Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Good afternoon, everyone. This is the Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development. It is Tuesday, 02/17/2026 at one in the afternoon. So we begin our afternoon of budget talks with Kelly Alt from the Vermont Bill Business Alliance. Good afternoon, Kelly. Thank you for joining us.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: Yes, you're sending me next to other custard and strawberry

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: Tasty Bites.

[Kelly Ault, Executive Director, Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance (VOBA)]: Tasty Bites, yes. Thank you. Well, you, Kelly Alt, Executive Director of the Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance. Thank you, Chair Marcotte and members of the committee for having me here to speak about the economic development needs of the outdoor industry in Vermont. Outdoor recreation contributed $2,100,000,000 in 2023 to the state GDP, a number which we anticipate to be higher when the Bureau of Economic Analysis releases its twenty twenty four numbers on March 5. My outdoor colleagues describe the wide ranging positive social and economic impacts at Outdoor Recreation Day, And today, I'm here to follow-up and ask for your consideration in funding two programs that have demonstrated success in strengthening Vermont's businesses and the local economies of our outdoor communities. Despite a tremendous winter for outdoor recreation, insurmountable headwinds have continued to hinder a promising business outlook for 2026. The ongoing costs of tariffs, declining Canadian and international visitation, negative trends in consumer purchasing, loss of federal funding, and the impacts from the four season shifts of climate change continue to plague the industry. Without public support and investment in times of uncertainty, their value as revenue generators and employers is in jeopardy. A few examples from our businesses. A decline in January foot traffic to a downtown retailer was 50% below pre pandemic levels of 660,000 customers. Tariffs cost a five year old manufacturer 20% of their 2025 revenues. A guide service saw a 25% decline in bookings and another reported a 50% decrease in Canadian visitors renting bicycles. Tariff driven increases on products led a down by retailer to reduce full time staff by 27%. Even though this happened a few years ago, variable snowfall, mid season rain, and rapid freeze thaw cycles caused an outdoor retailer to lose significant operational days and revenue, so it could happen again. Therefore, VOBA appreciates your consideration of funding requests for two programs that we present as solutions to these challenges. The first one is to invest in Vilba's Outdoor Entrepreneur Program to facilitate technical assistance to small and mid sized companies at all stages of development in areas including strategic and financial planning, market analysis and access, and climate adaptation and resiliency measures. The request would allow VOBA to continue our targeted one on one and small group consultations, workshops and events, as well as coordinate commercial clusters aligned with regional development and tourism destination strategies. The secondly is that we fully support the $500,000 for the VORAC Outdoor Recreation Economic Collaborative Community Grant Program in the Governor's fiscal year twenty seven budget. We recommend base funding within the Department of Forest, Parks and Recreation and encourage inclusion of the VORAT funding in your committee budget. This request would allow BORA Act to continue as a proven tool for strengthening our communities and growing our local economies. Both of these programs have demonstrated remarkable ROI. I'll first report on the outcomes of the VOBA program. Since 2024, we used a Borac Community Grant to allow us to provide business development services to 100 entrepreneurs through a curated service provider network of 30 business and financial advisors, trade and marketing consultants, and climate resiliency planners offering specific outdoor sector expertise. The support helped businesses expand customers and retail accounts, develop supply chains, cultivate leaders of women, BIPOC and LGBTQ owned businesses, and create marketing access that features sustainability and circularity. A few of the examples of our program include the 30 Vermont manufacturers producing gear, apparel and accessories that participated in five regional and national trade shows, which allowed us to also unlock funds from the Department of Economic Development State Trade Expansion Program. We also supported those manufacturers in participating in the Vermont Gear Makers Festival that was sponsored by Department of Tourism and Marketing, and provided marketing and media expertise to elevate their brand positioning and their promotion. Finally, we supported 10 businesses receiving ten hours of pitch fest coaching and presenting in BOGA's Outdoor Pitch Fest event. And one of the participants described that pitch coaching as shaping how she talks about her business. It helped her refine her core message, her value proposition and develop a more compelling narrative. Finally, we also supported eight businesses participating in a ten week capital strategy cohort. And one of the participants of that cohort said it was eye opening, inspiring, he would not have been able to have that opportunity were it not for VOBA. When the IEEPA tariffs hit last April, we organized a business study workshop with State Treasurer, Pcheck, and brought in some advisors from trade, financing, legal, human resources and marketing to support over 50 businesses. And in the climate realm, we've worked on a number of workshops and produced some documents, including a co workshop with Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, and also elevated the stories of businesses that have been investing in their climate adaptation. The Bora Community Grant Program has also demonstrated remarkable ROI. Since the first grant round in 2019, eleven point two million eighty four grants have been invested in businesses, organizations and municipalities across all 14 counties. Success has increased demand for the program, evident in the latest grant round. In 2024, 51 projects were awarded 6,300,000.0 out of its 127 applications, plus totaling 21,000,000. We've submitted to the committee a sampling of testimonials articulating the program impact. And I can describe a few more, including our experience firsthand with our workforce grant from Borac, where we focused on the regions of Montpelier Randolph, St. John's Bray, Lindenville, and Rutland County. We used the Borac funding to develop professional development credentials in the technical occupations of trail building and bicycle mechanics. For multi day courses involving 24 professionals and 10 employers, and also supporting a certificate at Vermont State University, help lead to job placements and career advancement. It also funded a career pathways portal and a set of career spotlight videos, which are widely visited on our website and on our social media platforms. But most importantly, this four act grant was a springboard to additional funding. And in year two, we were able to get funding from the Department of Tourism and Marketing through an Equality Development Authority grant to expand the program, and we held 15 additional workshops in trail, bike and ski, training 116 professionals, of which 23% were women, BIPOC and LGBTQ community members. This collaboration also involves 60 businesses as employers, hirers and instructors. It's a really positive collaboration and it's led to a year three partnership around climate resiliency jobs in partnership with the Climate Action Office, Department of Labor, Office of Workforce Strategy and Development and VOAAC. So, the takeaway of this is that our VOAAC grant leveraged funding fourfold to support our successful workforce program in partnership with the state. We know the Borac program has done that for so many others. You'll hear more stories from the next testifier, but I'll share a few examples from businesses. Petrocliff's Climbing Center and Mountaineering School in Burlington purchased mobility and adaptive climbing gear and trained staff in coaching skills. A testimonial from an adaptive climber's parents described the experience as being tremendously, enormously helpful because of the individual attention, the one on one lessons that allow their child to feel strong, powerful, and competent. This was really an important lifeline. Another example, which I'm sure you're familiar with, is the renovated Danville Train Station, which now hosts the Memorial Valley Bike Tours, which rents bikes to users of the Memorial Valley Rail Trail. And then another testimonial from a guide service in Randolph talks about the trails being a factor in him moving to Randolph as a place to live, and that the trails and the vitality of the downtown is an example for neighboring communities. A trail builder in Montpelier described the marketing resources that were produced because of the Rack Ramp led to outcomes such as event attendance, business revenues, and people moving to Central Vermont, which was much needed in terms of economic development at the downtown. So, in summary, we appreciate your consideration of investing $100,000 in BOGUS programs to support technical assistance and supporting the $500,000 ask for the FPR Borac grant program as based funding. Both of these programs demonstrate how some funding can lead to entrepreneur success and other funding. And with small investments, we can support businesses and our communities. And the other reason that now is the time to support VOBA and Borac as partners is because of Move Forward Together Vermont, the statewide vision and priority actions over the next five years that we're all united and working in lockstep on. With a clear framework and a set of partners, we can advance objectives and climate, equity, stewardship, wellness and economic development together. We can support the sector and their innovation and sustainability and work with our education system and career pathways, all in ways that are strategic and effective. So, thank you for your consideration today and your time, and I'm happy to take questions.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: Thank you so much for your presentation. Emily Carris Duncan. Was curious about, you were saying that the grants that you gave out through BORUC were regionally concentrated in Montpelier Randolph or was that such a judgedary in Windham. So is that something that you tip? Are there geographical guidelines that you generally follow for your board funding? And if so, what are you proposing for FY 2026?

[Kelly Ault, Executive Director, Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance (VOBA)]: Yes. First, want to clarify that the Community Grant Program is administered by VORAT, which is a program of FBR and ACCD. So BOBA, as an independent business, was just a recipient of one of the grants. Was that a regrant? Were you regranting the money?

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: I see.

[Kelly Ault, Executive Director, Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance (VOBA)]: Oh, I see. Thank you for clarifying. We were not regranting the funding. We were focusing our workforce development trainings on those regions after understanding that there was a high demand and a great opportunity for us to make a difference in training the workforce in those regions.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: Okay, so you did that as a workforce training course. Yes. Then did you, so I'm guessing through that you've partnered with other regional partners in order to get

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: Yeah, that was through Vermont

[Kelly Ault, Executive Director, Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance (VOBA)]: State University was a big partner in the Lindenville St. Johnsbury region, and we supported the development of sustainable trail building certificates that they held and did in partnership with local bike shops and our trail builders, travelers. Okay.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: And so I'm guessing for this year, you also are going to go for board funding.

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: Is there a plan that you have for that?

[Kelly Ault, Executive Director, Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance (VOBA)]: We would be interested in applying if the $500,000 was secured and was able to open another grant round. We would definitely be interested in applying and depending on the criteria, would be interested in supporting outdoor businesses and organizations in their business development and or more workforce development training, whatever it seemed that criteria would allow. Thank you.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: I just wanted to be really clear. What of this $600,000 is currently in the governor's budget? What is not? Where is it today?

[Kelly Ault, Executive Director, Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance (VOBA)]: Yes, thank you. That $500,000 is in the governor's budget. It is not base funding in the Department of Forest Parks and Recreation budget. The BOBA ask is not in the governor's recommend. And it was in S-one 122 last year as one of the technical assistance providers, but it is not in the bill this year.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: Half $1,000,000 is in as one time funding. You're asking for that

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: to go to base, dollars

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: 100,000 is not in there. Yes. Thank you. Just wanted to be really clear. Thank you.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So thanks. Thanks for you guys, Ronnie. You're doing a lot of great stuff. My question had to do, I'm trying to sort out and maybe betray my ignorance a little bit. So you do a lot of things, especially around business development, that kind of stuff. And I'm wondering, and you talked about collaboration with other, I'm sort of wondering what other entities are doing this sort of stuff and how that works out in terms of who's doing what?

[Kelly Ault, Executive Director, Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance (VOBA)]: Yes, our business development work is not done in isolation. And in many cases, we are bringing expertise to the table and matching that up with a need that a business or a set of businesses has. And in the past, we have organized collaborations with the Small Business Development Center, with Vermont Professionals of Color Network. Those are just two examples of organizations that we brought in to support businesses, or that we brought in to be part of an event, where we are matching up business questions with the resources that are available. And so we know there are other providers, in some cases, we're just trying to provide more of the outdoor sector specific expertise where it doesn't already exist in some of the other partners, but there's definitely an openness to collaborate with the others that are doing great work at this state. I

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: should

[Unidentified Committee Member]: have been more. So is the services that you're providing, is there anybody else that's doing that?

[Kelly Ault, Executive Director, Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance (VOBA)]: Not in the outdoor recreation sector. No, we have specific outdoor recreation strategists that will provide the business and financial

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: support. Thank you. Any other questions for Kelly? Kelly, thank you.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: Then

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: Thanks. Okay.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: Thanks so much, Kelly, for giving an excellent overview. I'm Sharon Plumb. I'm with the Vermont Trails and Greenways Council, and I am here to talk about Will Rock School Health. So I'm Sharon Plum, program manager of Remote Trails and Greenways Council. And I want to thank you, Marcotte and members of the committee for the opportunity to speak to you today about the governor's recommended $500,000 in funding for the VORAC Community Grant Program. I urge you to make this based funding. I'll be providing information on one specific program that was funded by VORAC in 2023, the last time that VOREC had a grant funding round, and that's the Trail Accessibility Hub. I'm not sure if any of you have heard about it. I'll make my way through the testimony, and then I'd like to share a video about accessibility. It's just one example of many that you'll hear from throughout this testimony of a unique and powerful and impactful program that has brought Vermont international recognition. But before I dive into the details of the Travel Accessibility Hub, I just want to ask you a few questions. Do you or people that you know enjoy Vermont's trails? Is it part of why you live here? If you think about where you could go, like, let's say today's been a tough day, you want to hit the trails. Can you estimate the number of miles of trails that you might be able to head out on outside the state capital or from where you live? It in the vicinity of half a mile, a mile, 25 miles? Just shout it

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: out. Me

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: too. It's why I live here. I grew up here, and I moved to East Montpelier specifically because of the East Montpelier Trail system.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Lots of trails

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: to get to, and I live in Burlington.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: You have lots of trails to get to, too. Yeah, they're wonderful. But what if you were somebody who had a mobility challenge? What if you were somebody who has a parent who uses a walker now or has a child that's going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of their life? Even if you haven't thought about that before, the answer is likely, well, they probably wouldn't have as many trails to go to as you do. Trails aren't just paths through the woods. They're places where people experience community, belonging and peace, and where they develop a sense of stewardship for our landscapes. They bring community members together, contribute to our local economy, inspire lifelong engagement with the outdoors, and in many cases, they guide people towards careers in conservation and recreation, as they did for me. For many Vermonters, access to trails is limited by terrain, mobility challenges, lack of infrastructure or information. People who use wheelchairs, adaptive bikes, mobility devices for children, walkers and canes. A lot of us are probably headed in that direction ourselves. They have fewer options. Rather than the thousands of miles that each of us have access to, they have less than a couple 100 in the whole state. They're often in a long ways away and they might be half a mile or a mile in length. That changes your perception of how you might be able to get outside if you have a mobility challenge. The trails are short, the information about them may be lacking. This committee, you all here today, have extremely tough decisions to make and I know that. It's hard to think about funding that supports outdoor recreation when there's a shortage of housing, when schools are facing reduced budgets and closure, when health care costs are unaffordable. But let me help you draw the connection between the Warwick Community Grant Program, trails accessibility, and our state's economy. Vermont has a backlog of stewardship projects and a shortage of trails that serve all Vermonters and visitors. FPR has done a phenomenal job managing federal grants that support trails and public recreation. For example, the Recreation Trails Program, RTP, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund, LWCF. These funding sources, however, are subject to current political whims and are limited in scope and budget. The whole rec community grant program, it's uniquely Vermont and it must be funded. The program's focus is on community based projects that leverage outdoor recreation. It's holistic. Each dollar spent has a multiplier effect that you heard Kelly allude to. If they bring communities together, whether that be a geographic community or people working for different sectors towards shared goals, Or it brings organizations together to create a common goal and improve a community asset for people's wellness, economic growth and stewardship. So now I'm going to tell you about the Trail Accessibility Hub. In 2023, I had just come on as Vermont Trails and Greenways Council's first staff member. And the OREC opened up a round and they had an equity bucket of money out of, I forget what it was, like a million dollars that they were going to be giving away through the grant process. And we were told to go big if we had a good idea. And we had a really good idea. So we applied for $644,000 as the Vermont Trails and Greenways Council, and we brought together a number of partners to fly. Led by BTGC, we became a statewide collaboration focused on helping trail managers design, assess, and maintain trails that are accessible to people of all abilities. Nothing like this had existed. Our partners include Upper Valley Trails Alliance, Community Geographic, such as Trail Finder, Vermont Adaptive Ski and Sports, Northern Forest Canoe Trail and the Vermont Mountain Bike Association. Each partner provides expertise, training and guidance so that trail managers have the tools and support to create trails that serve everyone. In the last eighteen months, thanks to VORAC funding, we completed 67 trail assessments, each valued at $2,000 They gave trail managers a professional plan to improve or build an accessible aquatic access, adaptive mountain bike or accessible pedestrian path. Trail managers now have what they need to seek funding and partnerships. We completed Trail Finder updates, 60 of them based on, we hired a man who uses a wheelchair to visit 60 state trails and then improve the trail finder description so that they're objective and people could find the trails that they were looking for. We hosted more than 20 workshops, including some at conferences in Quebec and out west that are international conferences. We developed an information rich resource hub, which I will share with you soon, that many, many trail managers up to 2,000 a month are using as they are interested in improving access in their communities. We also hosted a summer a year ago in January. We brought together the disabilities community with the outdoor recreation community and to explore and learn together and create a plan for the future. We now don't have that funding. And we are working off of a sustainability model that we hired a contractor to write for us using dozens of interviews and surveys of the disabilities and outdoor recreation sector. We're seeking funding so we can continue. I want to share with you just a quick short stories that are impacts from this funding. At Colchester Pond, the Northern Forest Canoe Trail in Vermont Adaptive assessed water access sites, provided recommendations for improved parking, restaurants, rest restrooms, trails, docks. At South Hero Recreation Park, Upper Valley Trails Alliance conducted an assessment, and they, have secured funding. South Carolina Trust has secured funding to upgrade half a mile of pedestrian trail to become fully accessible. And Jenna O'Donnell of the South Carolina Trust says the enthusiasms and support we received from the Trail Accessibility Hub has helped keep accessibility as a priority for our organization. Trail accessibility is not just a feel good cause. It has positive impacts. For example, Vermont has five hundred and thirty thousand adults, Twenty five percent are I did self identify as having a disability. With outdoor recreation contributing $2,100,000,000 in Vermont to Vermont's economy, like 4.8% of our GDP, we can assume that a lot of those people that are coming to play and that are here to play on our and spend money in Vermont have a disability. The more resources and assets that they have to explore, the more money that they're gonna spend in our state. Funding the Bullwreck Community Grant Program has ripple effects. It supports programs like the Trail Accessibility Hub, pays staff to do critical planning, provides high quality assessments for trail managers, enables trail managers to secure future funding and hire professional trail builders, It leverages grants. It helps communities design trails that are truly inclusive. A $500,000 allocation now, which is a drop in the bucket, now will continue to fuel these economic and social benefits statewide. BOREC has not had a grant round since 2023. While we can celebrate the dozens of projects BOREC has funded since its inception in 2017, it's only the beginning. At Outdoor Rec Day, recipients gathered with BOREC leadership to share stories success. Our collective enthusiasm for what these public dollars have meant to the programs and partnerships for our supports are palpable. Talk to some talk to the recipients, learn from them. It's just a taste of what's possible. The ideas are still out there, and they need funding. These are programs and projects that can come to life and have financial impacts if the Boura Community Grant program has consistent, stable funding. Outdoor recreation generates a lot of money in Vermont. That funding goes into the very needs this community committee wrestles with. Almost done. This year's $500,000 allocation is a fraction of what's needed for destination development, developing and stewarding outdoor recreation assets such as parking lots and trails, marketing and more. The return on this small allocation will have a multiplier effect that far exceeds the initial investment. If there's time, one of the things we did with our funding was create a video. And if you're still digesting your custard, I could play this for you if you have a couple of minutes. I can also just play part of it. It's up to you. Tell me when to stop. I don't know your just trying to move things around here so I can expand the screen, Kelly.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: You're gonna wanna go down.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: It's not my computer. You know, when you get on someone else's computer, it's

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Sorry.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: It's a five.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: It's okay. Opened up an extra tab. Yeah. Oh, I don't how you did that.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: Sure. You can email it. We can post it on our committee page and walk through it.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: If there's time, otherwise I can take questions. I can also just show you around the website. What do which

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: here we go. Ready?

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: It's showing. Something about how Right. You're have

[Rep. Abbey Duke (Member)]: to watch it from YouTube. So if you Okay.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: If you click on Yeah.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: If you could just send us the link I'll

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: send you

[Kelly Ault, Executive Director, Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance (VOBA)]: the link.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: That'd be great.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: But I think what you'll enjoy about it is there's people speaking who are directly benefiting from trails. We didn't build trails, but we helped create the conditions so that more trails can be built. And this whole section of the website is all about trail accessibility, and trail managers are using it. And they want more assessments. They want the one on one technical support that we can give them. And without funding, we can't do it. So as you asked Kelly, if there was future funding of GenePly, we would apply too. We are also training a secure foundation support in other ways so that I can keep doing this work. I'm happy to take questions. I also have handouts.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: I

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: guess I'm just not clear. Is this a separate request out of the budget?

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: So this is the $500,000 So again, we're That's what I thought you said. We're just saying, keep it in there. Put

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: it basically can.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: Put it in there. Just keep it. And it's it's smaller than they've had before, but it's gonna be such a critical piece to be able to continue all the great work that for work has done. Maybe the hub, but maybe not. Maybe there'll be other there will be other fantastic ideas. If you'd like handouts, they're there. Any other questions I can

[Unidentified Committee Member]: you very much, Jeff. Accessibility is huge for me. Valuations and stuff, so it's really big. A question, though, about that little gap, is there anyone else the state agency or maybe some other nonprofit who've done similar work around accessibility?

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: Not in this way.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: What's that?

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: Not in this way. So we brought together leaders who address aquatic adaptive mountain biking and pedestrian needs. So together, we're each leaning on our strengths. We also created a plan for the future, and that brings together FPR, Department of Aging and Independent Living, groups that don't often mix, but we're wanting to create some leadership to carry it forward.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah. I'm just thinking of and thinking about trails and that kind of stuff.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: This is where they'd go. They'd to go and give them a shout.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Would you folks be the only place they could go or could they go somewhere else with that?

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: Well, what they were doing before we existed was they were googling accessible trails, and it would drive them to all kinds of national best management practices and guidebooks. But there was nothing to say, Okay, if you're in Vermont and you wanna develop and design a plan, here's how you do it. Here's here's the curated resources. Here's the people you talk to. Here's some examples that are Vermont based. If you go to our our Trail Talk page, This is full of case studies and examples and stories of people who have mobility issues. Town of, you know, Lunenburg is designing a trail. They they got an assessment from us. South Hero, I know there's like 15 case studies in there to provide examples of like what funding did they get? How did they go about developing community engagement in the process? The stakeholders were involved. How did they design it? Who built it? Looking at an example from Ohio or California, it's interesting, but this provides, okay, in Vermont, here's how we do it, who we talk to, who we partner with. And those kind of examples need to be carried forward.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Is it that Sorry. If it's technical assistance or is it actual grant money? We

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: don't provide the grant money, but we do provide the service. And so those assessments are a $2,000 investment, and we were only able to do 67 of them because of the funding that came to us.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Thank you.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: Yeah, good questions. Anything else? Yeah,

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: Carris Duncan. Thank you. Just really quick. So were we able to get funding actually in basic? Would your hope be to carry on the work that you're already doing? Or did you have new projects or new programs that you're looking to start?

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: I don't know what Vermouth Housing Greenways Council specifically would want to apply for or what the different themes that would be. Like they had an equity track and it was the first time they had it to my recollection. So we went big with that. If they have an equity track again and we can reapply, I would imagine that we would seek funding for that. We're also going to Vermont Community Foundation and other places because we get asked to do workshops. We get asked to do more assessments. We have all kinds of requests that we can't do because we don't have

[Kelly Ault, Executive Director, Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance (VOBA)]: any money anymore. So if

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: you want to donate to the cause, you're welcome to.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: What I know is, you engage in any fee for service?

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: Not now, but tomorrow, the partners were having a retreat to and we're using the sustainability model that was funded by OREC to look at how can we go forward. Should we do some fee for service? It's tough because you think of a town. Often these towns that have someone who may pay attention to trails, it might be a volunteer position. It might be 5% of their already overloaded plate. And so they're not sitting on $2,000 which is less than what it costs to have someone from Upper Valley Trails Alliance drive, do the assessment, write up a professional 10 page report that someone can then go to a funder or go to the recreation trails program and apply for more funding. So they just won't have the assessments done. We 67 around the state and we're seeing through the RTP program, I'm on the ranking committee for that, that it's resulting in people applying for federal funding. But there's not enough sources of funding for trails. There's not enough and definitely not for adaptive and accessible trails because they're much expensive. So it's important work that we'll all benefit from.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Thank

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: you. Thanks so much. Thank you.

[Unidentified Coalition Representative (Housing/Conservation advocates)]: So I'll just speak from the side. Jill's going help Darren representing the Greenways and the Popular Business Alliance and say thank you. We encourage you to put this in your committee budget letter. And I did submit there's probably about 20 testimonials in

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: there

[Unidentified Coalition Representative (Housing/Conservation advocates)]: that I encourage you to look at, just snapshots that show you how much they got, when they got it, and the multiplier effect that happened in that community. And so we tried to just show a broad swath of the state. But like Kelly said, there was 84 grants that have gone out, and we just put this email out on Monday and I'm still getting tons of people that are just emailing me saying, This great, this is great. So thank you so much for your time this morning, but I encourage you to read that. Thank you, Kirk.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Hi,

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: everyone. Hello, everybody. Give me a second to get my

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: here.

[Maddie Kempner, Policy & Organizing Director, NOFA-Vermont]: Just to check-in on timing, I know you have someone else on the agenda at 01:45. I just wanted to see

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: gonna wind up running over the whole way. So K. Thank you.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: All right.

[Maddie Kempner, Policy & Organizing Director, NOFA-Vermont]: Hello. For the record, Maddie Kempner. I'm the policy and organizing director at NOFO Vermont, the Northeast Organic Farming Association. Thank you, chair Marcotte and committee members for taking the time to hear from me and my colleague Joanna Doran today regarding NOFO Vermont's request for the FY 2027 state budget. I wanna thank committee members for your votes in support of s 60, the Farm and Forestry Operations Security Special Fund, and ask you to please include an appropriation of 15,600,000.0 in your f y twenty twenty seven budget memo to support the fund's implementation. As a reminder, the Farm Security Fund, it's the short hand we use, will provide rapid response relief payments to farmers and loggers impacted by extreme weather and will be administered by the agency of agriculture, food, and markets in collaboration with the review board. Without an appropriation in the f y twenty seven budget, the fund will not be implemented for the upcoming fiscal year. Unfortunately, we know that climate change and extreme weather are here to stay. Farmers and loggers need state based, rapidly available financial relief to recover when they inevitably experience losses. We understand that, particularly this year, you have hard choices to make. In order to make those choices fairly and with as much information as possible, we are presenting you with a request based on the demonstrated need for the past three years from the past three years. Our working lands businesses can't shoulder the cost of extreme weather alone. Over the last three years, Vermont's Department of Forest, Parks, and Recreation and the Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets have gathered some important indicators of the economic impacts on farms and forestry operations from floods, untimely freeze events, and the recent historic drought, finding just over 94,000,000 in losses over the last three years alone. These losses were reported to the state in survey responses or as part of applications for PGAAP funding. And I will walk you through in a little bit more detail, the numbers that you see on this pie chart here. So in 2023, reported losses from farm and forestry businesses totaled 57,500,000. Those losses were from the late spring freeze in May 2023 that cost an estimated $10,000,000, cost fruit growers in particular an estimated $10,000,000. Farms alone suffered $44,700,000 in reported losses from flooding that summer, which we all remember very well. And forestry operations reported an additional 2,800,000.0 in losses due to flooding in 2023. In 2024, the summer floods that happened exactly the one year on the one year anniversary of floods the previous year cost farms $13,500,000 according to the gap applications, submitted to the agency of ag food and markets, and forestry operations, reported an additional $5,000,000 in losses to FPR. And then finally, these numbers are, you know, are incomplete because we know the tail will be long, but the drought that Vermont faced and and other parts of our region faced over the last year cost farms an estimated or reported $18,010,000, which is how we get to that $94,000,000 number. Written into the bill is a formula that the agency of ag and the review board will report on every year that takes the average of the previous three years of documented losses divided by two since payments in the fund are intended to cover a farm or logger logging operations up to 50% of their otherwise uninsured or uncovered losses. So just showing you our math here. Oh, and I'm sorry. I do just wanna be clear that we know that the documented losses are less likely less than the total losses actually experienced by farmers and forestry businesses during this time and that the existence of the Farm and Forestry Operations Security Special Fund will help the state better track the impacts of extreme weather on our farms and forestry operations over time, providing more accurate data for future appropriations. We also wanna emphasize that investing in the viability of Vermont's working lands businesses is an investment in significant economic activity in our state. In 2022, the sale of Vermont Farm Products alone totaled just over $1,000,000,000, and that 1,000,000,000 in farm gate sales was the foundation for 11,500,000,000 in total economic output when accounting for food system wide activity. Ensuring our farms can rebound when extreme weather hits is one thing we can do to protect not only the heart and culture of our state, but a substantial economic engine that creates jobs, circulates dollars in our local economies, and inspires young people to move here or to stay and make their living on the land. Finally, we want to be clear that state funding is needed in order for the Farm and Forestry Operations Security Special Fund to achieve its goals. We know too well that federal funding to support our farms in times of disaster is not responsive nor reliable if appropriate at all. The fact that the state is still waiting on millions appropriated by Congress in December 2024 to provide relief from disasters for the two years prior is evidence of this. Farmers and loggers can't afford to wait a full three years to receive relief when catastrophic weather hits. While federal funds are deeply needed, state based appropriations for this fund are as much a buffer for our farmers as they are against the lethargic pace of federal support. Farmers are always responding to their environment, often immediately and with great innovation. The state needs to respond to farmers who suffer loss in the same way to ensure our farms can continue to produce the food we all need. Again, please include 15,600,000.0 for the Farm and Forestry Operations Security Special Fund in your FY twenty seven budget amount to the appropriations committee. Thank you for your time and your commitment to our working lands and those

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: who can land, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: 15.6, has that been through the two appropriations committees, Emily?

[Maddie Kempner, Policy & Organizing Director, NOFA-Vermont]: It has not.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: We're participating in the public budget hearings currently.

[Maddie Kempner, Policy & Organizing Director, NOFA-Vermont]: The bill is in process. Yes. But the bill the budget request is moving separately from the legislation itself.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Is it in the budget?

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: It's not, unfortunately, included in the government's budget. Yeah.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Thanks. I

[Maddie Kempner, Policy & Organizing Director, NOFA-Vermont]: will give up my seat to Joanna.

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: Hello. Thank you, chair and committee members. I'm Joanna Doran. I'm the local food access director at NOFA Vermont, and I'm going to talk a bit about our budget request in FY twenty seven for $500,000 in funding for our local food security programs. So, I know some of you around this table know about some of these programs, but I'm going to do an overview. And I do have a handout which you can read along as

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: So

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: all of these programs are intended to support farm viability and food security for Vermont. PropCash is a program that doubles Three Squares Vermont or SNAP benefits for fruits and vegetables purchased at Vermont farmers markets. The program is federally funded, but a local match is in part federally funded, but a local match is required. State funds will allow us to continue to increase meet increased demand and maximize federal funding. The state's investment in crop cash is matched one to one with federal funds. Crop Cash Plus extends crop cash to meat, dairy, eggs, bread, and more, extending the program's impact to all agricultural vendors at farmers markets. State funding is necessary to continue this critical program so that hundreds more farmers will benefit and thousands of low income Vermonters can purchase local fresh food. And this program does not exist without state funding. The Farm Share Program has subsidized CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture Shares, for over thirty years for low income Vermonters. This program pays 25 to 75% of the cost of a CSA share so that low income Vermonters can afford to get a season's worth of fresh food. State funding would allow us to support up to 700 families in purchasing a consistent supply of locally grown food. So we were grateful to receive $450,000 in one time funding at FY '26 to maintain increased food security through Crop Cash and Farm Share, and we were able to bring back the Crop Cash Plus program, which we had piloted back in 2023. With this funding, we have been able to grow the programs to meet the demand. We have been able to shorten the farm share program waitlist, bring more funds to local farms, and ensure that more households can afford a consistent supply of fresh food. More specifically, the impact this year has been that we have been able to support over five thirty households or fourteen fifty individuals through Just the Farm Share program. In this 2025 season and including the winter twenty twenty six farmers markets, we are on track to invest $200,000 in the Crop Cash program at 40 summer farmers markets and 20 winter markets. We've drawn over or we expect to draw over 10,000 snap transactions at farmers markets. And the Crop Cash Plus program has also provided an economic boost to farmers by expanding crop cash beyond produce. We've doubled the number of farmers that can receive income from this program. And between July and December 2025, the first half of this fiscal year, we provided an additional $77,000 spent at farmers markets that has gone directly to farmers and has supported low income Vermonters in accessing locally grown food. So, this graph shows a little bit about how much when the state invests in these programs, how much additional revenue it leverages for our agricultural economy. Every dollar that the state invests brings at least an additional dollar in local food spending. So over the last two years actually, let me explain this graph real quick. So the blue bars show the program funding that NOFA brings in. That includes the state funding and also federal funding and other grants. So that is what NOFA is investing in these programs. And then the additional revenue, the green, is additional spending that these programs leverage. So when someone comes to a farmer's market and spends their SNAP benefits, because Crop Cash and Crop Cash Plus exist, the SNAP benefits are reflected in the green. So when someone goes and spends $20 of SNAP benefits, they're getting an additional $20 of Crop Cash, dollars 20 of Crop Cash Plus, and all of those funds are going directly to farmers. And we know that that transaction is more likely to happen because Crop Cash and Crop Cash Plus exist. Also, the CSA cost sharing, the amount that NOFA provides towards this is in the blue, and that leverages additional funds that are contributed from the participants in the program and other community contributions. So when we invest in these programs, we are leveraging just that much more in economic spending and support for our local farmers. We can expect that an FY '27 appropriation of $500,000 would leverage a total of $1,000,000 in local food spending at farmers markets, farm stands, CSAs. And we know that when dollars are spent locally, they stay in the local economy and further amplify their impact on supporting by supporting other local businesses and increasing community resilience. Crop Cash and Crop Cash Plus and Farm Share are programs that people count on every week. The state of Vermont has shown that it can be a leader investing in vital food security and farm viability programs and has been pivotal over the last two to three decades and also particularly in the last few years of food security needs. The state can count on this investment to be used for the best possible outcome for Vermonters, farmers and eaters alike. Food security can and should be achieved for everyone who lives in Vermont. And at the same time, we can support our farmers to ensure that they can profit from the food that they grow and the food that we all need. Crop Cash, Crop Cash Plus, and Farm Share are proven programs that help Vermont achieve both of these goals. So please include NOFA Vermont's request for $500,000 and ongoing funding for the Crop Cash, Crop Cash Plus and Farm Share programs in your budget memo to the Appropriations Committee. Thank you for your time, and I can take some questions if you have time.

[Rep. Abbey Duke (Member)]: Is the crop cash show coupons, or is it part okay. So is there any consideration to move on to the EBT card for Snap? Because it sounds like it's very similar to how Snap was originally done back in 1964. And they moved to, obviously back in the 90s, from actual coupons. One, because there's a stigma associated with it, although there shouldn't be, and two, it's just not as easy.

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: Yeah, I really appreciate that question. It's very forward thinking. And this is something that we would really like to get to eventually. There are a few different sort of farmer's market type coupon programs, the Farm to Family coupon that's run through the Department of Children and Families. And ideally, we would get to a point of having all the incentive programs on the EBT card. It's a piece of technology that would take a lot of investment and transition time. And so one thing that we're actually talking about with our We are part of a regional coalition of organizations that receives funding for PropFresh through the federal government. And for our next round of funding, we are thinking of applying for a portion of that to go into research to look into what that process would be of basically digitizing the CropCatch program over a period of time. So it's on our minds.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Actually Yeah. Have a question for Maddie.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Let's see if there's any more questions.

[Rep. Abbey Duke (Member)]: So the

[Unidentified Committee Member]: 500,000, is that in January's budget or not?

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: It is not in

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: the government's budget. How do

[Unidentified Committee Member]: you manage the income eligibility issue? Yeah,

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: so for Crop Cash and Crop Cash Plus, it's directly tied to SNAP. So someone has to be receiving SNAP benefits first. For the PharmTrip program, it's an application based program. So we do ask we don't do verification because we think it's important to provide some flexibility there. And we don't interest in asking people to prove their income. But the application process asks income level in relation to their family household size and other barriers to food access that will allow us to determine who is in the most need for funding.

[Rep. Abbey Duke (Member)]: Thank you. Michael. So if it's not in the budget, was it in the budget last year?

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: It was not in the governor's budget last year, but it went through a legislative appropriation. Okay. There's one time

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: The question

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: is You alluded to at least one other program that does something similar. Are there can you expand on that a little bit?

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: Yeah, I can do my best. The Farm to Family program is a program that is slightly different. There are a few different funding streams for it. There's one for seniors, one for That's tied to WIC families, and then another that's tied to other income eligibility, I believe. And through that program, folks can get a coupon booklet of either I think it's either $36 or $48 to spend at a farmer's market or farm stand or pick your own. So it's much more limited in terms of the resources that someone can get through it. It reaches a different swath of folks. There might be some overlap, but it's also reaching different populations.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: A follow-up. Farm to Family program overlaps with

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: you or how does that work?

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: It overlaps in that it is also used with local farms and farmers markets. And we do some connected outreach with the Department of Children and Families to dispel any confusion, but there are different eligibility requirements and

[Maddie Kempner, Policy & Organizing Director, NOFA-Vermont]: some different uses.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Thank you.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Addy, I think Emily has a question for you.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Yes, just hi. Really quick. Of

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: $15,000,000 that's being requested for the farm security, does that have the possibility of leveraging any other funds, federally or otherwise?

[Maddie Kempner, Policy & Organizing Director, NOFA-Vermont]: Not explicitly. However, the Farm Security Fund is set up as a special fund, it can receive federal and philanthropic dollars. Currently, state is waiting on I alluded to this in my testimony $31,500,000 that's supposed to come through USDA to the Agency of Agriculture. That would look back at the prior two years. So that would theoretically be for 2023 and 2024. And this funding would be available going forward at the state level. Great. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Any other questions?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Okay, Randy, thank you. Thank so much. Denise?

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Hi. Hi.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: How are you? Good.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: Do not have slides, but I can just hop right in. Is that okay? Okay, great. Thanks for having me, Chair Marcotte. For the record, my name is Denise Smith. I'm still the executive director at the Vermont Council on Rural Development. But I'm here on a different topic today. I know I wasn't here last week on the rural technical assistance appropriations that we're requesting. Today, I'm here as a representative of the Working Lands Coalition. And I'm joined by Jake Claro, who's the Farm to Plate Director at the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund. I would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak this afternoon to this committee and about the Working Lands Coalition. I don't know that we've ever I started last year, I don't know that we came in last year to talk about this or not.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: We usually have somebody from the Ag comes in.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: Yeah. Yep. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about who we are as a coalition and how we're different than the Enterprise Board and the Enterprise Initiative. BCRD is an independent nonprofit, statewide nonprofit. We're nonpartisan, and we provide community led facilitation. And one of the things that we also do are statewide policy convenings on issues impacting rural Vermont and Vermonters. And so one of the outcomes of our policy work over a decade ago was the recognition of the value of the working lands to Vermont and Vermonters. And the result was the creation of our Working Lands Partnership and subsequently our Working Lands Coalition, which is made up of organizations, actually a few of them in this room today, that support strong, vibrant rural economy, root and farm forest enterprises. It includes co organizations and businesses like Cabot, the Vermont Farm Bureau, Vermont Stable Jobs Fund, Northeast Organic Farming Association, the Woodlands Association, Vermont Community Loan Foundation or Loan Fund. And so we, as VCRD, we serve as the backbone of that coalition. And we supported the formation of the Working Lands Enterprise Initiative and the continued funding of that over the last decade. That initiative is overseen by the Ag agency. So the Ag agency, Food Markets, is the foundation of investment. And so they're the ones who oversee all of that fund and the Working Lands Enterprise Initiative and the Working Lands Enterprise Board. The coalition this year has put together a platform to increase funding to the Working Lands Enterprise Initiative to $5,000,000 Our 2027 request is additional $500,000 in base funding and $3,500,000 in one time funding. In the governor's budget, there's currently a million dollars, which we're grateful for, but we see how overprescribed that program is. And it's difficult to meaningfully invest in critical supply chain infrastructure, such as distribution and processing, without that larger pot of money. And in our testimony, there's actually a chart that shows how much money was requested by the Fund year after year and how much money we had to give the enterprises year after year. And then I just also want to note that over the years, the Fund has leveraged an additional $31,500,000 in matching new funds to the grants that we've been able to provide those businesses in our state. I'm going to turn it over to Jake Claro from the Standby Jobs Fund, who's going to share a little bit more about the homeless and advises. And he does have slides.

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: And for the record, Jake Claro. I'm the firm to plate director at the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Share what I have.

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: Zoe's fund it.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Abbey Duke (Member)]: Okay. Yeah. So I wanna talk

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: a little more about some of the context behind our request. So 1 and a half million for the base and 3 and a half million one time. So 1 and a half million dollars has been a long standing goal with for stakeholders within the food and agricultural space. So the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund helped to create the state's ten year food system plan. And there are 34 priority strategies in the plan. And while we didn't prioritize one through 34, I don't think it's a coincidence that working lands to increase the base to 1,500,000.0 is actually the first priority strategy. This was identified by multiple stakeholders, farm and food businesses. And so been a long standing goal for the state to get the base funding up to 1 and a half million. And that really, we are also intentional in saying this is a minimum. So we kind of think of this as the minimum base. The the governor's commission on the future of agriculture, which was created by executive action 2021, that commission actually came out with a recommendation for base funding of $3,000,000. So as we've released this plan, other policymakers and stakeholders have identified that the base should, in fact, probably be even more than this. But again, this is a number that showed up across many different stakeholders as what base amount for the fund should be. I'm gonna talk a little more about why that is. So really increasing the base allows the program, the board, and agency staff to better spread investments across ag and forestry. So keeping in mind, this is a fund that covers two sectors. And when we think about a million dollars as the base, about $606,150,000 is actually going towards farm and forestry businesses. So there's also a technical assistance pool, some money that goes to associations, and some that goes to support attending trade events. So that 1,000,000 really becomes about $606,150,000. And then that has to be split across agriculture and forestry. And over time, the agency has tracked how that's split out, and 70% has gone to agriculture, 30% to forestry. And arguably, with that working with $600,000, forestry does probably get the short end of it because larger infrastructure equipment purchases tend to be more expensive in that sector for mills and harvesting. So there is some real limitations then with how the agency can deploy those funds. And there's real limitations too with a smaller base to how that money can be invested across scales of businesses. So in 2025, this past year, this was the first year since 2021 that the program did not have special appropriations, so it was just operating off of $1,000,000 And that meant that impact investments in supply chain grants was not available. So those grants would be up

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: to 2,000.

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: And so the maximum grant amount was 50,000 this past year. And so that really limits then the the scale and the types of impacts that those investments can have. You can't invest in, say, a larger infrastructure project that would benefit multiple businesses. You're looking at more kind of individual business enterprise investments. So strategically, a lower base limits what what the agents can do and the impacts it can have. And I'll and I'll talk a little more to you about this kind of supply chain piece. And so that sets some context for the one and a half million to increasing the base from one to one and a half. Now the three and a three and a half of onetime appropriations, as Denise mentioned, there is significant backlog in what we see with the level of applications and the available funds that can be invested. And so farm to plate, we did some work to estimate three year infrastructure investment needs across five different industries in in in just agriculture. So this is not accounting for forestry. And these investment needs were based on recommendations and strategies of the strategic plan. So clearly identified needs, and then we sort of tied actual investment dollars that would need to be in play to make those those things happen. So over a three year period, we found that processing investment was that demand would be 165,000,000, and then storage and distribution, 3 13,600,000.0. And I would argue that the storage and distribution is very conservative based on the knowledge that kinda we had at the time when we did that. And this is but keep in mind that this is not assuming that the state needs to cover all of this investment need. So we identified that over a three year period, 35,000,000 roughly in state investment and 100 and almost 30,000,000 just for processing would come from private capital, private investment. And as I'll get to, working lands is, in these sectors, very critical to unlocking some of that private investment. So it's a really critical vehicle for that. So we know that demand and need is there, especially, you know, in emerging industries that are beginning to scale or evolve and adapt to new new marketplaces. And and, yeah, just the modernization of of agriculture and food production requires more capital investment. So we've we've done this analysis. The need, we have identified. And then if you look at what we see as the actual demand, we believe it reflects this projection pretty well. So through public investment or public grant opportunities across a couple of different programs, there has been over, in the last three years, dollars 70,000,000 in demand, and the state has had about $7,300,000 to invest. And what I've included here is the working lands requests and awards, Denise alluded to. So about 5,000,000 in awards, 27 and half million requests over the last three years. And then also the agency in FY twenty four ran the Ag Development Grant Program. So that was one time funds available for meat, produce, and maple. And through through that program, there was $53,800,000 in requests and only 2,140,000.00 in available funds to award. And those that program, that ag dev grant program, the applicants to that, many of them most would have been eligible for working LAN. So it it enabled kind of it basically identified it was able to target these individual industries and, in doing so, revealed a lot more demand than what we might see in working lands applications if it's just limited to working lands.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: Before you go on, so some of those requests statewide are duplicated in those numbers. Some of these programs could have applied for all three of

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: Seriously,

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: I'm not entirely sure on that because there's a there's a timing of when the funds were available. And I know there was encouragement for businesses to select a program to apply to and try not to sort of duplicate applications across. And also in the Ag Dev Grant program, that being limited to just produce maple and meat is much more selective in towards the group that's applying for those funds. So working lands would have would also include forestry, dairy, and grains, and other other other applicants. So there's not a ton of overlapping kind of duplicative dollars in the numbers shown on the screen there. We know that demand is there. We've forecasted what levels of investment are needed. And we've seen this through the application of these programs. And again, these larger dollar amounts tend to be larger supply chain investments. And then just to speak to how Working Lands is unique in the space of capital availability.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: And we like

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: to think of things for businesses, business investment along this capital continuum. And when we're talking about farming and forestry, to speak to farming, there's a lot of new business models, very diverse operations that are emerging. And for them, it's really hard to demonstrate to traditional lenders what the risk is, what the reward is, what return on investment will be. And so this is where working lands serves on this end of the continuum as being high risk, high reward, that in turn unlocks capital investment from traditional lenders once those businesses can demonstrate their business viability, demonstrate longer term revenues and success to those in the sort of lower risk, lower reward end of the capital continuum. So working lands just in the system is serving a really essential role. And as Denise mentioned, the money that the program invests is matched with other funds and investment. And what we haven't necessarily done is try to understand long term once those investments are made and that match is provided, how do those businesses gain access to additional capital investment over time? And so that's not a number we have, but I think there's reason to believe that the long term unlocking of available capital for those businesses is much more than that $3,132,000,000 dollars. And that's really part of the role that working lands is providing to these two sectors. And just lastly, it's easy, I think, in these appropriation request conversations to talk about the dollars and cents impacts. And I would just also say, whether it's talking with the working lands recipient, I see this in app yeah. The applications I've served on in a grant review capacity, is that this also has other types of impacts on those business owners and the long term viability of their business from a, you know, a well-being standpoint, from an ability to attract employees, making the workplace safer, you know, also reducing labor hours so that those owners have more time to spend with their families. So there's additional community social capital impacts that working lands is really essential to providing to the state of Vermont and to these two working land sectors. So that's all I have there.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: So I'm trying to understand, I've heard you say technical assistance. I heard you say training for association. What are the types of uses does the enterprise fund support? What are the types of purposes, I guess?

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Is it a grant program or is it?

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: Yeah, so they are grants. So there's those different pools. So the technical service provider pool provides for business coaching, technical services to those businesses, which has been proven when businesses receive that, the impacts of the grant to the business is enhanced as well. So that's the thinking behind pairing those two elements together. And then the actual money that would be awarded to a farm or forest business is a grant.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Questions? I

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: did.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: Yeah, I'm trying to wrap my head around that. I'll start with the question. Always looking for return on investment. So you mentioned that some of this money has brought in other money. And I know that some of the stories talk about businesses being able to hire more people or expand their business. But do you have clear information for us of how this money has been used so far and what the return on investment has been to the state?

[Nicholas (Nick) Love, Board Chair, Vermont Professionals of Color Network]: Yeah, absolutely.

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: So the program just released its impact report for twenty point five. And thank you, Denise. You're welcome. And there has been also long term analysis of impact. So in twelve years, five fifty ag and forestry projects, 18,800,000.0, 30.9 in matching funds. And just looking through here really quick, there are So in impact reports, there's more information about in terms of increased sales by those businesses, increased employment, some other metrics that measure that return on investment.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: So over twelve years, the state has provided almost $19,000,000 Is that what you're saying? We've gotten $31,000,000 in matching funds.

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: Yeah, just indirect match. So that's not measuring also any additional sales or investments that those businesses procure after the grant period.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: Any more detail you have

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: on that? It would be

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: it's hard for us to justify money requests without being really clear on what that return on investment is.

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: Yeah. And I apologize, too, because I was operating on an assumption that maybe Working Lands had already presented to the Commerce Committee on some of those impacts. But the other one that I just remembered too is there's also some impact figures around increased productivity for the business as well. So we're happy to submit that to the committee.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: Can

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: I just add to Jake's thing on that? This is a program that's managed by the agency of Ag. And every year, they do produce a report. It's one of the, I think, one of the best programs in the state in terms of its accountability, because it has dedicated staff, and it has an RBA into it, which is, it tracks number of jobs created, amount of money leverage in addition to the money that the state gives. It needs to do a little bit more. And I think they're starting to think about new metrics that they want to track, But it is important. They do have a report that they have every year. Businesses that have benefited from this can testify to how much it's impacted their businesses. I was in the Senate last week where the group business was talking about the impact that it had on their ability to do the work that they need to do. So it is an investment, and I understand what you're asking for.

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: And just a quick addendum to some more figures on that. So 48%, so this is over a period of 2013 to 2024. 48% of business grantees added jobs, 77% increased production, and 74% increased their sales.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: Which is fine, but by 1%?

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: Yeah, I understand. You're looking for a dollar now. Yeah, yeah.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: Yeah. And just out of the business.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: No, I appreciate that. Appreciate it. So

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: that's the other thing that's out of the business is every quarter.

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: Yeah, so that's like a 59% response rate. So

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: we're granting out money and we're not requiring reporting back?

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: There grant reports.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: A 59%

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: again, I don't know I

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: think that's a year

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: in terms of what I have access to and what the agency has access to. So that might be a question to ask of

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: the agency. Yeah, Thank you. Jonathan? I hope we'll keep the camera off, the baby's finicky. Think what I'm hoping to do is to continue on that line of thinking where investments are made in our processing infrastructure, for example, having a real handle on the amount of business that is now coming into Vermont for agricultural production, for processing, etcetera, that would otherwise have left the state or not ever come into the state to begin with, would really be helpful for us to see that return on investments. And I just am encouraging all those testifying today to really lean into that sort of level of detail. I think that that can really help us get a feel for what used to take place outside of our state, not taking place inside of our state as less of a black box and more of a known quantity. Thanks.

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: Yeah, thanks.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: My name is Carris Duncan, Lightingham. I'm trying to understand kind of the structure of how all of this funding moves and who is administering it. So my understanding is that the Agency of Ag broadly oversees this. The Sustainable Jobs Fund runs farm to plate. So this was a project of farm to plate?

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: No. Yeah. No. So yes, the agency administers the program and deployment of funds. There is a working lands enterprise board that makes strategic decisions, reviews applications, helps to provide the agency with guidance as to how to administer the program. The Sustainable Jobs Fund lives separately from working lands simply through our task to create a strategic plan for the ag food system in in Vermont. We've identified the working lands enterprise initiative and the fund as important strategic levers for achieving our state goals and objectives. So we are promoting the value of working lands and its strategic role for economic development in the farming farm economy.

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: So from your

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: point of view, the working lands fund is a key component to the overall food systems work that the sustainable jobs fund is doing? Yes. Okay. And then understanding how,

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: okay.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: All right. Thank you.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, okay. Well,

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: I'll just add, sorry. It's a program that's administered by the agency of the ag. And the coalition is making a group of organizations that supports increased funding to the Working Lands Enterprise Initiative, so that we have more money to grant out to businesses that are requesting. That makes sense.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Thank you. I think

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: our question is that this is something that goes through ag. Why isn't ag proposing a big reflection? So Which brings you here to us now for us to be the arbiters. And, you know, I mean, I I guess if if everything is doing what it's supposed to do, there should be should be increasing it. If we're if we're we're helping businesses do more, bring in more tax dollars, then we should be increasing the budget. But we're not seeing that against it. And the governors recommend. So, yeah,

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: answer that a little bit. It's a little tough for us now to Yeah. And Denise, add more, but early on in the agency budgeting process, this request was what they submitted to be included in the governor's budget, that was not reflected. And that request also was similar was the same for Forest Parks and Rec, Commerce, and there might be some other

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: A and R.

[Nicholas (Nick) Love, Board Chair, Vermont Professionals of Color Network]: So the

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: agency of Ag originally had requested a $5,000,000 funding for this, and it was not reflected in the governor's budget.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: What's the base funding been over the last? Million.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: 1,000,000. There was a little bit of one time funding in 2022.

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: During COVID. And the average before the increase to a million last year was around 500,000 to 600 Prior thousand in to that.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: We've moved it up a little bit over time.

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: And I think the reason we're in commerce is because it does impact Vermont businesses. So even though they're ag businesses, they

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: are Vermont businesses. We work on Cork And Lands. The original. The original in it

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: for its time

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: off. I think legislation. As we've talked about, these are businesses that can't just get up and leave the state, so they're really foundational to our economic development as well. Understood.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Any other questions?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Thank you, both. We appreciate your time.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we appreciate your time.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Thank you.

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: Having trouble with getting connected here. Seriously? My Internet is working except not my email. So I don't know that I'll be able to connect to the home, but I will do it the shop. Checking on it. It's coming. Christmas is too. I even like yeah. Exactly. I mentioned I even opened it up and was trying to get it ready. For this.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: We're back on schedule. Good. You

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: don't want to get ahead of schedule.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: Air break now and

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I'm I'm there, John.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: I should have said that too. Yeah. You jinxed it.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: It is. It is. We're just gonna get the right one big. Yep.

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: Hello, I'm Tom Cheney, the Executive Director of Advanced Remotes. Great to see you all again. It's been a while. So today, you know, because I haven't been in yet. I thought we'll get to the budget request, but wanna give you a little bit of refresher on the work that we do, some of the data that drives us and some updated data, and then talk about this concept of a career navigation system, which I think is a really nice frame for the work that we do and the benefit that we bring to the state as an organization. So Advanced Vermont, we believe that every Vermonter should be able to pursue and navigate a career and education path that meets their goals. And the two kind of easiest ways to think about this are one, every high school student should just graduate for their next steps. That can be going on to college, going into a certificate program and apprenticeship, directly into the workforce or to the military, but they need to have a concrete plan. And we'll talk about that quite a bit more as we go on. And then working age Vermonters should be empowered to advance in their career and understand how to make those moves as well. At Boutin Vermont, we're a little teeny nonprofit. There's two and a half of us. We were founded in 2017. And we've been fortunate enough to come before this committee since our founding to inform you all around various data trends, policy trends, and of course, over the last number of years also ask for some funds to support our work. So what is our work exactly? We'll get into the specifics, but at the higher level, we just are trying to build a career navigation system in the state that allows Vermonters to have the information and tools they need to make informed choices for their next steps. It elevates the importance of all education options and building a strong workforce. And then we're really focused on supporting schools and organizations to embed career and education planning consistently, purposefully, equitably across the state. And right now, we're seeing a real patchwork. And we'll talk more about that. And then finally, everything we do is about alignment with public, nonprofit, private partners to make sure that we're all rowing in the same direction, complementing each other's work and helping to advance each other's work. Please interrupt me, Anthony. So one of the data pieces that drives us is the number of Vermonters who have some sort of credential. So piece of paper after high school certificate degree, anything in between. And a goal that we've set as a state is that 70% of Vermonters should have a piece of paper after high school. We're at 60%. This is fresh data. It went up few tenths of a percentage point since last year. But don't get excited. Number one, getting that next 10% is really hard. Number two, our pipeline is. So, I really worry about this number staying as high as it is. And actually, we attribute a lot of this to baby boomers aging out of the workforce. This is the working age population. They were not as educated in terms of credential attainment. And as they age out of the workforce, you're left with a more credentialed workforce. But that pipeline, that youth pipeline coming up, we're seeing some real concerning data that we'll share. I wanted to just break down, what does this look like? So, when you look at that 60%, what is the pie here? So, I've

[Unidentified Committee Member]: got

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: to move the zoom a little bit so I can see a little bit better on my screen. So, what we're seeing is 37% have a bachelor's degree or an associate degree. We'll talk more about this, but only 28% of the high school graduating class will get one of those. So 37% now what we're seeing is the pipeline is gonna get us about 28%. So it's a 9% drop. So, you see that we do have a high percentage of folks who don't have any credential, that 40% number. And then when you look at the certification and certificates, it's a very small slice, and we're really low compared to a lot of other states in those areas. So an opportunity for growth. So then, you've all, I think heard from the McClure Foundation of the Department of Labor talking about the most promising jobs. And this is a brochure that they put out every year and would collaborate with them on. And this highlights the most promising jobs in the state. It's usually in the neighborhood of 50 to 60 jobs, pay well, high demand over the next decade. When you look at those jobs and break down what they need in terms of credentials, you're seeing 53.7% require a bachelor's degree and associate degree. So again, our general attainment is, what was it? 47% or something like that for getting that number. Sorry, 37% have a bachelor's degree or associate degree. Our pipeline is getting us about 28%. And then the demand for these most promising jobs is 53%. We also need more certifications and apprenticeships in a pretty big way when you look at these jobs.

[Rep. Abbey Duke (Member)]: Yeah. So when you're saying that the requirement because I know that when I go on to companies, they require years of education, but that's not entirely true. Are you basing that on what companies are asking for or is that legitimate, like they actually do need to have a bachelor's degree? Because according to the job that I work for, I think it does say bachelor's degree in there. I assure you, I don't have all of those.

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: Yeah. So what it says on paper versus what's happening is a hard thing to track. Not something that we track, but I think it is the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, if I'm getting this data source right, that produces this data for the Department of Labor, our Department of Labor. And then they remonetize it and put it into this brochure. So generally, a occupation will have a credential that is determined is usually the entry into that. And it's not always the case. But it's a good barometer.

[Rep. Abbey Duke (Member)]: That's a good question.

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: We share that data because I wanted to, one, give you a flavor of the different credentials that we need and where we need to improve attainment, particularly in those high demand careers. But also to show you that, and I have more data coming, just the challenge that we have with our youth. And it's a pretty gaping. So, I'm gonna shift into talking more about them now. A core promise of our K-twelve system is that when kids walk across the stage with that diploma in hand, they walk down the stage with a clear path for what's next. And what it feels like is about half of our kids walk down those steps to a path. And then the other half, just pulling the stairs away from them as they walk across the stage. It really is that substantial of a challenge that we're finding. It's really graduation is marking the edge of a cliff for half of our students. The structured supports of school fall away, and they're left to navigate this increasingly complex world of education and work just on their own. And the consequences are both personal, but also statewide, right? So you have stalled ambitions, underemployment, financial challenges, and a workforce that's struggling to meet the needs of our employers. And I think about this in terms of the systems level, and our current approach to current education planning was built for an entirely different era. So, in the say mid twentieth century, pathways were clearer and fewer. You had a stable job with family sustaining wages could often be found right at high school. That's not really the case today. College was much more straightforward, much more predictable returns than we're seeing today. Today's economy is more dynamic and demanding. And students just must weigh an expanding array of options. All the different types I've already mentioned a couple of times, each with different costs, different timelines and outcomes. And then at the same time, the responsibility that we put on the system built in the twentieth century, mid twentieth century, really largely rested the burden on school counselors and a few others. And then working within a fragmented system. So, the result is simply uneven access to guidance and opportunity. And it depends on geography, staffing, local capacity, and resources. And what we're seeing is a real patchwork of current education planning and exploration in our state. And so, our work is really focused on building a coordinated twenty first century career navigation system. And this is one that bridges high school to post secondary education and training and the workforce. And not just supports the students, but we also have to think about supporting adults around. So, I showed this graphic to you last year, I'll speak to it a little bit again this year. It really does a good job illustrating the problem that we're trying to solve. Over the last decade, we've seen declining high school graduation rate, declining aspiration rates. So, that's the second number, the 73. So, this is the number of people who plan to continue on to education and training. Those who actually enroll in college, that is also declining pretty significantly. And what's also alarming is the numbers when you look at low income and boys in particular, with numbers much lower than what you're seeing here. So, this is that 28 number that I was talking about. We've eighty two percent of kids will graduate high school. Seventy three percent will want to continue on to education and training. Forty percent will enroll in college. That's a proxy. That's not every education option because it's just not possible to track all that in our current data systems. But it gives you a really good flavor. Maybe you talk a couple percentage points higher of people going in another direction. It's less than 50% are going on education after high school. And then only twenty eight percent of the graduating class will graduate from college with a two or four year degree. So why the cliff? What's happening? So we did a survey last year, last spring, and we asked 500 youth, educators, parents, and other community members, How's it going? How is current education planning schools, in your organization, in your community? And the key takeaways are about three out of four. Say, current education planning in schools is falling short only somewhat effective or less. So, three out of four people are saying it's E or worse. That's not what we strive for, I think, in our education system. It's not integrated. So, they report that current education planning remains siloed. It's inconsistent. It's not embedded across schools or the broader community. And then students serving adults say, we need help. We need professional development. We need guidance. We need tools. We need to understand how to incorporate this into our school day. We need to know how to incorporate it into homeroom and teacher advisory into our curriculum. We need to understand what our role is, vis a vis the school counselor or the work based learning coordinator, etcetera. So there's a need and there's a demand for support, both among adults as well as the other respondents. Any questions before I move on?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yes, thanks a lot, Tom. So you talk about sort of what you're doing is a career navigation system, right? That seems to make a whole lot of sense. You also talk about there are real gaps in the system as it exists. How do we get to that point where we have those gaps on something that is pretty necessary? Well, I

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: think that we just have always been okay with the thought that generally speaking, I'm speaking generally here, school counselors own this within a school. And primarily at the high school level, not even as much of a focus in the middle school, though it is in a lot of places. And we ask that person to also social and emotional pieces, sometimes behavioral, other academic things. They run the AP tests. We give them a full workload. And when they have time, it feels like, is when they can really get to really meaningful conversations and opportunities for career education planning. Like I said, that system was built a hundred years ago or seventy five years ago, six years ago, whatever the number is. And that's when we didn't have as many options. And a robust number of students could continue to go into the workforce. Now, what we're seeing is that really all students need to continue their education in some way, certainly most. And there's much more complicated options. So, that's one piece, is that we're putting it on really one person or one role in a school system. The other piece is that I'm losing what the other piece is, but I'll get back to it.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: It's fine.

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: Thank you. Oh, flexible pathways. So, wanna speak to this. 10 ago, created, well, a little more than ten years ago, we created the flexible pathways field. And this created early college dual enrollment, personalized learning plans, some work on CTE, a whole host of really great work based learning journeys, whole host of great initiatives. We want more kids to do dual enrollment in early college, more kids to do fast forward in CTE, more kids earn credentials before they graduate high school, more kids getting into the workforce and having some learning ahead of time, workplace learning. The challenge that we find is that there was no container for it. We basically created these opportunities, but didn't create the system to help direct kids, make them aware of these opportunities, help them understand what they are and help direct them into those opportunities. So, we have these great things for kids and it's being underutilized. Many of them are being underutilized by the folks who wanna use them most. And it's really spotty across the state, depending on the school and the resources. Thank you.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Thanks.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: So, I'll talk a little

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: bit more about career navigation. And just in short, just to define it. It's the ongoing process of learning about options, making informed and personal plans and choices, and taking that education training next steps you need to help people move forward in their careers. Another important term that we use is navigators. So these are those adults, including the school counselor, but also beyond, who play a pivotal role informally or formally in folks next in their planning for post high school. So this might be educator, a coach, a parent, a family member, lawyers, other community members, service providers. So, career navigation doesn't grab the headlines, but it really is, think to your point representative, it's the connective tissue between education and economic vitality. So when students graduate with a plan, we know they're more likely to enroll in post secondary programs, persist to get those credentials, and then enter the workforce with real purpose. So even of those 50%, 40% to 50 are continuing on to education after high school or onto a solid path or onto a career path, they may or may not be solid. Definitely have a You look at that number of forty percent continue on to college, twenty eight percent graduate. I think a lot of those kids didn't have a solid plan. So, we can even solidify the plans of those who are continuing on with education. Some key factors for navigation, and this is where I think it's important for US systems level thinkers, is you need information. So a kid needs to understand what are my strengths? What are the jobs, the labor market information? What are the education opportunities? What supports do I need? They need to start to understand and acquire some of those skills that they need to access their career. Social capital is crucial. And between that and wraparound resources and supports, that's where we're providing personalized guidance to students and making sure that they are ready for what comes next. Then you have to create a system and structures and ecosystem around this. Like I said, that container to really make sure we're having purposeful, consistent and embedded career and education awareness and exploration. And it really does, and we're looking to state other states and modeling our work and modeling the things that we bring to you is other states are doing this. But they were in a similar boat. They're just now realizing that the model is 60 years old and that we have to re up it and rethink it. So, are schools that are really embedding this into their pre K to 12 system in a really meaningful way. So, the good news is there's a path for how to do this. So, when you think about it in the pre K to 12 system, this is not a perfect graphic, but it's a quick one. You think about it as you need early career awareness and exploration. So, you need tools like My Future BT that we'll talk about. You need information and you need facilitated access to that information by these trusted adults. You have to have individualized planning and advising. You've gotta be really purposeful and it can't be put on one person. Everyone within a school has a role and we have to make sure that folks understand that. And that requires a lot of professional development. And then to make sure we're fully taking advantage of these great opportunities from dual enrollment to early college to CTE, we have to make sure we're aligning these academic and career pathways within personalized learning plans and goals and course planning within middle and high schools. And then finally, you've gotta have this employer and community partnership, work based learning, really making sure we're having that connection. So, I wanted to share that all because that's really what our ask is about, our budget ask this year. We wanna help lay the foundation to formalize a pre K to 12 career navigation system and really dovetailing it with the transformation that's happening in our K-twelve system and our CTE reforms. We talked about the importance in this transformation to improve quality for our kids. And I can't think of a better, a bigger challenge that we have right now. 50% of our kids are graduating college without a sense of what they're doing next. So there's a great opportunity to learn from other states, to build on some of the work that we're doing, to formalize this career navigation system through the Act 73 through CTE work that's done this year. Specifically, what we would We're happy to work on policy with you as it relates to that. But also we think we have a role. Our ask for this year is $600,000 to continue state funding to support the work that we do to develop this navigation system by sustaining and expanding the impact of My Future VT, fully implementing a graduate with a plan initiative that I'll talk about. And then also supporting a statutory charge that you all put onto the state to publish the list of credential bearing programs and support services, which is existing work we're doing now. And would help the state to meet that obligation. So, really quickly as a refresher, and being sensitive to time, this is My Future VT. This is our current education planning platform. This is a free tool for Vermonters of any age and those who support them to come and explore. There's nothing else like this in Vermont where you can find the top 500 careers in the state, dive deep into them, see what education and training is required for those careers, and then get connected to the support services, whether it's the Department of Labor, VSAC, or many, many others, because we know that support's necessary and people need real life human beings to help them along the way. So, why this tool is so essential is that Vermonters say that web based tools are vital sources of info. So they're top three, top five kind of resources for Vermonters. If they're going to be exploring their pathway, they're using here. So we want to make sure that they have a platform that has Vermont specific information. It's accurate, it's up to date, and it's putting people into the roles that we need most in Vermont. We're the only tool for education exploration or for exploration and planning. And nine out of 10 users say that My Future VT works. And same percentage, 90% report taking a step forward. So, this could be, I have a better sense of my plan to, I applied for a job or I applied for an education program after using this tool. So, it's working. Last year, thank you. Last year, you all appropriated $150,000 to support this work. So last year we expanded our database of the education and training options. So this is everything from degrees to certificates to apprenticeships, from six fifty to nine fifty. So we have almost all of the education options in the state available on our site. We've doubled the database of support services, that's the BSACs, the Department of Labor and others from 69 to 138. And you can see that they're all across the state in that map. And that map does not have a little thing for each service, but each town where there is a service, but there's multiple in most. And then we're seeing a cool thing that we're seeing is, and it's a sign of people using the tool, is that more and more organizations organically are referring people to My Future VT. So they're putting it on their website or putting it on the library in a little card or whatever, and driving people to My Future VT. So we have many, many more organizations than in prior years doing that, which is great. This is an example of just a couple of screenshots of where people are doing that.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yeah, so those blue dots, were those schools or those libraries, is that just some place? What's located there? Your

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: program or? No, no. So this a program. It could be a school. It could be a library. It could be a, in this case here, it's the Franklin County Industrial Development Corporation. It could be the Department of Labor. It's other examples we have are Think Vermont, the McClure Foundation, Middlebury College, South Burlington Library Town, even the town of Berlin. These are organizations that are serving youth and adults and providing them with resources that they can go use and appoint to us as a resource. Yeah, I'm trying to understand how you deliver the service. Is it through these other organizations?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I mean, mentioned the online It's

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: a website. What's that? It's a website.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Right, but why would it only be the website available in those

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: It's not. Oh, sorry, sorry. It's not. So these are people who are referring people to our site on their websites. So we're able to go into our analytics and basically see, hey, this entity is pointing to us. So there was a school that thought this was a great idea. They just get in touch with you. Is that kind of thing? They're just pointing. We didn't even talk to half these people. You what? We didn't even talk to half these people. The point is that they're finding us and then they're saying, hey, this is useful and we're gonna point people. Okay. Yeah. Students. Students, career seekers, employers. Do

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: you have the ability to understand how many people have accessed the website?

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: Yeah. It's in the neighborhood of 30,000 or so a year. And I will say it's tricky. We have a lot of AI bots bombing the site now. It's a little trickier to get through that. But it's a good number of folks. And when we did a survey a couple of years ago, we found that it was every corner of the state. We checked the demographics and it's a great demographic mix. A lot of those underrepresented communities are represented appropriately on the site or overrepresented, which is a goal of ours, something to continue to perform. But it is getting Vermonters from across the state of all ages and all types. So, we're kind of hitting the mission on it.

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: Pablo, you stole my question. I was wondering how many hits you've got.

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: Yeah, yeah, it's in that ballpark. One

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: of the things as we were exploring how flexible pathways is under, maybe under is the wrong word, inconsistently implemented.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Some

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: of

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: that because they don't have the software to manage flexible pathways in their school, in their district. Is this the kind of software that can manage that for a school or is this a supplement?

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: This is a resource, this is an information resource. So, it's going to, it's not a customer management platform. You're not gonna be able to track student outcomes in here, but it is something that they're putting into that platform. So, if people use Naviance, there's a Google product. And so, people will put My Future BT into that as a resource with their students, but no,

[Unidentified Committee Member]: it does do that. Yeah.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Good

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: question. Okay. So, just why continue funding for My Future VT or what are we gonna do with it? So, we need to continue to boost users. So, one of the biggest things is we have this great platform. We want more people to use it. We want more students to use it in a really meaningful way. And we do run into folks who say, I've never heard of this before. And it's because there's two and a half of us in this organization and we're doing more than just this. And we need to actually have boots on the ground meeting with school counselors, with educators and with community members to make sure that this is a tool that's being used. So, we just need to be able to be dedicated to that effort. And we're not right now in a meaningful way. We want to expand content functionality. This year, we're going to be adding industry level pages. So you can go right now, you can look at careers, which are pretty granular. You can actually look at an industry. And if you're, I'm kind of interested in this topic and then understand kind of at a higher level what those opportunities are, which is a great place for people to start and a great place where we're going get more and more employer connections on this tool too. So the students and users are able to see those employment pathways in a more meaningful way. So we're really excited about that. So last year I mentioned Act 76 required the Department of Labor and the Office of Workforce Development to publish the education and training programs in the state. We're doing that. We've been doing that for the past five years. We can help the state check that box. Same with those support services and listing the VSATs and the Department of Labors and the Vermont Works for Women. We have that database as well. We wanna work with those two entities to implement that charge in Act 65 because we're doing it now. Let's formalize that relationship in a meaningful way. And we don't need to add more resources to that work. And then we want to align with Department of Labor's job link replacement. This is a product, a tool, it's a customer management tool that has been in the works for about six years now. I think it's going to take at least another year to come live. We want to make sure that we are very much aligned with that tool when it comes live. And the bottom line is, if we don't get continued funding, there's a very good chance my future VT goes away. That's just kind of where we are in the financial picture of this resource. I have another I know it's not my time is short. This other really cool thing, and this gets back to career navigation that we're doing. This is a new program we're asking for funds for. It's called Graduate with a Plan. Problem we talked about, too many students not graduating with those next steps. We think everybody should. What our solutions are, the students benefit from trusted adults. So we have to make sure those adults are trained to support youth. The most meaningful relationship someone's going have may not be with their school counselor, it's with their coach or that special teacher that they have a connection with or another community member, maybe it's an employer. We have to make sure that those adults understand their roles and have the tools and resources to be effective. Next, I mentioned, with the Kranav system, you've got to make sure we're implementing and operationalizing all of this into the day to day of schools and then scale that. So that's what we're doing with Graduate with a Plan. This was funded through one time federal funding and is going away at the end of this federal fiscal year. So in September, we need to replace the funds to continue the program. What we're doing is providing that professional learning across the state. We've had great, great uptake in that people and we're launching that program as we speak. And we're very excited about it. Next, we're creating a career in education planning framework. So this is a toolkit, a guide, a vision for how career and education planning should happen in the state of Vermont. We're not creating it by ourselves. We're using best practice national guidance, looking at what other states are doing, but we have a group, and this is the other bullet here, collaboration, group of stakeholders from the Agency of Education, Department of Labor, VSAC, a lot of other players helping us in this toolkit. What this is gonna be is a blueprint for educators, for organizations to implement current education planning consistently from middle school up. Surprisingly, we don't have anything like this. We don't, but we will in about six months or so, and we'll continue to iterate on it. This can be a guide and will be a guide for policy making. I think I do envision this being something we come back to you next year and say, we think some of this should be operationalized in policy. But for now, we're going to create the guide with these stakeholders, get that buy in and start implementing it across the state. So, that's what the funding would support. Is a big, yeah.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: Sorry, yeah. I really appreciate the work you're doing Emily Carris, Windham. I am curious about what is your relationship with AOE? Yeah.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Good.

[Maddie Kempner, Policy & Organizing Director, NOFA-Vermont]: AOE How

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: does they

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: actually function? Yeah. So, we're partners. So, collaborate with them. So, tomorrow I'm actually doing the webinar for their Work Based Learning Coordinator group that they convene across the state, providing professional development to them. So, we collaborate with them to provide professional development, to be experts from time to time. We'll be sitting in on some new task force they've created for their strategic planning process. They sit on our advisory committee for to graduate with a plan. They sat on our advisory committee for My Future BT when we stood that up, I believe as well. So they're core partners and folks that we both stay coordinated with, get expertise from and also offer our expertise to them as well.

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: Okay.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: So I was looking at your website and under partners, I don't think I saw them there, but I did see you again.

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: We should probably update the part of

[Unidentified Committee Member]: the list. Yeah. It would

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: be useful. Just to have a full breadth of understanding of where your impact is. And then I'm assuming also, likewise, you're teamed up with the Vermont State Colleges. And then as far as flexible pathways goes,

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: that I'm also not

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: seeing having a presence. But it's something that my community is definitely There are folks in my community very interested in, so being able to have a place to find that information.

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: It is on My Future VT. I'm happy to share with you Okay, I was looking around, I couldn't find Okay. I'm happy to share. I'll email you the link. Thank you. Yeah, we really pride ourselves on that for taking those flexible pathways and explaining them in a paragraph in eighth grade level. And we quickly get to a state website where it's much more trickier, quite frankly, to navigate. So we try to give it to you at that level. So it is their option too. We've got to implement this thing. So it's one thing to write a piece of paper and say, this is how we think it ought to look. It's another thing to go work with schools to build it into their day to day practice. And that's going to take time. It's going to take resources. But it's a real opportunity with education transformation to do this now. We don't have to wait for districts to be aligned to actually go in and start making some of these changes. This is practical. A lot of this is kind of low hanging fruit. And so, we can go in and do that. We also can train these folks. The same educators who are in the system today will be the same educators who will be there after transformation, many of them. And if we train them now on how to have meaningful conversations with our kids about next steps, that's gonna stay with them. That doesn't go away. So that impact will stay with them and will not just impact the 1,500 students this year, but another 1,500 the next year. And then we also wanna make sure there's what we call a navigator network. There's an opportunity to do a lot more coordination within the system. And we want to stand up a professional learning community where we can really engage those people who identify and do work as navigators to make sure that they're upskilled, that they have a sense of community, sharing best practices. And that's something that's also sort of missing right now, we hear a lot about. The last thing that I'll say is that Jobs for the Future put out a great rapport. It's a great national organization doing work in this space. And they said, okay, for a career navigation system, here's what you need. You need to craft the statewide vision for career navigation. That's the framework, putting our logo on top of it. We've got to review existing career navigation services and supports to understand what's there now. That's what we're working. You have to invest and expand and access to career navigation, that's your job. But the integrated tech tools and platforms, that's our job. I gotta keep moving on this Zoom thing. Adopt quality standards for pre advising. That's the next step after this framework is released. That's something we would want AOE to start looking at. Incentivize cross system collaboration. That's so much about the work that we're doing. Expand career exploration and exposure activities. That's my future VT and this graduate with a plan work. And then finally, build the research base. That's what we're working on too. We are pulling from national data, but we're also creating our own baseline survey that we did this past year about what's happening in schools. And then part of our work is helping to create the measurement system so that we're actually tracking the students who are graduating with a plan in a meaningful way and providing those resources to schools and organizations. So, when we look at what career navigation is and what are those policy elements, we're touching six out of the eight in a pretty meaningful way and just are committed to continuing to do that. When I come, I just give you a lot.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: You presented before so educated?

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: They were great dialogue. That was ten days ago, maybe. We had a great conversation. And they're talking about their budget letter as we speak. At least they were.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: The optimal if Department of Labor and the Agency of Education would get together and actually formally put something in their budgets that would What I worry about is that if we were able to get $600,000 to fund you this year, what happens next year?

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: Yeah. I mean, I think that obviously that's a goal that we have. I don't wanna sit here every year and do this, not because I don't love hanging out with you and sharing from a policy perspective, but yeah, it's a much better process if it's coming from the administration.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: I'm hoping that the agencies and departments get to the point where they understand that these are things that that aren't living within their realm and that we need, but they're needed, and they need to figure out how to fund

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: them. We only exist as an organization because we're filling gaps. We will go away as soon as those gaps are filled. We're committed to it. And I might not lose hair quite as fast as I'm losing hair with these types of conversations. Yeah, but I will tell you that we haven't had better relationships with the Department of Labor and the Agency of Education, the Office of Workforce Development than we have now. So I think that they, I wouldn't put words in their mouth, but I think they would come and say, We support that the work that we're doing, they're doing. But I agree, the next step is to just make sure that there's funding and sustained funding for it. I will tell you, I think, some of this is a bridge, right? So VITAL has this platform that they're working on. It's not going to replace My Future VT. That's been, I think, made pretty clear in the last couple of years to us, and I think maybe in this committee as well. But there is connect, there are linkage points, and we have to make sure we're there to make those linkage points,

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: and that doesn't happen in

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: the next year or so. We are in the midst of this transformation. There's a real opportunity for us to fill gaps in that interim so that we're not waiting to make quality improvements until the system's built. So even in the short term, there's an argument for it, but I agree that there's a long term need.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Alex, thank you very much.

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: Thank you all.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: You can grab that other beer that's there too and just swing it to the front if you'd like.

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: Sure. I'm actually just going

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: to set up at the computer and then maybe I'll sit on the side. Thank you. What a welcome.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Oh, cool. I know you're running late, so, hey, Oh, okay. I'm just

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Okay.

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: Take me a minute.

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: I have to my my computer is being super slow. Still thinking. Oh, it's working.

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: Yeah. How did you get your first one was here before it

[Unidentified Coalition Representative (Housing/Conservation advocates)]: was a little bit slow to start off?

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: Yeah. I think we're gonna be good.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: Here we go.

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: And I'm set up for screen share? Yes. All set.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: Great.

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: Now I'm embarrassed. I can't remember where the share is on Zoom. There it is. Found it.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Okay, sorry to be a little slow for the record, Gus Silig, I'm the executive director for the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. With me is Liz Gleason, who is the director of the Farm and Forest Liability Program at VHCB and manages a program called Rural Economic Development Initiative, which given that we're in the Commerce Committee may be a primary interest to the committee. I know you had some testimony from members of the Housing and Conservation Coalition last week, and you've gotten an update on the CTE program. And again, Mr. Chairman, thank you for asking us to take that on. It's really rewarding work to see students go at it and help get housing built, work on the workforce. I thought, and I was told we had about thirty minutes, so I'm gonna try to give you a broad overview of DHCV's work as you get ready to deal with the budget. And a piece of that work you can see at either end of the state in this first slide, old Bennington High School is gonna be renovated and provide all kinds of community facilities, including a childcare center. But for us, we're investing in 17 of the 34 apartments that are being built there. And up at Sacred Heart, we're about to complete phase one attached to the convent, old convent of affordable housing. And we've just funded a phase two for another 31 units of rental housing, and there's room for home ownership. And for those of you who haven't spent time at this site, you look out over Lake Memphremagog. So it's gonna be a beautiful place to live, not very far from the downtown.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: And we toured that a few weeks ago. But delegation from

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: And Old White Elephant Buildings, both these schools have been vacant, I think for close to thirty years, are a big part of the work we do, not exclusively, we do new construction as well.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Okay.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: So VHCb is asked by statute to invest in housing that'll be permanently affordable and the conservation of our working landscape, natural areas, recreation lands across the state. We do this to both provide equity and to ensure resilience. And the pictures on the right are our very recent project called Muddy Moose in Morristown. And here we're actually converting vacation homes into year round residences. And what happened here was that the Stowe Land Trust was very interested in the landscape you saw, but not interested in owning the housing. And they worked with another one of our partners down street. So we helped them conserve the land. They raised a lot of money and down street is taking on the resale and fit up of the eight homes to become permanent residents rather than vacation homes.

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: It's going five minutes. Think

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: you just have to scroll. No. Well, it's good.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: This next slide is about our budget and we're supporting the governor's ask, which is property transfer tax of $37,600,000 and a capital bill appropriation, we were just across the hall earlier today on that. That's funded more in support of his recommendation here. The legislature has given us a lot of one time funding over the last number of years, and we'll have a slide in a moment. I can advance it.

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: I'm very grouchy computer today.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Okay, so this is what's been done since the pandemic began. Some of you have heard that it costs a half million dollars or more to build a unit of housing. Our average investment across all of these activities is $80,000 So a piece of the statutory charge we have is to take your dollars and leverage them, find other dollars to help make deals go. Now, I need to say with new construction or substantial rehab, spending a lot more than $80,000 Some of these activities are lower cost activities, but that's what the average has been. Big focus on home ownership, both single family home ownership and condominiums, as well as working with homeowners and manufactured home communities. One of the programs we began this over the course of the pandemic was wanting to work with farmers to provide better housing for farm workers and a lot of work with people who are really struggling. And so we've doubled the state's shelter capacity as part of lowering the pressures on the GA program. We have worked on the issue of opioid abuse by funding for recovery residences for people recovering from addiction. And we continue, and this may be of interest to any number of your constituents to work with the Center for Independent Living so that if somebody becomes disabled, they don't have to leave their home. We can provide through them ramps or bathroom modifications. Is a full list of all the kinds of housing programs that we're involved in. And so again, I'm not gonna go through the list for you. CTE program is listed there among many others. And we do do a lot of work with Habitat for Humanity across the state, although there's about seven chapters and affiliates. And over the years they've built more than 170 houses around the state. So in any one year, it may be just a few, I think you heard about a duplex last week in Randolph that they built with the support of the CTE program. So this policy of permanent affordability is written into our statute, I wanted to talk very briefly about the reasons we think it's important. One is it protects mixed income communities. If a site like the old Catholic diocese were to not have permanent restrictions on the four buildings, we invested in there out of the, we're doing about two fifty out of a thousand units. That would quickly become what I call an economically gated community if somebody could just cash it out, convert to market rate. And so one way to think about the value that we bring to the state is that these are assets that are gonna last beyond the next five years or the next ten years. Yes, sir.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: This has always been a sticking point beyond the permanent. I live in permanently affordability housing, and I have an empty nest. So I live in a house that would be big enough for a family, but I am incapable of leaving and going to some place that is, you know, it's just me and my wife now. How, what do you have for plans to deal with something like that? Because with the fact that by 2035, there's going to be more people 65 than 21. So those problems only gonna get worse.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Hopefully, if you wanted to downsize and you couldn't get, I mean, we've done a study that says two thirds of the people who move on, move on to the regular market. If that's not an option for you, then a different option might be to downsize into a condominium that's also permanently afford. And if that's not working, I'm happy to talk to you more offline about that.

[Nicholas (Nick) Love, Board Chair, Vermont Professionals of Color Network]: The

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: other thing that it does is it protects the state's public investment. So pictured on the right is a property in Burlington of three thirty six homes that we invested just $2,900,000 into back in about 1990. If those homes got converted to market rate and we needed to produce a new development, a new development of that magnitude would probably cost $160,000,000 and need a subsidy of 40 or $50,000,000 to make it as affordable as Northgate Apartments is. So again, while I appreciate the situation you just raised, what we're trying to do is to make sure that there's always a place for people to be and not lose the power of the state's investment and not have the need to replace that housing become even more expensive. This just gives you an idea of the affordability to Vermont's workforce. So these are all professions that you see listed here that are at 80% of median and below in terms of what people earn. Our tax credit housing, which is the biggest part of what we do is restricted at 60% of median for the most part. Although the feds have just made a change that allowed for some 80% units. We're allowed under our statute to go to median income for whom we serve, but we then can't leverage that federal tax credit to make the deals work. Most of our home ownership developments are people who are above 70% of median, but below median income. This is a little bit about housing supply. And what these charts are telling you is in the blue, the number of Vermonters who need housing that are below 80% of median and between 80120% of median. And the difficulty we have in the housing market today is that housing has become so expensive that most of the housing that any developer can produce isn't affordable at that lower levels. And that's the reason we need the public invest. Just to give you a sense of what is going on around the state in a few weeks, we'll open this housing where the old VFW was in Burlington. In spring, there'll be new housing in Putney, new housing in Middlebury in the summer and new housing in Waterbury also in May. So things are happening all through the year, and we'll have a lot of projects also beginning this year. This chart shows you what has happened to funding over time. And so what you can see here is in 'twenty two and 'twenty four, 'twenty two, all through the pandemic, we're able to commit a lot of funding. It went down in 'twenty five, it'll go down further in 'twenty six, and that's the trajectory that we're on right now. In home ownership, we do what's called shared equity home ownership. We just looked at 55 recent resales. And again, our original investment across 55 homes was $27,000 because of the resale restrictions, the discount to the current buyers, these 55 buyers grew to $136,000 Didn't take any more public money to make those homes affordable. 16% went to households that were people of color And the average income across all the was 83 percent of median with a significant number below 60% of median. So in terms of those buyers in the regular market have almost no choice because they just don't have the income. So this is getting people who would own into home ownership who otherwise would not get there. I'm not gonna talk further about the workforce development work. Mr. Chairman, you may be able to tell me how quickly they're moving up here in Newport on this site, but they're in their second year, the students from North Country working on it. This was day one, nice ceremony with the governor and there are more projects underway and I'm told more projects being inquired about. So I think we now have about half CTE centers in the state. Conservation and the rural economy, we think of going back to our mission statement of economic vitality. We think about how conservation will lead to economic vitality. Conservation for us under our statute is also defined as historic preservation. So the building in the middle here, the River Arts is the old Grange Building in Morrisville. It's been reprogrammed as a center for the arts and lots of kids go there after school for their activities. The two pictures on the left are both Prospect Mountain is cross country ski facility about seven minute drive out of Downtown Bennington. Think I it's the highest or second highest such facility in the state. So it often has snow when nobody else does. The owners had been there thirty years. They got tired, a community nonprofit has taken on its ownership with our support and conservation of the land, and they're doing a great business there. In Mount Escutney some years ago, after the lodge burned and the ski area closed, store closed, property values in West Windsor. And the community came to us and said, we'd like to add that land to the town forest. And they wanted to take a page from Kingdom Trails. And so they wanted to promote mountain biking. First they put in a rope tow, now there's a T bar there. We visited last summer, there was a of people visiting, property values are back up, stores reopened, great success. A different kind of work is the work we just did with Vermont Adaptive. We helped them buy their first permanent home in Vermont in Rochester. They work with disabled Vermonters. They work with veterans at no cost to veterans to get to enjoy out the outdoors again. And their permanent home, if you're thinking about Rochester, Vermont is gonna include one day on the 18 acres that will not be part of a conservation easement facilities for their staff to limit. So again, a great economic activity in Rochester, a great service, I think, to our veterans and to other people struggling with disabilities. So it's a way we're using conservation to achieve a number of different goals. And I'm gonna let Liz talk about conservation in

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: the Farm and Forest Viability Programs. Great, thank you. For the record, again, my name

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: is Liz Gleason. I run our Farm and Forest Viability Program and Rural Economic Development Initiative. Thanks for having us. So I'll talk a little bit about the land conservation and then move into farm enforced viability and ready. So Gus started off with some of those great examples in the last slide. We have a bunch of different areas that we work under in terms of conservation, farmland conservation, natural areas. Really, the goal is to protect land, either to protect wetlands or farmlands, so it can be available for the benefit of the environment and for people forever. Our Farm and Forest Viability Program and Rural Economic Development Initiative, we consider those to be really complementary to the conservation, but focused on sort of business development and economic development. Gus, is there more you want me to say on the conservation side? It's not what I normally talk about.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: I think just again, we've always tried to use it as a tool to meet other needs, whether we're improving quality of life or dealing with economic vitality.

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: A lot of the farmers that I work with look to the conservation easement program as a way to help afford a farm that they wouldn't be able to afford otherwise, or they want to be able to transfer it to the next generation. Are new farmers that might want to buy that land but couldn't afford it, a conservation easement can help really drop the cost of that. So the farm upstream is actually collaboratively owned by a bunch of different young farmers. They got support from business advisors within the Farm and Forest Viability Program to help think about Well, they've been working together for a long time to help identify land that they could afford that would meet their business goals. It was really, really challenging to do that on their own. So this group of people came together and said, how do we run a multi farm enterprise together? It's complex legally. We don't have a ton of great examples. It's not like plug and play. You're not like, I wanna do a collective farm because that's the only way that I can afford farmland. Great, here's the legal playbook. Not yet, but there's a lot of work going on both around more collaborative ownership so that folks can afford, or just general business support so people can identify those pieces of land that really work for their business. And the Farm and Forest Liability Program is really focused on business management skills. We started the program a little over twenty years ago after we've been conserving agricultural land for fifteen years, and we really recognize this need for additional support. Agriculture can be a challenging industry to operate in. It's a really intense, basically international marketplace. So we have a network of 15 different farm and forest business planners who work across the state at our partner organizations. It's a network based program where we work collaboratively with a bunch of organizations to deliver this program. It's really in-depth around business management skills, around financial management. Some of the outcomes that we see from it are enhanced ability to access capital. So last year, we provided business or transfer planning to over 100 farmers, and they accessed over $5,000,000 in grants and loans for their businesses. We also focus a lot on accurate financials that folks can use to make really quality business decisions. Everyone we worked with felt like they had improved those management skills, and we saw really significant increases in both gross and net income last year on average, which was really exciting.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: Talk about how that's the same or different than some of the programs that Working Lands offers? Yeah, so

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: the Working Lands program is primarily a grant program. They provide direct grants to businesses, and they also, every year, hold a small amount of their funding to fund service provider organizations like ours. So we actually have received a little bit of funding from them every year in order to ensure that there are adequate services available to working lands businesses. But the vast majority of their funding is direct grants to businesses, which we also do. We run two direct business grant making programs that total around 700 to $800,000 a year. So there are a variety of programs in the state that do something similar, but I'm also on the review committee for those working lands grants. And I can tell you that competition is high. So there's very strong interest from businesses in our program, in the working lands program. And there's a lot of economic activity that can use a little boost and provides a return for that state investment.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Again, this program is much more focused on the business planning and technical support as opposed to the grant making. The majority of our grant making is around water quality, which is what we were visiting with your colleagues at the institution's committee about earlier today. So I view them as complimentary programs rather than things that are competing with each other.

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: Yeah, for sure. And we definitely see that folks who have been through the Farm and Forest Viability Program are more successful at accessing other grants and loans, and that's something we see consistently with the applicants to Working Lands or applicants to Vida or other lenders. So we're all working together.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: Just to add to

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: that as well, what is

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: the relationship with this program to NOVA?

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: We also partner with NOFA. So the Farm and Forest Viability Program is a collaborative model. So NOFA, every year, says, we want to run this program with you, and they apply to us for funding. So they do, obviously, a lot of other things. And then they have three people on staff who are farm business planners who are largely funded through this program. But they have a staff of 40 or something like that doing a lot of other things. So we contract with NOFA, the Intervale Center, UVM Extension, the Center for an Agricultural Economy, Land for Good, and then sometimes even more folks than that. And they basically sign up to say, we want to deliver this shared program model with our clients. And my team does the enrollment and the outreach and the intake. And we match people with the best fit business advisor. So whether you're a huge conventional dairy or a tiny organic vegetable producer, you can call us, and we can get you set up with the right business planner for wherever you're at, whether it's pairing with them with Nota or somewhere else. I will not say it's not the most straightforward thing to describe, but what we have found is that it's extremely efficient and we basically can be sort of an intake process for lots of different kinds of businesses. And the business planners we work with and our partners from out of state find that this sort of shared program model where we act as the hub is really efficient and effective for getting people the services that they need, even though it's a little harder to describe. I know we're getting up on time, so I'll just quickly talk about the Rural Economic Development Initiative, which was created in 2017 largely under the leadership of Senator Starr. And the idea was we had all these small communities in rural areas and farmers who were trying to access big federal grants and just not having as much success as they could have. So the Rural Economic Development Initiative was established to match small communities with grant writers who would help them get those complex dollars. So we've spent about $1,200,000 on grant writers since 2017. And so far, communities have drawn in $35,500,000 for their projects. And this ranges everything from childcare to farm and forest products to downtown revitalization, working lands. And the goal is really getting those big dollars in the doors to communities that wouldn't be able to have the capacity or skills or time to go after that money without it.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Is Reddy being oversubscribed?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: We're talking about whether and how to expand it. And if there were additional funding this year, would we expand? I think we probably would. We're fully utilizing the one staff personally assigned to it. And I think we could probably do more with it this year. There were a number of applications from communities for disaster assistance that the state received that maybe they could not have even applied for that. So we're trying to figure out how to do more with this one because it's obviously the return on the state's investment is enormous. And I think two years ago, I think the legislature did something similar to the agency of administration. They actually subcontracted some of that work to us. But I think there's plenty of appetite out there for more of this kind of assistance.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: What's in the budget just for Ready?

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: Well, we're actually on the tail end. We have leveraged other funding to grow Ready already, and we're on the tail end of working with the agency administration and working with USDA community facilities. So with those, we were spending closer to 150 to 200,000 on contracts for grant writers a year, maybe more like $2.50. So we have to decide what's feasible to do moving forward. But that was supporting between forty and sixty communities a year to get grant writing help.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Just to understand our budget, the Housing and Conservation Board spends around a little over somewhere $2,000,000 on all of Liz's programs, including an FTE for the REDI program. She raises some additional money that comes into the organization as well. So if we were to double the capacity for the REDI program, we would need something in the range of a little over a $100,000 for an FTE. And then if we were to wanna do more contracts with more providers to more communities, we'd need funding for that. But we're kind of at our max with what our staff can handle right now.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: So are we have we turned away any communities or any?

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: We tend to be able to either, like, say we can get to someone within a couple months or we do do a lot of referrals. So if we can't get someone in the door immediately, then there are other organizations we try to refer them to. But we generally don't have to completely turn anyone away and set them off, which has really been great. And that's

[Jake Claro, Farm to Plate Director, Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund]: What are we getting? Sounds like we're getting to that place now. It is definitely possible.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Yeah. Thank

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: you for that. That's very helpful information. So with the Ready program, does that also offer technical assistance or is it just sort of technical assistance within the guidelines of the capital that you're trying to access?

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: It's all under the broad umbrella of accessing grants. So some people need the actual person to fill out the grant application, and some people might need a specific study or technical study as part of that application. So that could be something from engineering or yeah. Is there something you're thinking of that

[Tom Cheney, Executive Director, Advance Vermont]: would No, was

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: just curious. Is that the type of thing

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: that you also partner with places like VLCT on? Absolutely. Yeah. We partner with VLCT, with all the RDCs and RPCs. Yeah. And sometimes we'll fund the RDCs if they wouldn't be able to do work with someone that they're trying to support without the funding. So it is very collaborative. Thank you.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Jonathan?

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Hello. My question pertains to the property transfer tax and the sort of annual movement in how those allocations are provided to the statutory recipients of that, between your VHEB and that split between your housing components and other work. Are you seeing, have you been receiving the statutory allocation over the years or have you had to get by with less?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Over recent years, we've received because of the one time funding, more than the statute would require, the governor's recommendation this year is consistent with the statutory language. It was last year as well. But there have been years where we were underfunded from that statute where the appropriators used the word notwithstanding and utilized revenue for other things. The general assembly has been very supportive of all of our work since the pandemic era began.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: And one last little follow-up there, is the split between, or the portion of that transfer tax allocation that goes to housing statutorily obligated or is defined, or do you have discretion over what goes

[Rep. Abbey Duke (Member)]: into housing stuff and what goes into your other work?

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: We have some discretion. The statute tells us where to spend the money in a balanced way. The statute doesn't define balance except to say that if in any given year we spend 70% of our resources on one purpose or the other, we need to report to you about why we did that. We've never reached the 70% threshold this year. Our plan is to be about 65% for housing and 35% for conservation, including Farm and Forest Liability Program and the Ready Program.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Thank you.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: I guess the last thing that I'll just end up with is that there's a huge pipeline for all of our work. Liz has never had a year where she couldn't fill all of her spots through the Farm and Forest Liability Program. This is the picture of the proposed new development in the South End Of Burlington, which we just got an application for that would provide over 200 units with 67 being permanently affordable. So I could go all over the state and tell you of stories of communities that are wanting to do more. I'm told that at Sacred Heart after phase two is done, there's still room for home ownership. The city of Montpelier bought the golf course and they're entertaining proposals for development there. There's a site in Brattleboro where the Austin School used to be that there's probably room for 200 more apartments. So there's lots of opportunity all over the state to try to address our housing needs. And as you know, as members of the Commerce Committee, that's viewed today as a great inhibitor to economic growth that despite a little bit of softening we're seeing in the real estate market, I think is gonna continue for quite some time.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Thank you very much. Okay.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Thank you both for what you do.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Thank you for having us in this year.

[Rep. Kirk White (Ranking Member)]: Just for clarity, the recommended budget is, you're not asking for anything different.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: We told the administration that if there was one time funding that we could quite easily put it to work To the extent that there's funding outside of the HCB in the budget, they've focused it on shelter. The interesting thing about shelter, which we desperately need to wind down the GA program is because you often can't outside of a community like New Upper Valley leverage shelter dollars, we spend about the same amount per bed in the range of $150,000 as we would spend to leverage other dollars in an apartment. So, it better to meet the short term need for shelter or is it better to build more apartments? That's a hard policy question. We need to do both right now.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Thank you very much.

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Okay, thank you for having us. Really appreciate being in this room.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Well, enjoy driving by Marble Village in West Rock daily, probably

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: ninety days. Did a nice job there. I think one of the things I didn't say is that we're trying to have not just immediate housing impact, but a cattle. Day we were there together with the town manager, she was speaking to three or four other sites right in that immediate neighborhood that she was eyeing for more development, more cleanup of environmental problems and great locations and I'd be feeling good about it.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Delightful to see Christmas tree lights and windows there rather than that old burning. Yes,

[Gus Seelig, Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board (VHCB)]: Definitely a big enclosure. Thank you.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Take

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: care. Hi, Smith.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: Thanks for having us. Hi.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: How are you?

[Rep. Emily Carris Duncan (Member, Windham)]: Good. How are you?

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Good. Like to join us?

[Kelly Ault, Executive Director, Vermont Outdoor Business Alliance (VOBA)]: And we have, Nicholas Love

[Unidentified Committee Member]: joining us also. He's in the chair there. Great.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Now Cooper is not charging for it yet.

[Rep. Jonathan Cooper (Member)]: Yet.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: I

[Weiwei Wang, Co-Executive Director, Vermont Professionals of Color Network (VTPOC)]: have joined the Zoom. Oh, okay. Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't see you there.

[Sharon Plumb, Program Manager, Vermont Trails & Greenways Council]: Hi. So

[Liz Gleason, Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program (VHCB) and REDI]: I'm just gonna share my screen.

[Weiwei Wang, Co-Executive Director, Vermont Professionals of Color Network (VTPOC)]: Hi, good afternoon. For the record, my name is Wei Wei Wang, she, her pronouns. I'm co executive director of the Vermont Professionals of Color Network. Thank you so much for having me present to you all today. I want to start off this conversation by talking about the people who represent UTPOC. This is our staff. We have five full time staff and one part time staff member. We do everything, along with support from our board and support from our community members. I want to set that context because we're really talking about people. And the Vermont Professionals of Color Network we have presented here before, we are a nonprofit organization operating statewide with the mission to advance the social and economic prosperity of the BIPOC community across the state of Vermont. And since 2019, we've been convening for BIPOC communities, so Black, Indigenous, People of Color community across the state for the purpose of business and professional networking, education and training, business direct, direct business and workforce technical assistance, and data collection as well. For the 2027 budget request, we are asking for $200,000 I want to set that out at the top, to continue our effort to grow our and to grow based on our community's needs. So what we're really talking about is direct support for business owners, employers and workforce professionals, relationship building with statewide entities, including the state of Vermont agencies and departments, nonprofits, for profits and more, increasing business and professional networking opportunities, outreach support for our partners, which creates access to information for all of Vermont, educational and training workshops, as well as ongoing collaborations. And this takes on a variety of different formats. And I'll get into it in just a moment. So I want to talk about what we have accomplished in the past so we can set a little bit of context for this conversation. So since 2023, when we started our state contract, we have worked on outreach. Outreach has really been expanding. So what does this mean? Outreach is focusing on what information is going out to the broader community, to the BIPOC community, the community of color. And even looking at this information presented here in front of you, between February 2024 and October 2025, we have expanded our following in all of these different social networks, as well as our direct mailing membership. But this is just the start because we statewide, we are receiving traction, supporting efforts of all of our other partner organizations. And getting that word out there about such things as Vermont Saves from the state treasurer's office is really important for businesses to understand and for individuals to understand. And that's just one of the activities that we do. I want to note that our presence has also really grown with the exception of Grand Isle. We are reaching out to every single county, especially in Orange County, Essex and Caledonia Counties, thanks to our outreach efforts out there. We've also been working on resource navigation. So, to support our businesses, we've built educational videos that are available at any point in time on our YouTube channel. And this is really to help people navigate through different processes, whether it's financial literacy or voting using the Vote BT platform from the Secretary of State or any other topic that might come up according to the needs of the community. We've also built 89 plus partnerships since 2023, thanks to state funding. And this could be with businesses, professional service organizations or state departments, as I have mentioned. So one of the partnerships that we have and we really love is the Vermont Small Business Law Center partnership. Through that, have workshops and we also have referred a lot of our business owners and nonprofit members to the Small Business Law Center, which is a really critical need for a lot of those startup businesses that we support. This is just a list of some of the partnerships that we had in 2025 alone. I know the text is very small, but you should have the PDF right in front of you to take a look because it ranges from businesses to the nonprofits, to the various state entities. And we wanted to show this because we are statewide, we are reaching out and making that effort, again, thanks to state funding. Another thing that we have been doing is really expanding our business and professional events. You can see that we really expanded our activities for network outreach and also started business technical assistance clinics. So this is where we actually go physically, for example, to St. Johnsbury and meet businesses where they're at in order to have those conversations, because it is really hard for businesses to find the time outside of business hours to even show up online. Sometimes it's hard to navigate, as we all know, there's not really, not necessarily service everywhere in the state. So we make sure to meet people where they're at. And we've expanded that between 2024 and 2025. Yeah, no, you're okay. And I'll note that these events, whether it's a clinic or networking event or outreach event, we have been able to reach five seventy seven businesses or employers and four fifteen individuals in the workforce. When we're talking about individuals in the workforce, we're really talking about supporting remote workers, as well as individuals who are in a traditional Vermont setting. So we're trying to reach as many people as possible, connecting them to the resources through in person events. And a lot of people prefer to have that because it can be vulnerable to have those conversations and we make sure to offer where it can. I'll just take a note that the education series and events went down a little bit in 2025, that's because we increased our business technical assistance. That was primarily for education for businesses specifically, and also directing them to clinics that were already available from places like CBOEO or Capstone, BDCC, etcetera. One of the largest things that we do with state funding is this direct business and workforce development and technical assistance. And this graph actually shows the number of clients we served on a quarterly basis between May 2023 and January 2026. The blue bars that are really high, that is during the flood recovery period, we had a lot of businesses requesting support, whether it was sixty hours of support or just a one off, where do I get this resource? So we are continuing that effort. And we are also seeing an upward trend in terms of workforce technical assistance requests. And that is mostly from mid career and advanced career individuals, which I find really interesting. We're continuing to look at that and why that might be. But folks who want to stay in the state and might need more guidance to the right career opportunity or to have more access to those resources. So in total, between May December 2025, we have served 98 unique businesses on various cases. And typically these businesses serve have five or fewer employees, and some of them are solopreneurs. So supports offered are grant application assistance for flood damaged businesses, loan and grant identification application support, navigating business owners to the right service providers, business plan development and support, identifying legal resources to help set up a business, support to find resources, etcetera. Some current trends continue to be access to capital. It continues to be a big need. Resource navigation to the right service provider who might have the expertise that we do not. And now we're seeing business succession, meaning we have individuals who are looking to purchase businesses that are being sold by individuals. And one example that I wanted to share about from this past year is the story of Maez Margas. Maez is a Burlington based artist and musician and business owner. And he came to BTPOC for support of developing a music album. He had been planning to do this. And ultimately, as we were working together, we ended up developing what he ended up calling the Latin Connection Festival. And this was an opportunity where BT POC connected him to the city of Burlington and Burlington City Arts. And they were actually able to work together to come up with this Latin connection festival, which ended up being hosted in September year. And this effort brought together eight music groups that were based in the city Of Burlington, as well as vendors and artists from the Latin diaspora. In total, we raised $12,000 to support this event with additional support from BC and the City of Burlington. And so this was an income generator for these businesses, these artists, as well as the vendors who were there. And VTPOC was directly involved in supporting him to get $7,000 which if we are breaking it down, something that I miss is for VTPOC, every single business technical assistance case, at least in the last few years, has cost us the approximately $101.24 I made that calculation. And that gives our business clients five to ten hours of support on average. Some people need a little less, some people need a little bit more. So for someone like Maiz, when we're thinking about offering him ten hours of support, which was more than enough, and the fact that we were directly involved in supporting him in raising $7,000 that means for every dollar that the state spent, Mayes received $69.3 in project funding that was going to himself, that was going to the other artists, so supporting the artist business community. And thinking even larger about the economic impact for the city of Burlington, attracting a lot of people to the city of Burlington for that particular event. And it was so successful that the city of Burlington and BC have approached us again to see if we can run this event again. And I'll quickly talk about workforce development. I won't talk about what's actually on the slide, you can read it there. But another story that I

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: would like to share is

[Weiwei Wang, Co-Executive Director, Vermont Professionals of Color Network (VTPOC)]: for those individuals who are in the workforce and coming to us, especially at mid career, more advanced level of experience, they're highly educated, they have a lot of experience. We had a client, for example, in education who worked with BT POC staff to identify a new opportunity for career advancement. They had planned on staying in the local school system, but also was having trouble finding opportunities. So, as we were supporting them to find a new employer, we looked at other opportunities beyond just school systems, looking at nonprofits and beyond. And so the client actually successfully found a new career opportunity and was able to increase their annual income by $12,000 inclusive of their benefits package. For each, right now for each workforce technical assistance client, it costs the state about $134 per person for five hours. So thinking about that individual and what that really means in terms of the return on investment.

[Joanna Doran, Local Food Access Director, NOFA-Vermont]: I really thought I had it here, I apologize.

[Weiwei Wang, Co-Executive Director, Vermont Professionals of Color Network (VTPOC)]: But we just thinking about that return on investment and what that also means in terms of potential future earnings for that individual. That is the type of support that we are offering. And finally, data collection, as I have mentioned before, we have been doing this work, we have a lot of really interesting information. This data was completed in 2024. And I'm just gonna go through some of the findings really quickly, because I do wanna give Nick some time to make a statement. So of the results, thirty one percent of the respondents were aged 35 to 44, So which is in Chenin we were able to break it out between Chenin County and the rest of Vermont, which is interesting. Forty six percent were identified as Black or African American, 31% Asian or Asian American, and 53% were employed full time. When we start to look at the reasons for being in Vermont and what keeps people in Vermont, we are seeing that the reason that they're here is 24% job opportunities. What surprised me is 22% were here for natural environment and outdoors, which is nice to hear. And then we get into family connections, community connections. And the reasons that they might leave include cost of living, lack of housing, lack of job opportunities, just like a lot of other folks. But what keeps the BIPOC community in Vermont, for the most part, it is family and connections and friends and those social networks, as well as the natural environment and existing job opportunities. So we want to keep that in mind as we're continuing to build our work. Those networking events are really important. Those in person events, being able to connect to one another, to build that trust with one another to create that anchor is really critical. And some of the most important needs for the BIPOC community in Vermont, lower cost of living, more affordable housing, and also 27% said community connections, which again really emphasizes that need for that direct community networking opportunity. And then in terms of awareness of statewide resources is why we really emphasize our resource navigation piece, as well as our outreach work. 37% had not used statewide services. We had a list of 20 or 30 different resources. I'm happy to share that with you. And why they had not used it is because 40% of the 37% were not even aware that these organizations existed. So outreach and continued effort around making people aware of resources is really important. And surprisingly, 30% had never thought about using them. So what does that mean for the BIPOC community in terms of making sure that these are trusted resources so that they are thinking about using them, that they are actually accessing it? And for individuals who had connected with different organizations, it was to attend events, it was to connect with people, it was to support organizations that make a difference as well. So what is next? We are continuing our efforts, as I've already stated, we are also increasing our outreach efforts right now in Central Vermont and Southern Vermont. That is a critical area that we're focusing on because we've made a lot of impact and headway within the last couple of years, especially in Northern Vermont and the Northeast Kingdom. We're continuing to build deeper relationship with state context. It's really important for us that the community, whether it's the BIPOC community or Vermont community in general, that they understand all of the incredible resources that are offered by the state. We're continuing to build community connections. So making sure that people hear about us, that they know about us, so that we can actually give them the information that they need. And for us to share our knowledge that we have with the community that we are connected to, as well as data informed storytelling. And why is state funding important to us? Continuity of business and workforce support for the BIPOC community. We are a fast growing demographic. We are a young and educated demographic. It can support the growth of a healthy business economy as well, and retention of workforce for employers. We are a trusted source of information and a partner for a lot of organizations across the state. We wanna make sure to continue that effort. And we're building a platform for the 65,000 BIPOC individuals living in the state. And we also believe that state funding for our work is aligned with statewide goals for prosperity and demographic sustainability. So I'm gonna stop there and I'm going to turn it over to Nick. And I'll stop by chair as well.

[Nicholas (Nick) Love, Board Chair, Vermont Professionals of Color Network]: Anyway, yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. And for the record, my name is I go by Nick, and I am the board chair for Vermont Professionals of Color. You know, and I'm here obviously to discuss with the ask for funding, as we gave the play by play, I'll try and do some of the color commentary to keep this a little bit shorter, being very cognizant of time and the day. So my family and I moved to Vermont in the '2, and it's my wife's passion to be here. She spent her 90s here at UVM undergrad, pre med, med school, and we both knew this is where we're gonna raise our family. And we moved to East Montpelier back then, and our biggest regret is waiting so long, right? We should have come sooner. But here we are. Why is VTPOC important to me and why am I a part of it? Right? It's my first exposure was the twenty three flooding. Bought a building right down the block ten days before. That was devastating. We we've been fortunate we've recovered, but my very first call was to VP POC. I did not even know who they were. My wife told me who they were. We had a conversation and they were right there with me, getting me access to resources and grants to help me recover. I've also had an opportunity to speak at Champlain College about once a month, excuse me, once a semester to talk to graduating classes and classes that are rising to junior or senior year. And while it's typically about leadership potential, working in IT and growing up in that space, one of the conversations took a side turn and said, Hey, why aren't you talking more about the BIPOC experience as an executive in Vermont, what that looks like? Hadn't dawned on me that that was even an ask or a need. So we all went back the next semester as an entire board and a couple of our leaders from the team. And we had a great conversation with about 50 students to really talk about what are the headwinds you could possibly face. How do you get ahead? How do you get your name out there network? So it was a great opportunity, and it's very similar to the work that we do with the actual professionals who are in the workforce today. And I want to take a couple of minutes just to talk about why VTPOC matters to me, right? You saw the presentation. I I look look at at VTPOC as a force multiplier. We don't just take $1 in, $1 out. Everything that we put in, we feel has a multiplication effect because we are touching people, we're touching communities, we're touching businesses, and we're actually touching professionals and giving them opportunities as well. So that's a big part of it. As Weiwei mentioned, the BIPOC community is the fastest growing demographic, and that matters. That's important. This is a continuing investment into this workforce. We've gotten great partnerships with CDOEO, as well as the treasurer's office. We talked about one to the lenders. You know, when you think about that, and you think about a new American and they come in, they don't necessarily have a grip on our language. They certainly don't understand our norms, let alone our financial systems, or how it works, and how do you approach people, and how do you get that. That's the kind of connectivity and force multiplier effect that we provide. And it's very important. And, you know, we think about a safe, reliable, and a consistent access to resources. I can tell you that I've been carrying my passport card on me since January 2017, but more so now than ever. And the reason I bring that up is, you know, a lot of the things that we saw up there talked about gatherings and larger gatherings, which we used to do quite a bit. And one of the manifestations of the current socioeconomic headwinds is those large gatherings for BIPOC have become unsafe. People don't want to go out into those large environments. So we have to be a little bit more nimble. We need to go meet our membership where they're at, not necessarily where we're having an event. So we have to play a dual role there and try and find our ways into both. Know, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. That's where we are, right? That's the promise woven into the fabric of this country, right? This is not the time to turn our attention away from a community that is eager to give back, be a part of the workforce and hustle, right? This is the time to lean in. If not now, when? This is the time. And in closing, I promise I would keep it short, right? As you consider or ask for the $200,000 for the next year's budget, the two biggest needs that many Vermonters that I talk to, whether it's PTPOC or on my daytime job, the two biggest needs are housing and workforce, right? Can't have one without the other, and we feel like, you know, we are actually fostering the connection to enable that workforce and those opportunities. The folks that are here want to stay here, but if they can't live or work here, they will leave. And we want to be, you know, one of the stoplights that stops that from happening. If anything, we have other programs that when we actually welcome other folks from other states to come in, get a feel for what it is. I forgot the name of the

[Denise Smith, Executive Director, Vermont Council on Rural Development (VCRD); Working Lands Coalition representative]: We have mentorship.

[Weiwei Wang, Co-Executive Director, Vermont Professionals of Color Network (VTPOC)]: The mentorships, Newcomer Nexus, we also call it the first option.

[Nicholas (Nick) Love, Board Chair, Vermont Professionals of Color Network]: Yep, exactly. So, you know, President Kennedy also said a rising tide lifts all boats, and that's exactly what we are trying to do, right? Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn't think about Reverend Jackson's passing today. You know, he had a quote, I might have modified it by one word, which was never looked down on anyone, unless you're willing to help them. And honestly, that is why we're here today. We're looking for that support to lift up a community, which we feel will lift Bob up in time. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: think we're you. At the end of our day and people have other places to go. I think we'll invite you back. I think it would be good for us to have a deeper conversation with you, so that we continue to understand the issues that the BIPOC community in Vermont are having. During COVID, when we were trying to help businesses around the state, the agency of commerce had no idea where the BIPOC community was or even how to reach out to try to get funding. I think that's where we started having these conversations about how do we help an organization that can help the BIPOC community. I think we found it. So appreciate everything that you're doing. So thank you for joining us today. Committee, that's it for today. More budget discussions tomorrow. We'll hear from Herb Olson for a second time. They're gonna continue on during the day tomorrow. And I think we're looking at 05:12 tomorrow afternoon, the regulations for the event to see if we can move that bill. So with that, I think we can go offline and we'll be back at nine tomorrow.

[Nicholas (Nick) Love, Board Chair, Vermont Professionals of Color Network]: Thank you again. So much

[Weiwei Wang, Co-Executive Director, Vermont Professionals of Color Network (VTPOC)]: for having us and happy New Year. Yeah.

[Rep. Michael Marcotte (Chair, House Commerce and Economic Development)]: Happy New Year. You too.