numbers right, in a normal year, we would see about 20% to 25% of Canadians saying that they would plan to come to visit The US. Now that's down to 15%. And border crossings, I think it was July, we had the height of the decline, if that's a double negative there. I think it was 35% decrease in border crossings. We've now improved to about 20%. But those numbers are the least I can remember from November, which is not necessarily a high visitation season for us. Really, we see the most Canadian visitors in July and August. Questions? The last stat on this slide is just the visitor economy. And again, this comes from that same Tourism Economics report, supports over 30,000 jobs. That is about 10% of our workforce. And so I think that one of the things that I just want to note here is that our role at ACCD, one of the things that I see is that we are really, in terms of how we are supporting business in Vermont, is that we are bringing customers to all of our local businesses. Those customers are helping to keep those businesses afloat and helping to keep those people afloat.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So I'm wondering if we can find what your company does all these stats, NAICS codes or whatever they use to determine a job in the tourism industry. So going back to what Tom said, the Brewers or Jasper Hill, you could argue that they do tourism too, even though they're actually manufacturers of producing stuff for all of us. So is there a way to get a better handle on what they're considering tourist jobs? Yeah, I think if you

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: look at again, I'm happy to share the board. In my mind, I'm seeing this chart where they break down where the jobs are in all those different sectors. And I think one of the things to think about, Wendy, I mean, you're absolutely right. Everyone's trying to quantify their economic impact. I'm the first to say these are overlapping Venn diagrams. So we're not trying to double count necessarily. I think we're just trying to put it in a context of other large industries. So it's not meant to say that we're going to squabble this one job.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: No, and I'm not suggesting that you are. I'm just sort of interested. It's a curiosity. What do they count as tourism? Because some of the shops on Church Street might be drawing tourists, right?

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: So I think accommodations is clearly the easiest one, and that's the biggest bar you'll see on those I think that when it gets down to if it's a retail establishment, and they're looking at sales and use tabs, and they're looking at day visitors overnight, and what's the average spend. And if they're spending about that much, then how does that get divvied out under x number of businesses? So I'm not an economist, but I No.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It's just very interesting. Yeah. Anyway,

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: so that's the broad picture of what it is

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: that what we

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: do. There's just four slides here, basically the big buckets of our work. So clearly, marketing is really where we focus our time. We utilize a range of different tactics, whether that's paid media, owned media, earned media, to basically make sure that folks around the country and around the world, when we can make sure that they know about Vermont. Again, there's a lot of detail in the big budget narrative of I understand why I often hear, well, we've never seen any of your ads. It's like, well, I'm sorry, because you guys are already here. So that's why we don't play them in Vermont. But there's a lot of detail there about our particular creative assets and so forth. But I did just want to note with the two bullet points that I provided here is that we take very seriously our ability to quantify what is the ROI of our efforts. And so there's two bullet points here that I just want to pull out. So we were spending down a large federal grant that you folks are aware of from the EDA for the last three plus years. One of the things we were able to do this summer was a large out of home installation in the New York City market. So out of home, that's basically what it sounds like. It's on the street. So we had a combination of street level kiosks in Brooklyn. There was over 160 of them. We were also able to do transit advertising on the Long Island Railroad and on the Metro North. Part of that buy, we were able to do a brand list study. And not only did the people who so basically, they do like a if you were exposed to the ad, then they survey you and say, do you remember seeing this ad? So we were able to achieve 50% of people who were exposed to the ads remembered them. And this is just from this one portion of our summer campaign. Of those who remembered seeing the ad, they had a 30% increase in brand consideration, which is, would you come to Vermont? So a 30% jump, which is above benchmark for most travel and tourism ads. It's an 18% lift. We were able to achieve a 30% lift. There's other more stats on that in the book. Then another one that we did was specifically on our winter advertising campaign. There's a lot of math that goes behind these numbers. But basically, this is from another company called Smarty Insights. This is what they do, advertising effectiveness, what we're really trying to we understand that people will come to Vermont anyway. I'm Okay with that. But what we do want to make sure is that when we are spending money on paid advertising, that we understand what is the incremental lift. So what is the travel increment that we get based on our advertising? So for the last winter's campaign, we spent $538,000 on that campaign. We were able to get a 44% brand awareness. So that's how many people who were targeted who remember seeing the ads. So there's a bunch of math there about, Okay, this is how many households, and this is how many people actually came. So again, a lot of math. It ended up being a 3.6 increment, which translates into 145,000 trips that we can say, specifically, these people. We know these people came specifically because of our ads. We can then see average trip spending. And so out of that, of that $530,000 and the amount that they spent over $300,000,000 here, so that is a five seventy four to one return on investment for visitor spending in Vermont based on $1 of advertising. We can also that same campaign brought in $23,000,000 of tax revenue, which is a 43 to one return on investment specifically for that one campaign.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Everything should be that successful.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: I would like to make the point that we are on the revenue side of the equation. We are bringing money into the state. What we do, we can prove the effectiveness of what we do. It is a very tight budget year. We know how much the education system is putting a pressure on the general fund. That is why I'm not coming to you with a base appropriation request. But I will also say and maybe this is a good transition to the next slide with the federal funds that we did receive over the last couple of years, not only were we able to fund that advertising that I mentioned, but also the advertising effectiveness study that I mentioned. We also were able to do a brand perception study. And it's a very sobering report when we realize we know that there's competition out there. Some of the conclusions in the report is that Vermont's problem is not active rejection. Our problem is we are just overlooked. And so in a national survey, just no prompts, where would you like to visit in the next three years, the amount of people who said Vermont, 14.8%. That's a problem for us in trying to stay competitive to make sure that we are staying top of mind. It's just a very competitive business. So there's a line in the report that says very clearly that Vermont cannot continue to depend on just the idea that people will love Vermont, and they will come. We do have to support our brand presence in the marketplace.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: So

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: knowing that, at least at this point in time here, what are you

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: thinking of wrong being a lot of strategy?

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: I see ads on TV

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: for sure. Lots

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: of things, other states are doing that as well. New York states has this large thing they've been doing for a long time here. They're now full of marketing here, for sure. And they're in some different positions to do more of those kinds of things. What you have first thoughts about?

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: I mean, so basically we have to make do with what we have. That's what we have in front of us. So that's why we spend so much time really thinking about how effective our work is. That's why with this federal money we have, we really concentrate on making investments in, for instance, creative assets that we can continue to use. We have developed new commercials that we haven't put into the market yet. We're basically saving them. So we will continue to be as efficient and effective with the resources that we do have. I just want to make sure that people do understand that it is a competitive marketplace. It costs us the same amount of money to put an ad in Boston as it does to New Hampshire or Maine, who have many, many times more money than we do. And I know it's a longer conversation, but basically, really, for us, it's about being as efficient and targeted as we can.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: There's a lot of our local chamber of commerce, which there. Budget is only so big as well and we always get lots of offers like the Boston area that you like to become, you know, this in Boston because we do all these things for you. It's a big price tag for sure. So we're always trying to like, wait, what's the return on that investment, know, in that level of marketing, which isn't practical for a smaller chamber like that here, but we do support our local businesses. Many of them are out for industry, you know, businesses, those different sectors, and Tom is asking questions about here as well. Yeah. You're out there in a local, like within a 40 mile radius here. How could our local chambers attribute to something along those lines to increase our visibility or prominent in change of altering industries as well? That's just in mind here in

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: the state process. So I mean, one thing that I can sort of talk to is that, you know-

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: one

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: of the things on this list is with federal money, we were able to do some regional grants. We don't have that ability to do that going forward, but with different levels of funding and resources, we might be able to do that. But even without that, our place is really at the top of the funnel. It's getting We have the ability to reach more people than any local chamber could. So that's sort of the top of the funnel. And then what we need to do is get folks farther down to get to different communities by telling that story about why they might want to go to one area of the state versus another. Part of that is just making sure that people understand all the Hetford Mon has to offer. We are also very aware of making sure that we are spreading the wealth, so to speak, that we're able to illuminate communities that folks might not be first top of mind. And so then it's really an opportunity for us to make sure that we are continuing to build those relationships with different areas of the state so that it's really like a top down, bottom up. So it's like, we can try and get folks to look at what you have, but please help us with, are you investing in photography and making or think we have a program right now. We're working with all the downtown organizations to create itineraries. Where should people go in your local area? So basically, help us tell your story best. That's where the local partners can really be most effective, really helping us understand what makes you special and then we can try and amplify that.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: That's one of those things I don't think we do as much younger, perhaps maybe as well, talks individual stories. So we kind of assume, know, buying people come down to ski and buying bikes and And those numbers are down for all the reasons we've talking about here. We're trying to recapture those folks and they call us.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: Yeah, one of the other programs I can point to on this list, the very first one is that we just completed a destination management plan. This is a five to ten year plan for the entire industry, not just for our department. Again, this is something we've never been able to do before, but it really outlines a roadmap for how we're going to support the tourism sector going forward. And within that, we have four strategic imperatives. And part of the different there's 16 objectives within that. And a lot of that is thinking about how do we support how do we one of the imperatives is how do we strengthen the tourism sector. And a lot of this is how do we think about our relationship with our regional partners. Again, how do we spread folks around? How do we think about year round visitation? How can we even out the shoulder seasons? That's obviously going to help with workforce if folks aren't needing to have two, three jobs, and so forth. So there's a lot of things within that plan that we can help start that conversation with different communities. And so as we roll that out, we did a large public engagement process to create the plan. And we're going to be doing a series of roadshows around the state so that folks understand that we're going to be down in the Okema Valley in a couple of weeks for one of them. And the kinds of things that you're bringing up that you're seeing in your community, we'd be having those conversations potentially in that area to understand where can we best collaborate to solve some of these issues.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Have Mike and then Dave, did you have a question too?

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: I did, if

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I You're after Mike. Okay. A

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: moment ago, you were talking a

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: little bit about Vermont's marketing capacity, which is maybe why I ask this now, which is I was disappointed that I didn't see anything specific to the 200 and fiftieth anniversary in the budget or any specific asks for that. You had referenced the eclipse, which I think is just an example of how unique things can go at, a $54,000,000 impact in Vermont. And I think it was 2009, there was a four hundredth I don't exactly know what we're celebrating.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Four hundred years of change in inflation.

[Thomas Stevens (Member)]: The state spent $250,000 on that, and that was in $2,009, and even rolled out a license plate. And there's a piece of me that wonders if we are under serving this two hundred and fiftieth celebration. I know the commission still has some of their funds from their original appropriation. So I guess my two questions are first of all, are there any plans for advertising that are embedded in your base budget that are going to be related to the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebrations throughout the state and the various things throughout the state. Obviously, I'm in Bennington, Bennington, Bennington, a big one, I know, but there are other locations as well. And I guess second, would you say that I'm overestimating the potential impact of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary? Or is the lack of additional funding just a reflection of a difficult budget?

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: Let me take a couple of those. So I think that, yes, it's a difficult budget year. That's why there isn't more of an appropriation for the Model two fifty. I do sit on the two fifty Commission, so I'm well aware of what folks are trying to plan. I think there is a balance that this often comes up in terms of we are promoting all the amazing things that are happening in the state, but we're not doing product development. We're not creating those experiences. So what I understand is that there are folks like the Vermont Humanities Council and other folks who have been able to provide grant funding to local communities to put on events. And then that's where we come in. So they're figuring out what the events are, and then we can promote it. I will say that for our we do an annual inspiration guide. That's our printed fulfillment piece that we do in partnership with Vermont Chamber of Commerce. There's over 200,000 posts that are distributed every year. They're in the welcome centers and so forth. We have a specific multi page spread on Vermont two fifty. So we it's important enough to have that be a centerpiece for the inspiration guide this year. Will it bring as many people as the eclipse? I can't say that necessarily, but that's one of the reasons why I point to our general work in the winter campaign. So that 145,000 that I was talking about when we were talking about the ROI on that particular paid marketing effort, that's about as many people came for the Eclipse. So we can bring Eclipse level people here. With the winter campaign, it's not just about one place or one day. That's why we see that amount of visitor spending that's that much greater than the eclipse, because it's a whole season that we're supporting. So I think that's where we just have to be a little bit realistic. We want people to get to Bennington, and we will continue to tell that story. We will lift up events that are happening. But I also think that we have a lot of competition, to be honest, when it comes to two fifty with our other states. So we are doing what we can. And I think it's a great part of our story. And a great reason to come into Vermont this year versus another year. So it's not just about paid media. Like I say, it's all of our email marketing and our social media and so forth.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: But we have lots of different ways that we can lift up different particular stories, whether it's about Vermont two fifty or something that might be happening in a different community. Steve? I'm bullish on tourism, and I really believe that if we wanted to infuse some funds into our general fund, this is where to make some investments. Having said that though, unless I misunderstood you, I don't get too discouraged when I hear that, was it 14.8%? When someone's got 50 choices to make, and one out of seven people pick me, that's pretty impressive in my mind. So it's a lot to build on. It's something to build on and I don't get too discouraged by that personally.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: I guess, I appreciate your optimism. I'll take the 14.8 any day.

[Speaker 0]: I would be

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: less slightly depressed if Maine's wasn't double ours, because Maine has a budget five times ours and has had for twenty years.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: They also have an ocean.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: They also have an ocean, but we have competition Thank out you.

[Speaker 0]: I was going to say, remember being in commerce and caring about the Mini Program, which is very impressive. They have some kind of a formula that goes and takes every dollar that generates income, plows it back into the advertising, and the results were really pretty amazing. I've got a couple of quick questions here. I also sat, can't remember his last name, but Ken, the economist who came in and presented a white paper and looked at where the tourism was surging. But what was really important, and I believe you were there and also described it, maybe you can explain this better than I can, but there's ways of knowing where the people come from and how many times they come and when they come on a day trip, and they come for a weekend, and then they stay for a week, and then they buy a house, then all done with credit cards and probably Google Analytics or something, but it's an amazing breakdown. It's a little spooky. But you really can't target it.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: We definitely try to access as much data as we can to afford our efforts to the point that we have to be very strategic in what we can do with our resources. I will just point out, if folks want to learn to your point, we actually were able to do a Vermont visitor survey this year, where we were able to do intercept surveys throughout the state. This was a year long effort. So we were able to I'm trying to think. I think it was 66 locations throughout the state and at 27 different events to do in person interviews, understand where did you come from, where did you go. And so we have maps within those reports that shows where people throughout the state, when they came to the state, where did they go? Did they go

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: to one region? Did they

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: go to different regions? Yes, we also do have information on credit card spending. I mean, it's all anonymized, but it does say what state their home address is in. We use that when we're doing our geo targeting to make sure where we're spending our dollars, to make sure that we're not only encouraging folks who have been here before to come back again, but within our ability to look at our direct markets where we have a direct flight, or more aspirational markets where maybe we've seen a little bit of an uptick in folks coming from that area, we feel like it's a growth market that we can build on. So we do use data in as many ways as we can to really understand not only who we're talking to, but understanding what they're doing when they come here so we can whether that's helping different communities understand that and, again, spreading people around, or just really understanding what they see in Vermont that they may not be getting elsewhere, so that either we can tell that story better or to the point of the continuum, if I may. The next slide is about our third bucket, which is really about relocation. So we do know that there's a continuum when folks decide that they love Vermont, maybe we can convince them to move here someday. In that visitor survey, we did ask. This number, I don't have off the top of my head of the amount of people who think they might relocate here, but I think it was around 10%, which I think is actually really quite encouraging. But this is a third major part of the work that we do at the department. So we are looking not just at folks coming here as visitors, but how can we convince them that Vermont is their future for relocation. And then equally, we understand that retention is a big part of that. So when people go through the effort to move their family and come here, we want to make sure that they feel welcome in their community. So we were able to, thanks to base funding that we received a couple of years ago, was really impactful. We've been learning how to do this better and better over the last couple of years. And we were able to launch our Grow Grants program. So we are now in the second this was a competitive grants program. The first phase or cycle was two years. We're now starting our second cycle. In that first cycle, we were able to document the 200 New Vermonters who came to this program. We will always undercount how many people come because just like visitors don't check-in when they cross the state line, People who move here don't necessarily check-in with us either. But the GROW program has helped us really learn that where we're able to be most effective is providing capacity money to local organizations to have those very difficult and detailed one on one conversations. So the GROW program will now fund 15 grantees. That includes now we're able to cover the entire state in terms of where folks are interested in moving to. Plus, we do provide a grant specific the Vermont Professionals of Color Network and to open and out and I may have that wrong, because they're a new grantee to support LGBTQ plus new Vermonters, as well as Vermont Pressions Collective for BIPOC Vermonters. So really what that is all about is Think Vermont is our just like with visitation, we're top of the funnel. We're trying to make sure that people understand what Vermont has to offer. They have questions. Our call to action on thinkvermont.com is our connect with a Vermonter form. That's how we really think of this really as a sales funnel. So people raise their hand, we want to move here. We are able to then funnel those leads to the individual regions where they can have those conversations, whether it's about housing, child care, finding a job, whatever it may be. They're able to provide that level of assistance and really be that shepherd through the process when they do decide to move here. We see from the data it takes about four months for folks to make that transition. It's pretty much equally split between people who have a job offer and then decide to move versus people who decide to move and

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: then look for a job, put more data on that. But that's another big part of what we do. Honest push. There's a fine line between people coming to visit, wanting to come back, wanting to move here, and buying a second home, which is an issue in some communities. I'm just curious, how does that play with how you're looking at possibly using the loveliness of the state and it's attracting people? I mean, it's just, there is that thing of where I'll say Stowe in particular has been most of the home purchases recently have been for second homes. And what does that do for Does this play in all conversations about how does it help us attract people who want to stay?

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: Yeah, there have been second homeowners in Vermont for They are a small portion, I would say, of our visitor base. If I think back to that visitor survey, anyway, thinking about the percentage of people said, well, I came and I stayed at my second home, it's with maybe like 10. Not a huge number of folks. I think that sometimes people decide that they want to move here right away, and they want to go from being a visitor to I'm going to move here full time. Sometimes they say, well, maybe I'd be interested in investing in a property, and I might move there someday in the future. Or maybe I'm not ready to move there, but maybe my kids might move there one day. I think it depends on the community as to how much that is a burden on their housing stock versus how much it's bringing in revenue. So it's a fine balance. They think we can do both. Then I guess just to round up, I'm not quite sure how much time we have left, but just finally, I want to mention that there are two staff positions within tourism marketing that make up our Chief Marketing Office. This office has gone through a bit of a transition in the last couple of months. Folks might be aware of the fact that there was a new position created as the Chief Communications Officer within the agency administration. Rebecca Kelly holds that role now. So our two positions that we refer to as the Chief Marketing Officer are now co located with Rebecca Kelly in the Chief Communications Officer. And that really fits with their mission of those positions, which is really supporting communications and marketing activities throughout state government. So if you think of the rest of the Oregon Department, we're really very outward facing. Those two positions, with the addition of the chief communications officer, are looking more internally about how to support marketing communications efforts with other state agencies. So you can see here on this slide some of their major initiatives. The top one on the list there is the Universal Digital Accessibility Initiative. Folks may be aware that under the ADA Act, there's a big deadline coming up in April about how government entities will need to fulfill their responsibilities with digital accessibility. And so this team is working very carefully with, again, other state agencies on how that they can meet those requirements.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: So did this position move? And are you funding it, or is it all in AOA now?

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: Right now, they're just co located together. We're trying to figure out what the best form of collaboration looks like. Your employee Correct.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Located elsewhere. Working together, yeah. And

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: then I think the last slide is just our ups and downs, which, again, not much

[Speaker 0]: to see here, but I'll let Dan do that.

[Dan Dickerson (Director of Administrative Services, ACCD)]: Yeah. I would just point to, in the federal column, we did have this big EDA grant that allowed the tourism marketing staff to do a lot of really good things. They fully sped down those funds, so the study of the ordinance falling out in FY twenty seven. On the general fund side, no big changes. I think this is really a current services budget. There was some funding available to push towards just small increases to the marketing efforts. So you'd see those there. But by and large, it's pretty much strictly current services.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: How much is the original EVA grant?

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: 10,400,000.0.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: That was nice.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: That was great. Yeah. Yeah, that slide. Look at bullet by bullet, it's like, that's a major thing. That's an amazing major thing. That's an amazing major thing. I mean, there's workforce development work that we were able to do. We were able to provide some funding to state parks to work on their fire towers. There's so many different things that we were able to do, which was hopefully not once in a lifetime, but it's very welcome. Approve what we can do with resources.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Well, thank you. And it's always nice to hear from the Agency of Commerce and Community Development. Thank you for giving us so much time. Tom has calmer, development in tourism, Tiff has housing, so I'll we'll have check on

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: come around again for a second out of commerce.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: And if we have public confessions, it's like we'll go to the top.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: It kind of sounds like it's about as pro form a as it's ever been, right? There's not very many assets.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: It's the three Yeah, I'll check. I'll be back and tell you something. Base

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: funding for VHIP, we're on the same team here. Economic development office in Montreal.

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: Of course.

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: Heather, on the I was just struck by your comments about how people aren't the feeling is through all the data that people aren't just going to come here because we're such a cool place to come. And yet I can see scattered, mean there's not one place and maybe there should be or maybe there is, but you know, there's cheese tour, there's a beer tour, there's tours that each individual place how would you go about pitching the larger picture of like, no really look how cool we are. Like you know, I mean because I think each of these individuals, I mean you can go biking in the kingdom, can go to the cheese places, you can go to the beer, I mean whatever it is that people are doing. And then I work in a place where there's a lot of bus tours that people are coming from Pennsylvania and New York State and they're staying at traps and taking the bus and coming here for a sandwich and soup and a tour. What's percolating in your mind in terms of what is it that we would do as a state? Mean there's a 100 different things that we can do, but how do you, where are you going with? How do we get people to come?

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: I think there's two parts of it. So one is what is the story that we're telling? So what is going to be compelling to people? And so that's where definitely do a lot of research in what is the competitive set, what can we offer that somebody else can't offer. So part of that is then we're investing in whether it's, like I mentioned, itineraries or ideas for what people can do. And then it's telling that story. Do we have the right video assets to do that? Are they long form that we can show as YouTube pre roll? Are they shorts that we put on social media? There's lots of different development opportunities for us to tell that story once we know, as we're talking about on the local level, what is the best story for us to tell. And then it's really like the other side of that is we can create all these wonderful stories and assets about what we have to offer, but we need to get it to people. And that's the resource constraint that is difficult for us, is how many people can we reach? We know it's a competitive environment. We know it takes multiple touch points to really activate someone to do any kind of behavior change, whether that's come to a place or stop smoking or whatever it is, just basic communications. So it's really about both. It's like, how do we hone in on that brand study talked a lot about, yes, people come here because it's a beautiful place. They also come here because they feel safe. That's something where we rank very high. Cool. But yes, in all sorts of different studies. It's kind of like the Venn diagram for the economic impact, which are so many different styles. But it's just so it's really so how do we use those brand assets in the most impactful way that people really understand what it is they're quote unquote buying when we say, spend your precious free time with your friends and family here at Vermont? So I

[David Yacovone (Member)]: think it's both. Need to spend money to make money. It's an investment. Pardon? It's an investment.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Invest money to make money, is what you're saying. Yes.

[David Yacovone (Member)]: Have you ever heard that one? Well,

[Speaker 0]: thank you for the time.

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: Well, you for the time today.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Thank you very much.

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Appreciate all

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: of you coming, and great to see you.

[Tiffany Bluemle (Ranking Member)]: Thanks for hanging in with us. So,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: committee, this is our last set of testimony for today. Tomorrow, we'll have different hours of the day. In the morning, we've got the state chair, sheriffs and attorneys, and then BGS. And I'm asking Autumn to shift BGS a little bit later so we can get a break in between the two of them. That's important. And then at 01:45, we have the first public hearing joint in Room 11 with Senate appropriations. So we will have tomorrow, 01:45 to 03:15 approximately. So that will be the afternoon. And you will get sheets from Autumn about who's coming. I'll take notes on what you're hearing in the public hearing, what's coming. Usually what we've done is we run the first public hearing, and then we let Tenen on Road to the second. The next week, you mean? Yeah, the Autumn will be five to 06:30 on Thursday night so remember that to your travel and your plans and if you want to stay overnight if you don't go away but that's Room 11 that's Room 11 we're both Room 11 I have been promised

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: been

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: One year we had to do it, both committees were in gear for some reason. Was like, oh, it's so bizarre. Not ideal. So that's what it looks like. I sent you the email and the carry forward reports. There's already, I'm texting some of you saying, what about this? But you'll all check it out yourself as well. So you'll have time tomorrow also after you're done with BGS to keep doing your budget work. I know that there's meetings that are happening between different people around, so we're trying to build in some free time for you to be able to do that budget. That's what I got. Okay, I guess Michael. Just wanted to share

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: a quick comment. Narrative that I'm seeing unfold here, that every, just about every group that's come in here saying we're facing a really tough budget, it's tough out there. Outside the building I'm talking to people and they're just treading water. It's tough out there. And then there's this cognitive dissonance because I'm hearing the news every week from the White House that we've got the best economy in the history of the world. At some point I think people are waking up to see, maybe it's good for the people up here, but

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: the rest of us

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Very treading

[Michael Nigro (Member)]: true. It's tough, very true.

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Yeah, and I think we will be starting to see, continuing to see how hard a budget year this is going to be. I think people in the building are understanding that now, is the first start, the first step. So one of the things I also, which reminds me, because we're gonna hear people asking for money again, I don't think we're gonna get the same numbers that we got last year, because I think they do understand that, but even cutting it back a little bit is still going to be more than we're going to be able to do. But I will send you the link. Our congressional delegation got a lot of money in congressionally directed spending, aka earmarks with free on Latinx. And they have some really good stuff in there that they're doing. And I think some of that may help offset requests that we're going to hear. So we really want to know what's in there. I'm seeing some really interesting things that they're doing in healthcare for seniors, for other housing. We should understand that in the context of what we've been doing. And apples and

[Heather Pelham (Commissioner, Department of Tourism and Marketing)]: get distributed. But who are the funnels that will send Right. So that

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: I have the link somewhere on one of my five awesome open tabs and I'll forward it to you guys so you can take a look at it too.

[Trevor Squirrell (Clerk)]: Do we have any kind of liaison between us and the delegation?

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: Oh we can contact the delegation at any point in time. Mean yeah we can check-in with them easily to just have them talk about. That might be a great thing to have them come in.

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: It's helpful for us to

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: know that. Talk to us, yeah. Understand. Yeah, so Congresswoman Ballard, in the House, have a maximum of 15 designations that you can do. And she got all 15 of hers. Really? If she did as much as she could, if hers looks less than the other guys, it's because she's in the House, not the Senate. And the Senate, they seem to have done quite a bit of stuff. I'm optimistic that that can help us this year. I don't know how again. Haven't swallowed all the dots. And Nolan is also going to is doing work speaking of connecting dots. 195,000,000 rural health transformation versus what people are cutting in the budget. He's going to do a little work to see, are these things that they're trying to cut, actually, are we covering them somewhere else? Or are they just true cuts that we can't?

[Alex Farrell (Commissioner, Department of Housing and Community Development)]: Because I don't know about you,

[Robin Scheu (Chair)]: but I'm hearing from people, including legislators in the building, like, who's going to cut this thing? And I don't want you to do that. So we're going to get a lot of Well, I don't. Oh, so you're dead. Well, we don't usually cut things to the extent that we are. And yes, we have to do it, but just know that we're hearing that. Just

[Michael Mrowicki (Member)]: one more question. Everybody else hear that?