Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Good morning, everyone. This is the Vermont House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development. It is Wednesday, 02/18/2026 at 11:01 in the morning. So here to continue our discussions on the FY '27 budget. So we have representatives from the Regional Planning Commission. Charlie, Catherine, welcome. Thank you for joining us this morning.

[Unknown Committee Member]: Happy to be here.

[Charlie Baker]: Yes. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah. For the record, I'm Charlie Baker. I'm the executive director of the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission, but also serve as a chair of our kind of, like, the legislative relations committee. So that's why you see more of me than others. Apologies.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: And I'm Catherine Demetrek. I'm Executive Director of Northwest Regional Planning Commission. We serve Franklin and Grand Islecans.

[Charlie Baker]: Yeah, so we just got, well, I guess 20 slides here maybe. So just kind of give you a sense of what we do and we'll dig into the budget a little bit. I think most of you know, we provide staff support and technical assistance to towns and the state. The Abbey County government play a role in connecting communities with federal and state programs, as well as a forum or really that venue for towns to discuss and provide services jointly. We are political subdivisions of the state and were created to serve all the municipalities of the state back in 1968. So we're just trying to figure it out.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: It's a quality year. A lot of good things happen.

[Charlie Baker]: I'm guessing Katherine may have been born that year, but I'm not going to ask because that would be too much. So these are the topic areas. Sometimes when we talk about it, I think of this as just generally the place based work. We don't get involved in health care or education doing place based work, whether it's water quality or economic development or energy or housing, all the things that end up landing on the landscape. Some quick facts. So there's 11 of us. We have about a 135 staff. Yeah. So there's a think, like, maybe the state should think of us as almost a state agency, like then just a couple of notes of some services where we help the hunt in. These are FY '25 highlights. So every year we do reporting out on all of our programming to all of our funding agencies. And then we do a summary report, which I think give you a thing I also got attached to a two page summary of our annual report. At the end of this is a link. If you wanna dive in and see what your RPC did in more detail, there's a link to a 100 plus page report that has all the detail from all of the RPCs. And last year, we did 143 towns in equity environmental justice work. That reached a peak at the end of the Biden administration. I don't expect that number to increase. Governance. So we're all run by our municipalities. I can all make appointments to our boards. Our boards set our budgets and policy program priorities, including our regional plans. We all have our executive committee. So a subset of our board that oversees the executive director. And then we typically have a bunch of committees, transportation, permit, regulatory kind of Act two fifty to participate in Act two fifty, regional plan, clean water, etcetera. Happy to take any questions if you got it. But funding, so we have no general tax revenue. We have no taxing ability whatsoever. And about 95% of our revenue comes from state and federal grants, about 5% from town dues. That's a general number across the state, and down in different regions. And I think we've been talking about like we almost act like a public sector consulting agency. So we're really working on performance based grant agreements with different agencies or the towns. So we only get paid almost always at the reimbursement grant. So we have to do the work if we're the town or the agency satisfied, we get paid. Sometimes there's some agencies more like human services, they'll look at something from the health department. Sometimes they'd fund us upfront, but that's a rare situation. And you can see the hopefully that list of acronyms looks somewhat familiar. Been in the state house long enough. I don't know. But let me know if there's anything you're wondering about.

[Unknown Committee Member]: We created those.

[Charlie Baker]: Wanted them, some are federal. And then just to get to brass tacks on the specific budget request. So the kind of the core funding program for RPCs is the Regional Planning Grant program that is funded through a statute set portion of the property transfer tax. So we are in that boat with VHCV and the municipal planning grant program. So those three programs are all funded by the property transfer tax. In this fiscal year, there was an approved budget of 7.74. The BAA that I think the House just passed out recently, there was a reduction in the property transfer tax revenue. So there was a 1.3% cut in the BAA to our funding, just to kind of reflect what's happening with the property transfer tax. The governor's recommended budget is 7.83858, a 2.6% increase. We had made a request of the administration as to kind of follow the same guidance that he had given all the agencies, which was up 3%, because all of us have health care costs and other things that go up every year. That is the specific request that we're hoping that you might be able to support in your budget letter to approves. And and then the rest of this kinda digs into more detail on different programming areas and stuff. But any specific questions on the budget amount?

[Jonathan Cooper]: We're hearing from another property transfer tax entity yesterday, VHCB. So there's, is it the Agency of Digital Services? There's another Yeah,

[Charlie Baker]: I'm sorry. That's it.

[Jonathan Cooper]: BCGI, that's it. So are you all, Do you find with the RPCs that this haircut is consistent? Is it Yeah, we all

[Charlie Baker]: got that 1.3%.

[Jonathan Cooper]: Is the notwithstanding stuff happening all the time, some of the time?

[Charlie Baker]: Who knows? That is that is SOP.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: Yeah. Okay. It's most efficient.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Yeah. I I I don't

[Charlie Baker]: know that has been necessary.

[Jonathan Cooper]: At a 1.3% kind of range?

[Charlie Baker]: Or Oh, you're talking

[Jonathan Cooper]: about the BAA part? I'm just thinking when when things happen with an notwithstanding language, are you seeing appreciably less than what the language the statutory language would direct otherwise? Or is it usually pretty close?

[Charlie Baker]: Jonathan is making a reference to in the property transfer tax, the statutory set formula. There was a formula there. It did get tweaked a couple years ago, so I'm not as familiar with the new methodology. The old methodology would have had us, and this goes back now like three or four years, would have had us over $10,000,000 if we were actually getting the formula. So we've been under what the statute said in terms of that formula for since the beginning, maybe the second year we were at the formula, but property transfer tax has gone up and we were pretty level funded for a long time. So this is the first time I think that we've seen a BAA from property transfer tax revenue decrease. I'm trying to think back in time. I think we saw one after the real estate crash in 02/1929 and there a reduction there, but that was like across a lot of programs. So, I don't know, is that

[Jonathan Cooper]: And it does. I didn't realize that the Budget Adjustment Act was usually that's an unusual thing in terms of where that occurs. Yeah.

[Charlie Baker]: Can't of a year where that has happened before. So I think just some softness in the real estate market and not meeting the projections. I can confirm that. Thank you for that. And if you want to pick up something up.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: And so as Charlie noted, this funding that we get from the state through the property transfer tax is really our foundational funding. And we use that to leverage everything else. So we leverage anywhere from four to seven times that amount of funding through direct grants from the federal government and helping state agencies leverage federal dollars that come to the state. And so because of that, we really do serve as this critical link between municipalities and the state. As you know, being legislators, Vermont has this great tradition of adopting a state policy and then expecting two fifty entities to implement it. And so we are the tool that helps the state implement those state policies through our work with our municipalities. And because we work from so many areas, from housing to transportation to land use, we really can take an integrated approach to that. So when we help a town with a project, we're gonna look at water quality and transportation and all of the factors that are impacted.

[Unknown Committee Member]: So I would attest to, you talk about the link between what you guys do and your base funding, sort of foundational kind of thing to help the camps, in My experience, you guys do a great, great job. And it's even more critical because I think you have real challenges right now. You got a very complex and challenging statue, But my question, that's great. So what portion you got this base amount for the property transfer tax and you leverage it, I think, to get monies from other state agencies, federal government. What proportion how does that break out in terms of what your grant the grant funding is from these other state federal agencies versus your base of them? And the reason why I ask is is that, I mean, the activities have gotta be congruent

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: with the grant. Right?

[Unknown Committee Member]: Yeah. And I like the base finding because that that really, really helps in this power. And the other stuff's good too, but it isn't so much focused on how

[Charlie Baker]: do we help staff. Sometimes it's

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: it's

[Catherine Dimitruk]: Yeah, just a

[Charlie Baker]: I think, Catherine kind of mentioned, what did say five to seven times? Think, so this is probably 15 to 20% of the rest of our funding. If I was gonna aggregate it, I think we're in the 30 something million dollar range statewide. So this is the real core funding that's and it's been steadier and more the base because as you mentioned, kind of the other grant programs, some things have come in, we work on something for a few years and then that ends and we work on something else for a few years.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: So it ebbs and flows. Yeah.

[Unknown Committee Member]: Right, and from these towns perspective, that's great, but they look at for some specific help.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: That's really what It's a dilemma, I think, right? Yeah, and that really is what this base funding gives us, is it's that stability. So when the, you know, federal funds ebb and flow, we're still able to maintain this stable core of trained staff to be available to our towns. And that foundation is crucial. Thank you. And so as you noted, we are spending a lot of time working on implementing Act 181. All of the regional planning commissions are on track to have our regional plans updated by the December of this year. We've had over 500 meetings with towns and the general public with thousands of citizens engaged. As a quick note, we are not responsible for implementing the roll rule or tier three. That is an entirely separate process. So we are only responsible for updating our regional plans, which set tier one. Feel like I need to say that in every bit. And so our work is right on track. I think we have some potential change. It's a statute we're working on in some other committees to make that go even more smoothly. But all in all, we're on track to be on time. And so because so many of our towns just lack staff, because they don't need a lot of staff on a regular basis or from a funding and resource perspective, the RPCs really do serve as a technical resource. We serve as the town staff. In several cases, we actually serve as the zoning administrator in towns that have contracted with us. And you can see almost every town in the state has gotten some form of technical assistance from the regional planning commissions. If you have a town plan or zoning bylaws, we're here to help and we serve in that role.

[Charlie Baker]: Sure. And then housing has been a significant focus the last few years. So those are things and it's very related to the zoning work. Also, we are working with towns on that and and also trying to reduce the risk from permit appeals, especially in the growth areas that towns are planning that we're working on mapping right now. I think we could talk a lot more about that. Economic development, even though we have regional development corporations and some of us, Sorry, I think I've a different hat on here. Two of the RPCs are combined RPCs, RDCs, regional development corporations, corners of the stake. And the others of us have just a partner, RDC, that we work closely with, depending on the topic issue. Kind of split idealistic, just for clarity, is that they're working with employers, we're working with towns. And sometimes there's a need to work together on something, but that's the simplistic split.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: Another example of how we bring in the different disciplines is in our region, the Northwest part of the state, we've had a 26 mile rail trail there forever that nobody really paid attention to until the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail was built, but we have this gem of the Missisquoi Valley Rail Trail that we've managed and promoted, and we developed a trail friendly business program so businesses can market themselves to trail users. And through a collaborative effort with the agency of transportation, we're now expanding that to the Lamoille Valley Railroad as the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail as well. And so it is really an opportunity for businesses to capitalize on the tourism economy that the trails create.

[Charlie Baker]: Yeah, and the other way to think about that, the difference in our work is we're doing community development and they're doing economic development. Again, Boutin versus employer networks. Related to that, Brownfields has been a program that the RPCs have been heavily involved with for a long time now. So you may be familiar, there's some Brownfields money that the state may have asked you for Brownfields money for either agency commerce or ANR at times. We have typically gone straight to EPA. So we apply to EPA directly for these funds. Then you can see like NVDA up in The Kingdom. They got an assessment grant for 1,200,000.0 and a $1,000,000 revolving loan fund in 'twenty three. They got another grant. They've done 40 sites. Anyways, EPA Brownfield work is something that has been kind of a core program, although it is a federal discretionary grant. So there are times where our grant money runs out and we're kind of pending. Went through that a couple of years ago where we didn't have Brownfield money for a couple of years. So then we're kind of more reliant on the state program.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: And our neighbors.

[Charlie Baker]: And our neighbors. We often Sorry, we're pointing at Catherine. She is a neighboring region, but she has a revolving loan fund. So, she's been able to help property owners in my region if we're out of Brownfield's money.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Are you hearing about we just heard from Andy the issue with increased levels of arsenic and lead in in the soils as being an issue for development. For increased standards.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: Yes. Reducing those thresholds. Yeah. We do have some concerns about that as well. Yes. Public health and environmental health is crucially important, but soil disposal costs are a huge driver of the expense of downtown redevelopment projects, and I'm afraid this will potentially expand that. Yeah.

[Charlie Baker]: It would be good if we could find some different solutions. And there may be properties where, especially in more urban situations where these arsenic, historic arsenic is, do we really need to dig it all up and take it out? Or can we just leave it in and work in a more urban place, we might just be paving it. It's under the parking lot. There aren't any kids playing in it, which might be the concern. So, yeah, I would hope there could be some other solutions rather than just ratcheting up the I know that. Potentially multimillion dollar project was killed and built in because of soil. Yeah. Yeah. So not not a great dynamic. Transportation planning has also been a core program for thirty five years at least. I think we're getting on forty years now with VTrans. So VTrans take some of their planning money and share some with each RPC to do local transportation planning work that feeds up into VTrans. You want to add to that?

[Catherine Dimitruk]: Yeah, I think that's great.

[Charlie Baker]: Yeah. And you can see a little example here. I brought one kind of work with our transit agency to evaluate their transit service and get to a more efficient, effective service.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: And I think I will add. Transportation is definitely one of those areas where our work is from the very basic, like helping towns with the road inventories or doing trainings for a public works crew all the way up to, you know, helping the state to accomplish what what FHWA requires them to do. So we work from the very basic TA with technical assistance to towns all the way up to being of service to the agency.

[Charlie Baker]: Clean water, another area. This is, Vermont passed their Clean Water Act in 2015. And then there was an update a number of years ago to focus more on non regulatory clean water projects. A number of us in the Champaign Basin

[Catherine Dimitruk]: It's okay. Definitely wrong.

[Charlie Baker]: Has become in A and R, Lexicon, we've become clean water service providers. So we're actually working with property owners to do individual clean water projects to help meet the clean water goals outside of the regulatory environment. And this slide mentions grants and aid, but we've also been using some transportation money again on that road erosion inventory type work and trying to reduce road runoff. Yeah,

[Catherine Dimitruk]: and then emergency planning and response. Luckily, the past couple of years, happened had to two years now, serve as staff in the state emergency operations center. But all of the RPCs do have trained staff that can help state and emergency services emergency in operations center. We also work with our towns on basic emergency preparedness from their local emergency response plan to federally required local hazard mitigation plans that are required to access hazard mitigation funding for projects. And then we really serve as a general liaison through our municipalities and state agencies to make sure that our towns are just fully prepared for eventual disasters that we know will come.

[Charlie Baker]: Just a note that that kind of relationship with the VEM, the Vermont Emergency Management, really, really grew a lot after Irene. And that was a big threshold moment. There's been a lot of turnover in staff and also a lot of questions about federal funding in this area. And so we do have some concern about our ability to continue to be of assistance to the state in this and the implications of that if more events happen. So not that this committee should be addressing that, but

[Catherine Dimitruk]: It is important from a stable economy perspective. The funding that FEMA does provide to the state that supports about a half time person in each RPC to be the expert in emergency management, that funding's been held up. So we've been working without funding at the state and the regional level since the September in this area. And we're managing to keep going, but we are gonna need to look at it if that becomes a long term issue. And so just to be aware of.

[Jonathan Cooper]: Okay. Passing on that, are you allocating staff time you're seeing to that individual is being brought on to other projects within the RPC's remit or you have some place to add to reduce staff?

[Charlie Baker]: I don't think any of us have cut yet, you know, just because we're Yeah, think VEM is communicating some level of hope. So we'll see how that plays out. But this is another really important use of that base funding. In the absence of a specific grant, we'll do what we can with that base regional planning funding. Or maybe we can shift to another project at that time.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: So we have had to we've triaged a bit and really focused on the core areas of helping our towns do their local plans and being, know, being available if there is a disaster to be that point of contact with the towns and then working on the local hazard mitigation plans. But any of the general, like, education, outreach, coordination, collaboration, that is definitely we've had to cut back on that.

[Charlie Baker]: Yeah. And one spin I think that some of us are doing is, like, kind of working with VTrans using more transportation money because a lot of the impacts are on the transportation infrastructure, but we have an event. And so we're maybe using more transportation money to do some of this work. So trying to move things forward in the absence of Short

[Catherine Dimitruk]: term, we can manage without work. On the long term, we'd have to do some cuts and reallocations. Underpinning all of this, we have GIS and mapping capabilities that we use for data analysis for mapping purposes, and we provide that service to all of our municipalities, to state agencies. We support local planning through that. We support the erosion inventories. We use it for emergency preparedness, and we use it in all areas of our work.

[Charlie Baker]: If you see a map at a town office, it probably says produced by the RPC.

[Unknown Committee Member]: So in terms of the implementation of 01/1981,

[Charlie Baker]: you have the GIS mapping, then you have some ANR mapping that sort of overlays on that. Can you talk about, you know, how that that works at Ethnord? I'll just say in general, when we talk about mapping, it's very rare that we're the primary producer of a map. In other words, we're using other people's layers. Maybe the town zoning layer might be a lot of A and R layers that we're using to inform other mapping processes. So, yeah, that's just kind of typical of using them and then trying to figure out how best to apply them is always part of the question.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: And so because our maps aren't regulatory, our regional plan maps don't have any- we don't control local zoning or we don't issue permits ourselves. It doesn't have the same import as maybe what was talked about this morning in the rural caucus. But we do use, let's say, ANRs, ATLAS, to look at where are the major wetland complexes, where are the key endangered species habitat areas so that when we're doing our regional plan and we say, like, here's an area where conservation should be a primary goal, we'll use that data to help do those maps. Oh, so energy. So the state of Vermont has an optional enhanced energy planning effort that towns can do. You do a more detailed energy plan, your plan gets additional weight in the Public Utilities Commission process. And we help our towns do those, map those plans, and help them implement the plans through a variety of programs, including one that we're working with through the Department of Buildings and General Services, which is the Municipal Energy Resilience Program, where we're helping towns implement energy efficiency improvements on municipally owned buildings. They'll extend the life, they'll make them healthier buildings, and save taxpayer dollars in the long run.

[Charlie Baker]: This was something that I think the full program was like 40 something million, but even as of the June, 36,000,000 had gone into the buildings and things. Oh, yeah.

[Catherine Dimitruk]: I just noticed a time. I'm expecting next door at 11:30, so I'm gonna jump out.

[Charlie Baker]: Charlie, you're good. I'm almost done. Yes. And this last substantive slide is just noting, almost everything we're doing, very little that we do by ourselves, it's all in partnerships. And here's an example from Bennington County where they've been supporting the CUD through the startup. And then after even if after things have been implemented, they gotta monitor what's going on for the next ten years. So they're providing that staff support to that new level of government that had to be created to do the broadband work. But this is just one example, you know, we're constantly working with partners all the time. It's kind of we're in the relationship business, I think we often say. And that's that's all we got. This last slide does that the detailed VAPTA annual report is what I referred to earlier as, like, if you wanna scroll through it and look, dig into your RPC, there's a detail there. And you can see our State Association website also at the end. Happy to take any more questions or questions for Charlie?

[Monique Priestley (Clerk)]: Hi, Charlie. I really appreciate the work that you do. I know we've talked about this a lot. And I'm trying to understand how we can leverage the knowledge that the RPCs have more than we have been so far. Right now, from the outsider looking in, it appears mostly that you're kind of a receptacle of information, you're being had a dogging, organizing, but you're not really taking what you have and pushing it out to anybody who doesn't ask for it. Anybody who asks is getting that full support and all of that. But sometimes, I like to think of regional planning a little more broadly than that. And so I'm curious if there's something that could be done differently that is happening differently in parts of the state. How do we do better with what we have?

[Charlie Baker]: Always a good question. Certainly, I'd like to think that we're bringing all of our resources to bear when we're working with a town, know, particularly on their town plan or their zoning or elements of a town plan, you know, like we're doing bikeped plans or whatever it might be. So hopefully that happens. I don't know I'm curious to maybe explore that further. I don't know if I thought about it exactly in that way. Partly we see that part of our role here, like trying to bring perspectives here because we see a lot of different agencies. Hopefully, we got a flavor of that. And so happy to talk with legislative committees in particular. Seems to be a place where we try to bring some of that broader perspective in. But always happy to see if there are other places where can be more helpful. And because most towns don't have staff, I think we often look at ourselves as like we're we've got to kind of be the consistent staff person to help for small towns really. Like, they don't have anybody else, so we need to be there. It may be very intermittent, but we need to be there to help. So don't know, happy to talk more about that. Thank you.

[Monique Priestley (Clerk)]: And then, are there things that you do that have been more effective in the past or less of what we need today? I'm just wondering, we continue to have a limited pot of money and the resources that you provide are great and the knowledge that RPCs have is outstanding, I'm just trying to come up with how do we leverage it to get

[Charlie Baker]: more efficient?

[Monique Priestley (Clerk)]: Not even more efficient, but just to be using it in a way that is getting more out. Obviously,

[Charlie Baker]: going through this 181 process, and we just recently had conversation with the board chair there. I won't quote her at all, but she can speak for herself. One of the things, there's a lot of requirements that have been added to the Vermont planning statute over decades. And it's kind of overwhelming and I'm not sure that's that useful at the point we're at now. And so just to try to make it a little light of it, I think the LERB, the Land Use Review Board, is they've been reviewing our regional plans and they're like, Oh my God, I got a 700 page document here. Like, what the heck? They're like, Maybe you could reduce some of the requirements in the planning statute that aren't really that useful. So I think that's one area where it feels like we're spending effort without return. Just it doesn't always help the town move forward in a strategic way. It's just we're covering a 100 different requirements and then and then it sits and we don't actually make progress. So I don't know. That's when you talk about that, that's the one area that has come up recently that seems like there's some opportunity to improve for sure.

[Unknown Committee Member]: Was part of my question that you answered, is that idea of what are we doing that's not useful that has been layered on for decades, and how do we go about fixing that? And then the second piece is really about I feel like every issue we talk about in this building, somebody brings up rural capacity or town capacity. And then there's another maybe proposed resource to provide capacity for towns. And are there things that other organizations are doing that maybe makes more sense for the RPC to take on? And just in what we've heard in the past couple of days, there's the Ready program. There's MTAP, which maybe doesn't have money anymore. There's the Virta study. It just seems like there's a lot of different entities providing technical assistance or trying to fund technical assistance? And is there a better way to deliver that?

[Charlie Baker]: Probably above by pay grade. I think we work well with all those partners. I do think more broadly, structure of government in Vermont Sorry, now you opened a Pandora box. That's all right. That's what we've won. Did want to go. But, sorry, I worked in a couple of states before moving to Vermont almost twenty years ago now, so just starting to figure things out. Sometimes it does feel like that. We have town and state government, we're for 600,000 people, lots of other states, that's a decent sized county. And so the state does some more things here than maybe they do in other states where they push some more things out of the local government. But on the other hand, you look at local government capacity and it's really not there. I I work mean, in Chittenden County and at least half my town is a challenge. Mean, you guys are now over 10,000, 11,000 people. Like they have some staff and some capacity, but most of the towns don't. And then we kind of say, well, they should share services. Honestly, it's really difficult to share services here because you got to get two select boards to agree. And this is where I think the biggest gap is. There is not a true mechanism that makes it easy for towns to share services. And so that's we've been kind of flirting with and floating a little bit this council government's idea. Know I if that's exactly the right model, but something like that where a town could say, hey, want a zoning administrator. Would you guys do that? Then of leave it up to us. Like maybe we can get three other talents to join in and we're hiring one person and providing staff to multiple towns. But that dynamic could happen over and over and over. And that's where I think we're seeing the real inefficiency in the system is the expectations on the towns just don't line up with reality. And then the things fall through the crack, regional assessment, not that we want to do reassessments, but the day to day assessment, does that need to be town by town? I work for a county before coming here is done at the county level. That seemed to be really efficient and effective and professional, and got done easily. I don't know, sorry, that's my regional governance jagged. I'm with you.

[Monique Priestley (Clerk)]: Go ahead. Thank you for all this wonderful information.

[Unknown Committee Member]: I was wondering if you had a

[Unknown Committee Member]: sense of what your multiplier effect is from the $7,000,000,000.

[Charlie Baker]: Yeah. It's like a five to six times. Mhmm. So I and I haven't actually gone through all the RPC budgets lately, but I think probably in aggregate, we're, like, 35,000,000. So seven times five? 35,000,000? I'm gonna go back to Pandora's box here. I gotta leave. We are one of the Right.

[Unknown Committee Member]: We are one of what? Two states that don't have a county government. Most of New England doesn't really, but yeah. Do you is part of what do you think a county government would help?

[Charlie Baker]: I don't think county government is really compatible with the culture in Vermont. And partly I say that, like, we have a really strong you know, the town meeting tradition is, like, a really strong, like, special thing about Vermont. Right? It's what bottoms up. So I think maybe some flavor of county, but like a true county government would be, let's elect county commissioners and they're gonna decide, they're gonna run the county roads and the county health department and county something else, I don't know, sewer system. I don't know. That doesn't feel Vermont y to me. But something where the chairs of the select boards were all on the county board. So I think One of the intriguing models I saw recently is in New York actually, which we don't usually look at in New York for good models for Vermont. But I think, I don't know how many counties they have, but 12 of them have what they call a board of supervisors model, which is the chief elected official from the towns make up the county board. And then they kind of decide, like, what services do they wanna do at the individual towns or do they wanna aggregate at the county level? Like, oh, something like that. Something like that makes more sense to me. I like having that option but still have town elected officials be in charge of it. That's very helpful. Thank you. And we can drink. So

[Jonathan Cooper]: one of the things I wanted to ask about was sort of, we talked a lot about, you know, supervisor unions and goals to try to have things be of equivalent size, roughly close. And looking at the presentation, you know, we have some fairly small geographic areas, some very large geographic areas among the planning commissions. Do you have a lot of variation in staff size commensurate with that? Or do you find that now there's a transportation person, there's an energy person? There seems to be kind

[Charlie Baker]: of I think everybody's probably geez. Got a list of we we share a list of all of our staff. I think everybody's probably, like, at eight is probably the minimum. And then some are larger than that, you know. But, I'm probably the largest. I have funny forge that. So that's kind of the range. But yeah, you're right. There's kind of a minimum level that needs to happen for just to provide the basic services.

[Jonathan Cooper]: And thinking the base that it requires to And do the then there's other partnerships that have been referred to, I think, in this conversation, whether organizations at the state level or statewide nonprofits that kind of engage with other kinds of outreach or municipal work, is that something that is We've been sort of on the hunt this year, and in testimony here for where are the things that are duplicative, where are the things that are more than one entity doing the same thing? How do you swear the day to day sort of bread and butter operations of how an RPC engages with its constituent municipalities with state or broader scale initiatives that are in and So it's like kinda sometime one tech one time technical assistance thing. Do you feel like you're able to persuade those fully, or is it we'll hang out and help where we can? How does that work?

[Charlie Baker]: Sorry. It's a thorny relationship question a little bit, but I think we kind of view ourselves as kind of like that core technical assistance provider for Towns. Like we were created literally to provide that function. And so the things that have been added, we've been like, well, maybe we could do that, but we don't want to get into a competitive situation that everything works better if we're all collaborating and working together. But again, there's probably ways to make it more efficient and effective if you aggregate a bit.

[Jonathan Cooper]: Do you find staffing to be difficult? Is hiring for a regional planner, which seems to be a bunch of different things,

[Charlie Baker]: difficult for Are you asking me or you asking all the RPCs? All. All the RPCs? Yes. Do you have a different answer? Yes. Oh, of No. It's not difficult for me, but because I'm I'm in Burlington and yeah. About the population of these. It attracts crazy people. So it's easy for me to find. Sorry. I'm I'm sorry. Is just because there's more university students or whatever, it is a little easier for me to plan.

[Unknown Committee Member]: And maybe that's where you are.

[Charlie Baker]: Yeah, and also, I've been able to, probably my salary a lot is probably a little bit higher than I wish to, but our cost of living is also high. Any more questions?

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Thank you, Charlie. Yep.

[Charlie Baker]: Thank you for indulging my lights of fancy there. Appreciate it.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: Well, I think, you know, the conversation of county government, it's something that it needs to continue here. We all can't have fire departments, especially in the rural areas. We're just duplicating, duplicating, duplicating, and that's a lot of money that

[Charlie Baker]: One thing we didn't talk about was bond A and R had some money that they gave to the bond bank to look to help the fire districts. And so all the RPCs are kind of like this was an interesting experiment because they're like, you know, fire districts for their a municipal government, but not the municipal government. Right? And they have the providential Thank you. But, you know, the bond bank kind of came to us. Was like, geez, mostly it's a, you know, older guys and they're getting older every day and we're concerned about the continuity, like what happens. And so we're kind of like working with them to assess needs and things, but it's another little layer of municipal We have so many of these little layers that it seems like there's got to be a better way to do it. And encouragingly, think the gov ops committees are continuing that county regional governance study and they're going to report out by the end of the year. As you've been saying, mean, if we wanna talk about county government, I'm more than willing to have that conversation, although that's not our jurisdiction. They are having that. Oh, are they really? They've got about. There's a county and regional governance study committee that got started under in the last quandum. It really kind of went into a hiatus for a while, but I think they are intending to start it up. I don't know when.

[Unknown Committee Member]: We restarted it, I think, in the fall.

[Charlie Baker]: That's it. You're on it, right?

[Monique Priestley (Clerk)]: Oh, yeah, great. That's right. Great. Excellent. One of my passions. It might also kid being drunk.

[Charlie Baker]: I have experience with merging of public safety issues. It was not good. It is. It truly is. Richmond and Hinesburg Tribe. Yeah. And we tried to have six towns to dispatch, should have been like the easy basic one, but that was also ran into That's what the problem is. Let's be on. Okay, anyway, that's not a topic of publication. Shame center. Trevor, thank you. Yeah, thank you very much.

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: What time for lunch today? So back here, 01:00 sharp, we have ACTD back in. Commissioner Pelham, who is in the marketing, and Commissioner and Dan Dickerson will be back too, so we'll go through their folks somewhat. Learn more about, from Commissioner Judson, on granting the grants that BED puts out. We need an understanding of how they've got that and making sure that see where there might be duplication and the grants that they put out and their ways of consolidation, things like that. Then at 02:30, we're going to take up h 05:12. We're gonna see where the committee is on on the event tickets and see if we can vote that out today. Then Then we'll get

[Charlie Baker]: the

[Unknown Committee Member]: floor. Is that that we're using the latest draft from last week?

[Michael Marcotte (Chair)]: These there's a new draft that he's working on right now. Oh, okay. Going through editing now, but he'll be bringing us a new draft. I think it's gonna incorporate some of the pieces that we wanted, like, you know, if you're a reseller, have to post that on your web page. And you talk about there's only three of tickets left, you have to know if it's on our website, so it doesn't make it sound like it's the whole event. And I think we have to discuss. We are going to have a 10% cap. That's the big one.