Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: It's for me, James. Folks. This is class elections and institutions. Is Wednesday, February 11. We're trying to get settled, go to the kids. I got that. I'm sorry,

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: You're right.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Don't. It's good. This morning,

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: we have a little bit

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: of a late start. The roads are in pretty bad shape, so we had to make sure we had a quorum before we started. So this morning, we're gonna be dealing with the capital bill. The governor's proposed budget adjustment, and we're working with the agency of agriculture on their water quality grants. So who should I go to first? Nicole?

[Nicole Dubuque (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: Yeah, I can introduce everybody.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Okay. Welcome, Nicole. So if you could introduce yourself for the record, then then we'll go from there. And there's requests of 1,500,000.0 for FY twenty seven. And then there was also 3,000,000 in FY twenty six. So we also wanna see where you are in those expenditures.

[Nicole Dubuque (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: Thank you, chair. For the record, my name is Nicole Dubuque. I'm with the agency of agriculture, food, and markets. I am joined today by Laura DiPietro, who is our director of water quality. Amy Mercer, who is our financial director. And then in the room with you, you have Nina Gage and I believe Jeff Cook. I can't see him,

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: but I

[Nicole Dubuque (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: think he's there.

[Laura DiPietro (Director, AAFM Water Quality Division)]: I'm here.

[Nicole Dubuque (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets)]: Also from our water quality division to speak to you about the water quality grants through the capital bill. I'm going to turn it over to Nina to lead because she has a PowerPoint to show you all, and then we'll be happy to answer questions if you need us.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Gina, why don't you come on up? And if you worked with Tate to share your screen, that's all set. Welcome. Good morning.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: All right. Well, appreciate everyone being here. It's a harrowing drive in. We appreciate the time to discuss our programs. Before I begin, I'm just going to pass around each year we publish an annual report on our technical and financial assistance programs. This is one of our legislative responsibilities, and this talks about all the programs that we administer through the water quality division. This process ran as a reference material.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: That's the same one

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: we have already.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: If you received the one that was submitted to the legislature online, you may have this link. There's also a link with your committee assistant as part of our materials for the day. And if you don't take a paper copy,

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: we will reuse them. All

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: right. Good morning. I'm just going to provide a brief overview of our division, what our program does. I'll speak a little bit about some of the additional agricultural water quality reporting resources that are available to you. I will touch on our agricultural water quality goals and where we're at in our progress, our grant programs that we administer, and then we'll sort of sum up on the governor's proposed fiscal year 2027, section 10 clean water water quality grants. So just for backdrop, our division does a few things. We administer the agricultural nonpoint source management program for the state of Vermont. So we prepare inspection and enforcement on farms in Vermont. They're just some statistics to show the rate of regulatory compliance assessments that we complete and enforcement actions that occur. We also provide technical assistance and education. We do this through our technical and financial assistance programs. We also provide funding to local and regional partners. Examples I'll provide is, UVM extension agents and conservation districts. So the line item that you'll see titled Ag CWIP is the Agricultural Clean Water Initiative program. It's one of the programs we employ to support long term relationship building and one on one individual support with farmers to prepare them for state and federal assistance programs when they're ready to implement improvements. We also support educational events. Last year, was 186, different educational offerings across the state, to support the agricultural communities, all of the regulations, understanding of how to comply, changes in regulations and more.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I just wanna clarify. These are programs or what you provide to farmers throughout the state, but they don't necessarily come from the capital. Yeah. So I just want folks to be clear about this. This is what the agency of ag is providing to our farm, our agricultural community, in terms of inspection and enforcement, then in terms of technical assistance and education. Okay. I just want to committee to thank the capital, the 1,500,000.0 is paying for this, all of this.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yeah, so on the screen is a graph that shows our investments over the last nine years. So you'll see we had $12,100,000 in investments in fiscal twenty five. This is sourced from a variety of different funding sources. As Chittenden described, we receive funding through a variety of different funding streams, some of which are state corporations, some of which are agreements that we write competitive grants for. So through USDA, as an example, we write for competitive grants and receive funding that we additionally administer to the agrivolta community. So the capital bill is just one piece of the funding that our program administers. I'm gonna give you guys a little bit of the big picture and then we'll kind of zoom in specifically on the 1.5 and the proposed fiscal twenty seven capital bill adjustment and what exactly those specific funds will be used for for the proposed fiscal twenty seven timeframe. One important note is that our programs do leverage significant amount of funding. While I mentioned 12.1 in fiscal twenty five, an additional 4,000,000 is leveraged as a part of those projects. The majority of which is federal, but also from farmers.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Million that's a match, is the 1,500,000.0 that the governor is recommending for FY 27 used as a match as well? Yep. Just so you understand that. And the 3,000,000 in FY 26 is also used for ranch.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And, Nina, that's like one of the projects up there where you went in and, like, put stone down on so the cows weren't kicking up all the mud and you built a bridge. Is that a bridge rail?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: It's actually it's an area for stacking solid manure adjacent to a waste storage facility to capture runoff from that 100 and Yeah. Or storage. Yeah. It was previously used as a as a heavy use area for cows. And so what you're looking at is probably the edge of the new heavy use area. So part of what our team does is really working with farms to identify the management challenges that they're facing. And some of that is site specific, some of it is related to infrastructure, and there's always a portion that's related to management as well. Please.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So, to go through the bar graph there for '25, this is fiscal year, right, or calendar? Correct, fiscal year. Fiscal year. So, the colors are kind of similar. So the general fund

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: is So we receive a very limited amount of general fund. I'm not sure if you can see my cursor. Yeah.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: That's the general fund.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: That's the general fund. The capital fund is the dark blue. Sorry, my question is disappearing.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Which is this one.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yep. And so you see, we had a higher value in '23 and '24. You also see that purple ARPA investments that the state made over the last few years. So those investments are now complete. We do not anticipate any new investments with ARPA funds in fiscal twenty six. And then the light blue is Lake Chimpan Basin Program funds. So we administer some of those fundings in Vermont through a collaborative award with ANR, Agency Natural Resources Department of Environment conservation. And then the orange is a USDA NRCS or natural resource conservation services.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So can you go to the clean water fun one?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yeah. Actually, I can let me pull up our interactive, and I can just show you guys. So one of the resources I was just about to go through, see if you can see my screen.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Just jump into the question. You said no new ARPA for '26. What are you anticipating for '27? What's that landscape look like?

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: It's done.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: For '27?

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I think it's done. All the ARPA dollars have to be out the door. It wasn't on the graph.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: FY '27 wasn't on

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: the graph.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: This is prior fiscal year completion. So fiscal twenty six is underway now. Fiscal twenty seven is proposed. So we'll be speaking today about proposed for fiscal twenty seven.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: So you have our funding projections, isn't there?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Not for spending. So those funds are all obligated. Is there anything you'd like to add regarding obligation?

[Jessica (AAFM finance staff – last name unknown)]: No, all of the ARPA funds have to be spent by the end of calendar year 2026. Then hopefully, everything will be set up by the June '26, the anticipated time.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Thank you.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Because there's no more ARPA funds coming in. Correct. It was a five year.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Gotcha. Thank you.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: So this is an interactive dashboard that's available to you. It's linked in our report, and it gives you the opportunity to sort of click around and understand individual funding screens. There's a variety of pages embedded within this report from investment to field practices, foster introduction, structural practices, outreach events, technical assistance visits, regulatory compliance assessments, items evaluated and enforcement. It's a very comprehensive public information about our programs and the results. It is endless in terms of what you want to look at. So it's just one of the resources that we have available. Is there a specific Yeah.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So the total investment by funding source, the one with the bar graph that goes out horizontally. Yep. And that'd be enlarged a little bit. I want to see the bulk of it, what we're seeing. This is over This is from fiscal twenty sixteen through '25. So it's a 10 and that's when we started capital bill funding clean water. So if we could keep that enlarged.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yep. So I can just show you specifically the capital funding?

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I don't want just specifically the capital. I want to see that bar graph that's horizontal. There. So we've got 26,000,000 over a ten year, nine year life is on the capital bill. The Clean Water Fund had 24.9. And then the General Fund had 6.3. So what's in the big bill right now at almost 12,000,000, it's 11.89. Is that considered from the Clean Water Fund? Or is that considered from the general fund?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: So we receive a very small amount of general fund dollars. I believe our proposed to administer to the agricultural community in Vermont is 150,000. The vast majority of our funding to support the programs that we administer, which I'll get into in a moment, is sourced between the Capital Fund and the Clean Water Fund.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: That's what I wanted to put out there for the committee to understand. Okay? So that 11.89 is from the Clean Water Fund. I'm gonna pop back to the PowerPoint and I'll just say this

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: is a resource that's available to you. Encourage you to check it out. It'll show you everything that's done up to fiscal twenty five. So each year at the end of the year, when we publish our annual reports, we update this report to make it available for folks so you can see the types and size of funds that we're supporting and the results. So I'm going just share some highlights for this morning.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: That

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: trip to Joe's Pond and so did. It's the don'ts. Those

[Unidentified Committee Member]: are good donuts.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Okay.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: As I mentioned, there's a few different reporting resources that are available to you. Primarily, publish a narrative report about our programs, And I just passed that around, so those of you who have it, it is accompanied by an interactive data report, which I just navigated to, to give you a quick example of the types of information that's embedded therein. We also support a report that specifically focuses on federal funding. It's an entire other conversation in terms of what federal funding streams are coming into the state, what is available, what might be the considerations that we have in mind at the moment. And that's published in collaboration. It's published by ANR, Department of Environmental Conservation, and we contribute to that report. So we have a big picture understanding of federal funding. And the third that I would feature for you all to be aware of is Vermont's Clean Water Initiative Performance Report. This is published on an annual basis. We contribute significantly to the development of this report. I'm going to share a few highlights from that report. It also contains our tactical basin plan annual interim reports, which are part of the state strategy for setting targets, and planning within the basin level versus the statewide level. Okay, so just a quick recap, sort of the mission behind the work that we do is related to improving water quality. Specifically, the state has some very lofty total maximum daily load requirements. These are phosphorus diets for different water bodies in the state of Vermont. The Lake Champlain is up in the right hand corner. I'm not sure if I

[Unidentified Committee Member]: can move. No, I don't think you can move.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Okay. I'm sure you guys have a general understanding where Lake Champlain is. Skip that piece. In general, we have estimated about 74 metric tons of phosphorus to be reduced from the lake as of the end of state fiscal twenty four. Our state fiscal twenty five practice and result reporting is somewhat delayed based on essentially the schema of when agreements end, the growing season ends, and what our fiscal year reporting deadlines are. And at that point in time, agriculture contributed to 83% of the overall results that the state is able to capture for improving water quality in the Lake Champlain Basin.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So the dollars that come through the Clean Water Fund, as well as through our capital budget is targeted to the Lake Champlain Basin for our clean water. And that's an agreement with the EPA, and we have to meet certain timelines and certain steps away. And we developed all of this back around 2015, 2016 in terms of how to address this so we would be in compliance with the EPA requirements. So these dollars just go towards right now, the cleanup of Lake Champlain. There will be some dollars in the future for the Connecticut River Basin. But that's for nitrogen, not phosphorus.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Shawn? So just to try to clear

[Unidentified Committee Member]: it in my head. So are you saying that that's the phosphorus going into Lake Champlain is mostly agriculture?

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: The majority

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: of loading is associated with the agricultural sector. It's the pie graph on the left, our baseline load. This graph shows the estimated reductions, the progress being made. So 74 metric tons is assumed to be reduced from loading otherwise assumed to be entering the lake. So agriculture is the biggest sector making a difference in our estimated level of phosphorus runoff.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: Gotcha.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So if we had not implemented this in compliance with EPA back 2016 and made a commitment in terms of benchmarks we needed to meet and funding levels we needed to meet, If we don't honor that, what could happen is EPA can come in here and direct us to what projects need to be done with our dollars. And they would direct folks mostly to wastewater systems because that's what the case is in most states, it's your wastewater systems, not your agricultural sector that's producing phosphorus. So that's why we have to be very careful and diligent in terms of making sure we have enough money and making sure we're meeting the benchmarks because we know it's the agricultural sector that's producing the load. Our wastewater systems would not make an impact in terms of really addressing the phosphorus load.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: I just realized, I apologize, I forgot to include the legend here, but the colors are the same as the prior. So the red is transportation, the green is natural resources, yellow is agriculture, and dark blue is wastewater. And so what Alice is Excuse me. What Conor is referring to is the small amount of loading from our wastewater treatment facility. So agriculture really is and natural resources are really the sectors that we're targeting in the state of Vermont for improvements. We have a ways to go. I won't say we're anywhere near the targets that we need to be at. We're at 35% for the Lake Champlain requirements. But just to reflect once more, agriculture is a sector that's really stepping forward. Farmers are stepping up and improving their management to help the state meet our goals. Our programs are the mechanism by which we are seeing those changes.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So Kevin, I'll go back to you.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: No, no, no, Mary.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: I'm still not following on the previous chart why 2025 is so much lower. You may have said it and I just didn't understand it.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yeah, so I'll give you the specifics. We run programs with farms And farms operate through the growing season. We typically have reporting processes at the end of the growing season. And so the end of the 2025 growing season occurred in December. So our fiscal year reporting deadline for the fiscal twenty five year is in July. So we have a lag time between when our results are really complete.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: Okay, that's partial data for 2020 Yeah, it's

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: an indicator of some data, but we don't like to reflect on it.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: Okay, thank you.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yeah, so again, progress differs by lake segment. The Lake Champlain Watershed is a very large area. We have different amounts of progress occurring in different parts of the lake and there are different requirements for different parts of the lake. So you can see the Masiskoye Bay as an example has very high requirements, but yet we have a significant amount of work that's underway there. Lake Memphremagog is the other lake that we have concerted effort and improvements in that watershed for reducing phosphorus runoff. Again, agriculture is the majority contributor to the state's progress at 68% of the overall estimated load reductions in that watershed. And again, we still have a ways to go in the Lake Memphrem and Antigua watershed. We're at about 25% of our required goals to meet the federal total maximum daily load.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Can I just get a two sentence understanding of the transportation related stormwater? Is that just diesel and things like that there on the roadway? What's the runoff there?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: So our colleagues at the Agency of Transportation would be best to answer that question. But as someone who works in agricultural, I'll say, think of roads and dirt roads and ditches and just sediment runoff and nutrient transport from our road systems. As Tara alluded, we also have requirements within the Long Island Sound that relate to our Connecticut River Basin. So that's the eastern side of the state, specifically focused on acreage. So in different areas, we have different pollutants of concern, all of which track back to human civilization and the use of those nutrients. They're natural nutrients that are required for plant growth, but the overabundance of them in our lake systems can cause major issues. I just wanna zoom in for a moment. So I showed you guys previously a graphic about our investments. Our program specifically has a very large impact on the overall state excuse me, on the overall state results. So the programs that we administer, including the compliance of production areas contributes to 72% of the state's results. I mentioned agriculture as a sector contributes to 83%. That's because of the incorporation of federal funding results, federal program results. Make up about 7% of the state's clean water investments in fiscal twenty four and twenty one percent of the Clean Water Fund budget in fiscal twenty four. So all this to say, I'm trying to tell the picture of that agriculture is a very cost effective sector for the state to reduce phosphorus. The graph on the right shows you the dollars invested per estimated kilogram of total phosphorus load reduced. And it just shows you sort of the cost of different types of projects, right? The cost of stormwater projects, transportation related projects, natural resources, and agricultural projects. Agricultural projects are cheaper. They're more cost effective for us to reduce phosphorus. Part of that is because they're simpler. We can provide support to a farmer to change the management on their field. And the results of that change equal more improvements per dollar than if we invest in large scale infrastructure changes in stormwater. So that's just the reality and the data that we're able to share at this point in our nine year sort of concerted clean water efforts. What do we do to contribute to 72% of the state's results? We administer nine unique technical and financial assistance programs. These programs all support farms in different ways. We provide support for agronomic practices. We provide support for innovative equipment use. We provide support for taking land that's in annual cropland, converting it to perennial cropland if that land is contributing a higher majority of loading on the field. The two programs I'm gonna talk about more specifically are our best management practices program and our conservation reserve enhancement program. Those are the two primary programs that currently use capital funding for those investments. And I'll bring those back in a moment. Again, we also have programs that are specific to supporting smaller farms that are pasture based to improve their pasture and livestock grazing systems. We incentivize an NRCS program that supports wildlife habitat diversity. We have an innovative program that looks at performance based programming. And then as I mentioned in the beginning, we also provide significant funding for our local and regional partners. Those are like agronomists who can provide expert understanding and research to farmers. They also lead research on farms to look at new practices, understand the effects. So the best management practices program is the primary recipient of the state's capital funding within the programs that we administer. This program provides two tracks. It can support a farm who's not enrolled in a federal project. And it can also provide support to a farm that is enrolled in a federal project. And when I say federal project, I'm referring to the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service EQIP or Environmental Quality Incentives Program. That is the primary funder for large farmstead improvements such as waste storage facilities, heavy use areas. This specific project, you can see the photo on the left was an access road that the farmer utilized to travel and stack manure, especially through the winter period. And on the right, we have an improved stacking area and an associated gray water pit to collect runoff from that manure stack. Those are part of the state's regulations. Right? We need to capture any runoff from waste storage. And this sets the farm up to be able to comply with state regulations as well as to continue farming.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: Common question. After we collect it, what do you do with it?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yeah, so we support farms to Farms are required to have a nutrient management plan. Nutrient management plan assesses the level of nutrients in your soil and the recommendations that you would need to grow a crop on that soil. So just like if you garden, you typically would take a soil test to say these are the nutrients required to grow beets in this location. And so farmers are required to take an analysis of that material to determine the nutrient content and then to incorporate that into their cropping plan in a mechanism to essentially be able to grow a crop with the the right amount of nutrients without over applying.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: This is fertilizer. Yeah, it's used

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: as fertilizer. So if you have a farm and you don't have what I'll call an organic on farm nutrient source, you would be required to purchase fertilizer. Just like you might purchase compost for your garden. Farms in Vermont, especially dairy farms, have this incredible resource, which is nutrients from dairy labor. And the mechanism by which we ensure that that is appropriately applied to the field is through sample analysis of the substrate, soil analysis of the field, an estimate of the crops nutrient requirements to grow, and a plan for how to utilize those nutrients on their plants.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: That makes sense. What I'm missing here is that the right picture is much prettier than the left picture. But the only difference I see functionally is that you've got a cavity that looks like it's lined. So the runoff doesn't go into the ground and someplace else.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yeah. So the photo on the left shows a stacking facility. It was a stacking area that was unimproved. So the farm was using this area to store manure, but there was no system to capture any runoff. So when rainwater interacted with that, it would simply So run off the production this new system will allow the farm to stack manure and for the runoff from that area to be captured. The farm will then be required to spread that liquid appropriately within their nutrient management plan recommendations.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: I am understanding it then.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Okay, thank you. So here's another example of a recent project and I love to share this project because the farmer was so excited he bought a drone and went out to take pictures of the site. But you can see on the left, we have essentially an unimproved area where animals have access. And on the right, the improved area. Both of these projects that I just shared were matching federal dollars. So the farmer is providing a portion of the funds, the federal government is providing a majority of the funds, and the state is making the project financially feasible to occur. Here's another example of a project on a smaller organic farm. So organic regulations require that livestock have access to the sky, but that can be troublesome when it comes to water quality regulation. So part of the process for smaller farms is identifying solutions that work for them that are cost effective for them. So this covered their heavy use area, enabled their livestock to have access to the outdoors to comply with their organic regulations, but also provided protection from essentially precipitation related runoff in that part of our area. Couple of statistics about our BMP program. As I mentioned, this is a primary use of the state capital funding. I've got a couple of graphs up there just for reference. Our average project amount is about $91,000 per project. We typically have about 43 projects per fiscal year. We have a team of seven engineers that work on these projects and we work with all different types of farm sizes. So small farms, certified small, medium and large farms. You can see the difference in staff visits to these different types of farms just in fiscal twenty five. And those visits are anything from initial visits on farms to assess the site, secondary visits to start doing engineering fieldwork, or construction oversight visits as the project gets underway. The second program that we typically apply capital dollars towards is our Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. This is also a partnership with the federal government. It's actually a quasi. So we have the USDA Farm Service Agency, the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service and the state involved in this project. And this program specifically takes land that is environmentally sensitive out of production and implements riparian forest buffers in those areas. We also support the associated infrastructure, so fences, stream crossings that might be involved in implementing a CREP project. A couple of statistics about our CREP program. You can see it's a much smaller amount of funding. The state's average payment amount in the CREP program is $4,200 per project, and we typically have about 6.5 projects per year. And 100% of the funds that the USDA puts out through the Pencilation Reserve Protection Program receive funding through the state's CREP or enhancement program. When you break down the visits by farm size, what does if you go back

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: SFO, CSFO,

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: what does that mean? Small farm operations, certified small farm operation, water quality, medium farm operation and large farm operation. Trying to keep on time here. So I'm gonna just zoom right through here. So the clean water budget process, as you may be familiar with with testimony from other clean water section 10, state agency representatives is a process that occurs before the governor proposes his budget. So there's a board. It's chaired by Doug Farnam, and it includes secretaries from four state agencies as well as members of the public. That board delineates the sort of initial target for the clean water budget for a given fiscal year. The governor then incorporates those recommendations into his budget, and then it comes forth to legislature for consideration.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: And one part that we were very, very clear when we started putting bonded dollars towards the Clean Water Initiative. And it's through the Clean Water Fund. We were very clear and it's written in statute that for those projects to be funded by the capital bill, it's not for operating, it is for capital infrastructure upgrades and implementation of things. We were very, very clear on that because we didn't want the capital bill to be used for other items within the Clean Water Initiative. And we wanted to make sure because bonded dollars cannot be used for operating costs. We had to be very clear that the projects would be eligible for bonded dollars.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Thank you, Chair. Yes, 100% of our proposed fiscal 'twenty seven funds are for infrastructure projects on farms. The proposed fiscal twenty seven budget is likely to go directly to BNP and we will supplant that budget with other funds. Program, our BNP program specifically invest between 3.5 and $5,000,000 per year. So 1.5 will be a portion of the budget that supports our BNP program for the upcoming fiscal year, but it would not constitute the entire budget required to support that program. So the clean water proposed budget includes 1.5 for water quality grants. You'll see there are other budget pressures in the Clean Water Fund, and I'm sure you'll be hearing from our state agency partners on those items. But this graph just shows you again the sort of historical capital bill allocations to our program over the years. So our previous year allocation was 3,000,000 and our proposed fiscal 'twenty seven is 1,500,000.0

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So how much of that $3,000,000 is obligated for FY 'twenty seven? How much?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: I'll let Jessica speak to the exact figure.

[Jessica (AAFM finance staff – last name unknown)]: The amount, we have about 1,000,000 point that's in actual agreements right now. We also have another 700,000 that are in agreements. We haven't brought up the agreements. The engineers are still working with the firearms for a couple different reasons. They don't have their plans set or the cost estimates finalized, so they're not ready to, we're not ready to give a final number on our grant amount. So this is our estimate is that and a lot of our grants, as Nina has said, are tied to federal EQIP program and we're waiting on EQIP contracts to be drawn up before we can match them.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: So because our program works in partnership with the federal projects, their ranking deadline is upcoming in March. So oftentimes engineers are coordinating between the two agencies to finalize the project design.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So you have 800,000. Is that what you're using for the match for ECORD? Cause you have 1.5. You said they're already encumbered in agreement. Then you got 700,000 that you're still working with a farmer.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: So the proposed fiscal $27 are not yet obligated to I'm talking '26. I'm talking '26.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: You got 3,000,000 in '26. So of the 3,000,000, I just want wanna know the flow here. So of the 3,000,000, 1,500,000.0 is obligated. Correct. 700,000 of the 3,000,000, you're still working with farmers and the parties to work towards an agreement to obligate it. Yes. So that leaves about almost 800,000.

[Jessica (AAFM finance staff – last name unknown)]: And we have primaries apply to us throughout the year and our ranking deadline for all applications we receive is the May. We've received 42 applications already that will utilize for once we rank them and choose the projects to book over.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: That's what

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I was trying to get at.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: I will just mention we do have a meeting tomorrow morning with their subcommittee to review prior year obligations and traffic details associated with those projects.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: You have one more slide. Thank you. It's disturbing.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yeah. So we talk a lot about water quality. That's our mission and goal in our program is to improve the state of water in Vermont. But it's important to reflect on the context by which we do this work, which is that dairy farms specifically, are the one type of business that has zero control over the cost of their excuse me, of the price of the product. There's a long history. I won't get into the details on how federal milk pricing works. But unfortunately, Vermont agriculture has seen similar trends across the country, which is that we're losing many small farms as regulations are increased. We've also lost 17,000 dairy cows and 70,000 acres of crop load and pasture. So farms are facing the same pressures and economic pressures that many other industries face. I will just say, I believe in my opinion that farms are facing it at a level that's extreme in comparison with other industries.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: If I may comment, the amount of detail that you have organized in here is outstanding. Is this amount of statistical analysis required by either the state or the federal, or are you just outstanding in your field?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Have an incredible team. We have an incredible data analyst on our team, and our program and our work in agriculture in general sits at an intersection that is complex. And so public transparency about our work is really important. And we strive to make as much information available to legislators and policymakers as we care.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: Okay. So what I heard you say is you came up with this way of analyzing all the information that's available rather than being told to do this.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: So the state clean water initiative, so act sixty four twenty fifteen, did lay out a process for the statewide coordination efforts. And we worked very closely with our partners at ANRDC to compile the sector based overviews for looking at agricultural sector versus stormwater versus transportation. But within our programs and the interactive Power BI report, yes, we produce somewhat voluntarily because we feel like the PDF is helpful. But sometimes you want to get into the nitty gritty details.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: That was a nice, humble answer. One last question. Your second slide shows assessment for fiscal year and type. And I'm seeing a trend of enforcement increasing since 2022. And I guess my question is, why is it going up? Is it lack of knowledge on the farmer's part or we're increasing the requirements on them and they can't keep up? Isn't a good trend unless I'm misreading this.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yeah, I'll ask my director Laura DePietro to speak to that, who oversees our day to day on the inspection enforcement.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Laura, are you there?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Oops.

[Laura DiPietro (Director, AAFM Water Quality Division)]: Yeah, trying to get to the button, sorry about that.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: No, that's fine.

[Laura DiPietro (Director, AAFM Water Quality Division)]: Yeah, good morning, Laura Depitro, the director of the division. So the regulated farms, we are seeing lots of different trends within the industry. There are a lot of small farms that are going out of business, unfortunately. And you do see expansion of these large farms, but it's really kind of a wash in terms of the cows because it's just one farm going out of business and another one absorbing it. And so those continued costs to make those improvements for those sites because a lot of our small farm sites have not received the assistance over many years that we've offered to people just because they haven't been engaged in the programs. And so, you know, just over the course of all the years that I've worked here, what I've seen is we increase regulations, then we expect more. And then we also see this, this more of the infrastructure that we have not worked on come into the system. And so that it's been continuous that this need has been there. I don't know if that helps answer your question.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: Yeah. What I heard is we're we're making it harder and harder for the small farms to survive the direction. We all want clean water, but we're killing the little farms. That's what I'm Again,

[Laura DiPietro (Director, AAFM Water Quality Division)]: mean, I said that as we see like more infrastructure, but we have since act 64, we've had to inspect these smaller farms. So I think the majority of our participants in our program are small firms. And so we help them significantly, but certainly we we can't address the bigger national trends for milk pricing. And and that is certainly a bigger challenge. But we work with as many small firms as we can.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Thank you. Kevin and then James. Brian, why do I do this? Brian.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Did you never call him

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: as a love?

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I know. I don't know why. Brian and then James. That's alright. You gotta put your big names. Kevin Kevin's.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Well, it's actually it is sort of a follow-up to to Kevin's line of questioning, and I don't think I could fit everything into one question with time at least. But I'm thinking back to your slide seven that showed the graph with the amount of phosphorus removed and the fact that it's flattening out over time. And I'm wondering if that's a function of we did the easy stuff, less money has been coming in. And this also goes back to the question about smaller farms. Did we go for the big bang for the buck and thereby do projects with big farms, and we're thereby missing smaller farms? And what's the there's a story there. Heidi, I'm asking you to tell me one.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yeah, I'll say it's nuanced. I think that there are a few important variables. There is the amount of state funding that we receive to administer our programs. There is the capacity that we have to administer those programs. There is the willingness of individual operations to make credibly expensive investments in their operations. So by all means, have we hit everything we can hit? No, no. We have both tracking gaps. We have programming gaps. We have individual farm operations that need significant direct assistance to be able to move from what is their generational transition plan before they can make an investment in a multimillion dollar project that they're required to implement because of compliance reasons. We have to acknowledge that every individual farm we work with is in a different situation. Do we have a general sense of where we would like to work and then make improvements? Yes. Part of the sort of structural changes we're making at this point in time, we're wrapping up a four year $7,000,000 federal award that looks at performance based programming. It's a somewhat new concept in the conservation realm that looks at compensating farms for the results of a management change rather than the cost. There's a lot of complexity there. It doesn't necessarily compensate them for everything that they paid, but it gives the state a better understanding of essentially targeting funds towards the most effective management changes. So our team has been able to pilot that program for four seasons. We're wrapping up the fourth season with 20 four-five management. And we're in the process of securing funding and developing a plan for Kukui to program moving forward. But that's led to about 40% of the reductions within our programs specifically. So we are finding more efficient ways to manage programs within essentially this similar amount of capacity. Yeah.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: And then I think there's one follow on, which is you have this plan about how you're going forward. And this goes back again to Kevin London's question about how are we balancing the desire to reduce the phosphorus load and how are we balancing that with the survival of these small farms? How does that affect your plan?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Great question. I'm not trying to it happen. I'm the most qualified person. We attempt to control what is in our control. So customer service that we provide farms, the types of solutions and the cost, the reasonableness of the cost of those proposed solutions. So that's what we do on our end. And at the same time, we have to work within the budget and staffing constraints that we have within our program to make those things happen. But yeah, again, I really think it gets back to what is the individual farm, what are their needs and goals in the short term, and how can we support them? Whether it's within our staff and our programs, it's working with agronomists, experts, or local conservation district personnel who might need to support them to improve other areas of their operation in order to make things happen.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Thank you. Just one more.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: Of course. Last thing. Sorry if it's my turn.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: That's kind of a great

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Oh, James, cool. It's actually a comment, but since we don't really get to deal with agriculture very much in here and I'm in an ag town, I appreciate that you say that farmers are under extreme pressure, because it's true. But I always tell people I'm not in this situation, so I have to take people's word, know, for, you know, like unless you really go and research, but overwhelmingly my farmers tell me, including not just in my towns, but like around, is that the, they want to comply and etcetera, but that they've overwhelmingly feel the state is much more adversarial versus collaborative, and that to them is a problem. And a lot of these places, even the big firms, which might surprise people, are hanging on. You think about small firms and the money's not necessarily there, which it could be run the right way, but you usually think about small firms going out because the money's not there and they get absorbed by the big ones. And there's a lot of big ones that I kind of say that expanded to stay ahead of the debt in a way, and they're struggling. And then when they get massive fines from the states that have collaboration and stuff, certainly hear about it in a town that's full of dairy farmers. So sharing that perspective that that's their view. And I probably don't disagree, but I also could be persuaded the other way. I don't know. But that's point of view. And I don't get an opportunity to share that much in this building with people. So I want to say, like, it's a real problem. I hear about it on a regular basis.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yeah, I'll invite my director, Laura Cutro, to speak briefly about how we approach the enforcement process. Laura, if you're to if you're still

[Laura DiPietro (Director, AAFM Water Quality Division)]: listening, one chime in. Thing I'll statute, it is very clear for these programs that the cost of clean water shall be borne by everybody for agriculture. And I think that, you know, that was put in twenty, thirty years ago, that recognition that farms can't just, you know, add more widgets to make more money. They are stuck in a national pricing system unlike other businesses that may be able to increase their price. And so not only, you know, to support these farms that are economically challenged right now, do we have this program up to 90% cost share? But then the VHCb, which will come in and discuss stuff with you, they're another option to help farms who really do need these projects and do need the financial assistance to bring that up to a higher cost share or reduce their cost share rather. So there is just an understanding of trying to work with folks and make sure that we can keep farms viable, but also make water clean. And then, you know, on the inspection side of things, it is not an easy space to do that work for sure. And not all farms love it, of course, as you can imagine, you're you're being regulated. But again, the the process in what we work through is to make sure people are aware of what their issues are, to get them information about all of the programs that they can sign up with, and to, when we do timelines for compliance, for instance, we work with the programs, right? We wouldn't say, you need to do this $800,000 fix. You know, we would say you need to make sure you go to the federal government and you apply and you get into that program, and then we work with that program timeline to help reduce those costs. So we try to be really mindful of that. But obviously, farmers may need to do things on their own and manage something as best they can in the interim because they, of course, cannot have pollutants going into water. And so we some of that would be on their own and not be cost shared. But yeah. I guess I hopefully, that answers your your question. I mean, I we are we are keenly aware of the challenges on the economics on farms. We deal with it on a daily basis and have for decades, but we try to do our best to try and work to have farmers utilize the resources that are available to them.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: And the other part, Laura, that you also mentioned, farms are so dependent on the price of milk and what they get paid, and that is totally out of our control. Mhmm. That's their revenue stream.

[Laura DiPietro (Director, AAFM Water Quality Division)]: Yep. And right now, the milk price is very low, so it is a very challenging

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: time. Kevin?

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: I think I've used all the right time. Thank you.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Since you mentioned milk prices, and just for the public, whoever might be watching is, we all, I think maybe people in this room don't know. People at the grocery store make way more money on milk than the farm does. Like the farm has no ability to set the price and it's one of the most unfair situations ever. And since the compact went away, they really got, I mean they've had a few good years here and there, but that whole process and what went on to have that fall apart was shameful,

[Jessica (AAFM finance staff – last name unknown)]: but it is what it is to me.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: It's not fair to them. No other industry no most other industries don't work that way. It's not right.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So I have a question on the FY '26, the 3,000,000. How much of that is used for match? Do you know? Percentage or what? I'll probably get back to

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: you with exactly the number of projects that are in our FY twenty six pipeline in regard to what number of projects and amount of money is certified for matching federal dollars and what amount is state only. As I mentioned, we have both tracks available in our program. Sometimes we work with a farm on a state only project while they're waiting for a federal contract to be in place. Right? So

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So if you could give us the number of projects for FY26, the 3,000,000 and the number of projected projects that you have for FY27, the projected projects you have for '27.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Yep. So as Jeff mentioned, we have 42 applications received. Our application deadline for this season is May 1. And so our team will be ranking reviewing all applications at that time. We have 42.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: You can give us an update and what the cost

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: of those projects would be

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: that you have so far.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: We can give a rough estimate, but keep in mind, in order to develop a cost estimate for an individual project, it does take engineering process and working through costs of proposed materials. We can give, like, some rough figures. That's what we need, the rough figure. How many

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: projects are projected, what you're seeing right now for FY twenty seven, and what the costs of those are at this point?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: Would it be appropriate to follow-up via email with those figures for you? Yes.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: It would be a fair assumption you've got more requests than you have funding for.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Typically speaking, yes. But it's not all for the 1.5. Yeah. It's 11,900,000 in the big bill.

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: So we have a portion of funding from different sources. And again, 1.5 will not cover all of the needs for this program. We run between 2.5 and 5,000,000 on a given year. So it'll be a portion of our budget for the BNP program. But historically, we've relied on the capital fund for that.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: That's why you have to prioritize. Okay. And

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: I would say that's not always the farmer's favorite part of

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: the conversation. I'm sure it's not. Anything else?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: All for me. Thank you for

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: your time. Hey, thank you. If you could give us that information,

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: that will help us and mark up.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Did you guys get a new Kevin tonight? He's so cheerful today. Oh, I'm cheerful.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Thank you. We're gonna be very much fine because we're running a little late in our schedule. We have forest and parks. They were scheduled at 09:15, so I'm gonna give a little plug. I know some folks were tied up on on the road. I get that. That's no problem. But we did have a quorum, and we had three people in the building that were not here. So it delayed us in fifteen minutes in getting started, which then bumps everything back. So if you're in the building and we're due to get started, please come in because then it impacts the whole schedule. So now we're running fifteen minutes late. So that's

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: six per day.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: And I understand the folks are tied up on the road. Don't worry about that. So we're gonna keep working. If you need to take a break, take the first straight.

[Jessica (AAFM finance staff – last name unknown)]: Yes.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So we are in section we're in two sections. We're in Section 9, which is Forest And Parks, and it is Line 76 And 77. And we're also Section 10, clean water section for Lines 91. Jane, thank you, folks, for your patience with no more running weight. So, Danny, welcome. Good morning.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: Good morning.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: Good morning. For the record, I'm Danielle Pitzko. I'm the commissioner of Forest Parks and Recreation, and we're here to talk to you about what's in the FY '27 proposed capital bill that's new and updates on FY '26. The way we sort of organized it was the first to go through FY '27, and we have two items there. We have in section 10, clean water, forest roads and parks infrastructure, And then we have three updates on FY '26. I thought I'd start off just to kind of high level overview of the three buckets where we have capital investment overall for FPR. Our first one is parks infrastructure and rehabilitation. As you know, I'm hoping you've been to several of our state parks. We have 55 state parks all across the state. We say there is a state park within twenty minutes of every monitor. This year, just under a million visitors to our state parks. We did see a little bit of a hit due to the Canadian visitation and the drought. But overall, customer feedback was fantastic with really good customer service and facilities are looking fantastic. So that this part is really just about infrastructure investments within our designated state parks. We do have another line item called public lands access infrastructure. We like to call it play. And this is outside of designated state parks. So FPR owns and manages for Vermonters about 200,000 acres. And there's a lot of infrastructure needs outside of designated state parks. Think about trailheads, roads, trails. A great example is the South End Of Willoughby. I'm sure many of you have been there. It's a fantastic location, high visitation. In order for us to manage people, we have to invest in some of the infrastructure like parking, even restrooms. And then our last one is in section 10, which is the clean water funds. We have over 600 miles of roads within ANR lands, and we invest in strategic implementation of BMPs to protect water quality and build forest resilience on our road network. So those are our three sort of buckets of where investments go. I'm going to start off, and then I'm going to pass it to Frank Spaulding, who's our Parks Project Manager, to give you the Parks update. Then we'll go we'll swap back back. I'll come out at the end again. Okay. So our first one is section 10. This is line 91. I got the line numbers off your website. This is called forestry access road quality improvements. As you know, the clean water budget is done every year. Last year for FY '26, we had 200,000 in capital and proposed for FY '27 is also 200,000. As I mentioned, we have 600 plus miles of roads and should My next slide will have to show you how we identify those areas for improvement, but this really is investing in areas that are hydrologically connected so they have a direct water quality impact, implementing best management practices to minimize sedimentation going into water bodies, and then also to build forest road resilience into the future. We've been doing this now for about five years. I will say after the 'twenty three and 'twenty four floods, those areas that did receive investments and improvements were withstood the sort of the major rain events that we had. So it was a real testament that these improvements are making a big impact. We didn't have to rush out to mitigate the impacts. It was a real testament to this work. If you look on your left, there's a before, and you can see what it looks like afterwards. I'll be honest, when we first started getting these funds, we didn't know how to move the money out the door quickly. But now five years later, we have a large, we call it bundled roads contract, where we have a large contract. We work with BGS, where we have a project manager, and we we can easily get projects out the door. And we're seeing, like it's fantastic to see our ability to scale up to meet the dollars that we have. And estimate is we have about 40 to $50,000,000 worth of work ahead of us. So this is $200,000 but there is additional funding, there's general fund capital, and then we leverage federal dollars as well. This is just an example of how we actually target where those investments go. We've done what we call a road erosion inventory on all of our roads, where we walk it. Well, first we identify the hydrologically connected roads. So those road segments that will impact water quality, that could. Then we look at all the practices and say, one's failing, this one needs to be updated, and we and we pretty much prioritize them. So we have a prioritized pinned area of where we need to actually make improvements. That's how we go about investing money. We do the highest priorities first, And we try and do it by you have to make it efficient as well for the contracts that go out, so we do it by region as well. So what did

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: you say was the total amount of work?

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: We've done the inventory, we estimate 40,000,000 to $50,000,000 of us. So combined between general funds and the capital, we would have $1,200,000 in FY twenty seven post in the clean water. And when we're looking at meeting the CNVL and reducing phosphorus, this would be allocated to the forestry load reduction, because it's in rural areas, and this is where you really make the impact in the forestry related segment. Because the reality is forests are natural contributors to phosphorus. So working with roads is our best investment.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I just wanna be clear on the money. So for f y twenty seven, there's the 200,000 our PAA. And did I hear you say there's also a million in clean water fund? Correct.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Yeah.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Great. So there's 1,200,000.0 total. Correct. I see a hand chunk.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Just quick, so you have a map of that, of all the roads that you got, all 600 miles of roads, you've done this prioritization.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: That was our first step in this process was to do the assessment piece before we started investing. Yeah.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: Great. And roughly how many people were involved in doing all this assessment?

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: Well, we actually did a we had contracted that out. So we had an engineering team that was boots on the ground doing the work. And then now we have a GIS layer that helps us manage it. We can go back in and, like, we have before pictures and after pictures so we can really see sort of the progress. So we self better. Gotcha. Yep.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So the projected 1,200,000, how many I know this is just one section of the state, the system for full state. I'm assuming you would really look at your very high priorities first and then see from there, should you do a high priority or moderate priority, because it's all in the region.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: The 1.2, how many of those could you get done? I'm gonna actually show you later. I have projects that we are working on for FY '26 and then FY '27 to give you an idea. In the bundled road contracts, we sort of we call them by roads. So like and and for FY '26, it's primarily focused in what we call D 4. That's like the Berry District. It's easier when you're trying to execute with the contractors in one area. I don't know the miles of roads, and I can get that information for you, but it's probably gonna be five or six different segments of roads that we'll be able to get to.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Just so we have some ballpark. Yeah.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: Let me get to follow-up with that, and I can probably give you some maps that that could show you that that in more details. If I can come back to this because I'll give you updates, but I'm gonna pass it to Frank to do parts. That's okay? Mhmm.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Good morning. Morning. For the record, Frank Spaulding, parks projects manager for the Monstee Parks. Best job in the state.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: And sometimes we see you on TV. Few times.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: I advance it or do you advance it?

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: You advance it.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Folks who've been in this committee for a while probably heard me say this. Could probably recite it back to me. Vermont State Parks infrastructure, we we take the we we've been receiving money as a general appropriation from this committee for probably twenty years now. It's broadly defined, which allows us to be flexible among the projects, both in terms of year it's performed as well as projects within the same year, allows us to maintain cash flow with money going out the door. So what we generally do is we take the money that's appropriated by this committee and we assign it to different categories of projects, and they're shown on the screen back here. Smaller scale infrastructure, also call regional infrastructure. That is allocated out to our four different management regions. We have four project managers, one in each region, and they execute smaller scale. I'll say smaller scale because everything we do is pretty small compared to some of stuff we talk about. But smaller scale infrastructure, locally executed, locally permittable, can be done in that first year. And what we do is we assign roughly a million, million plus aggregate out to the regions from each year. And we don't really look at it as a budget. We look at it as their ability to spend. And so they have the ability to spend about, whatever, 225,000 or 200,000 per region in that fiscal year. And what they don't spend gets pulled back in and applied to larger projects, and then they get their next year's money and they just keep going. So it's it's a pattern of spending that that the regions execute. And this is really you'll see this is like roofs on houses and roofs on lean to smaller scale projects that are usually customer facing. Renovated interior of a bathroom that's not otherwise slated for reconstruction. Really, that's really the face of our state park system. And just for a set of scale, we have over 100 bathrooms. I think I counted eight twelve seats of state park system. We've got a lot going on with the third to fifth largest municipality to aggregate all our work and all our people. We're a pretty large organization. And it's a great example of the project on the screen behind me. That's the new ADA launch of Kettle Pond. It allows Vermonters of all abilities to access this real gem of the water, water body in the ground forest executed by regional staff and not by regional staff, but under the coordination of regional staff. We hold a small amount in a short term reserve called the Emergency Wastewater Reserve. That month number gets lower and lower every year because through the larger projects we'll talk about later, we've actually been able to really keep up with our waste block. But we hold a small amount in reserve in case when they open up the park in the spring, that waste water system doesn't pump station blows up, that sort of thing. We take that money and apply it right to that project, get it fixed, get it recapitalized immediately without impacting other projects. If we make it through the spring without something blowing up, we'll take that money and we'll apply it to a larger project. Usually it's contingency on a larger project that went over budget because we always find something that surprises us. The last category is major capital projects. That's like large coil buildings, full scale park renovations, and I can talk about those as I go. This is the gift of wood shop. Mean, you might have seen it on the cover of your report. The the the the Really

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: boring picture.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I I'm I'm really know,

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: I just said that, actually. Because because, you know, we weren't as folks who've been on this committee realize how hard we work to get that funding for these shops. This is not public facing, but it it it supports the critical function of of of our staff working in these parks day in, day out. And we felt we hit the balance between it being nice but not being too nice. So so somewhat boring is okay with us as long as it wasn't we we wanted people to to feel pleasant coming to work. We also also, what's important in my mind, this is me speaking on, is that we have we require our maintenance staff to to keep our parks at a standard that's fit for the public. And we felt, I felt that one of the reasons this project is important is because it puts them in a facility that echoes and mirrors that requirement of them. And so we felt this facility hit that mark. We just finished it. It went into service this summer, and I'll bring your attention to the photo on your right. The pellet boiler. This entire facility is heated absent a fossil fuel. We have air source heat pumps for air conditioning in the summer and shoulder season heating, and then a wood pellet automated system that fires it during the depths of one. So right now, the bill the pellets have been churning through that thing pretty frequently. I've watched the emails go by, and the commissioning took place in the the heat of August. So we had a few more corrections to make as we hit the cold weather, but the the the engineer asked for the cost of our electricity. They determined the setting of the thermostat based on the most economical heating. So really proud of us. Very proud of us. This is what we accomplished. This was the this was like big bill money, but you authorized the the spending of it. Rotten is up next. That is it's a it's it's gonna be basically, if you take the picture that you see, you cut off the little tiny short part of the building, which is the more office portion of it. Everything to the left of that is what's getting built at Groton because Groton already has a an office style building. And and that's matched full match with federal funding for the maintenance shop. And so that money's in hand. And we'll talk about that a little bit later too. It's an exciting project. We do those construction management projects. I think Commissioner Petco talked about how you can use these contracts to hire management, project management. And this is a great way to get the the project done by hiring construction manager because there's a lot of fast to do work, the site work, wastewater, a lot of stuff going on. And the Gifford Woodshop was actually managed by our regional staff person. Was ready to step in, but she just took it. And found weird stuff on the ground. We had to stop and remove stuff. But generally, it was a pretty seamless project in terms of the management of it. And that was partnership with Russell Construction down in Rutland, this project. So Groton's up next, and that's that's gonna be $3.03 plus million dollars. And that's that that's talked about later. The other

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So you're gonna address that later?

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Mhmm.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: I'll talk about it later, or I can answer questions now too if you How

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: much do you have in the bank for it right now?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: All of them.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I have all the

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: 3 Yeah. That's what that's a lot of what the 26 money was slated for was to make that match. That's, like, $1.1.0.21 $100,000. It's in the spreadsheet. But and that's matched with federal funding. We can only use the federal funding for the shop. We can't use the federal funding for the wastewater. Sorry. We can use the federal funding for a portion of the wastewater that's only supported by the SHOP because with federal funding, you have to encumber all the properties that SHOP serves, which we've done. So it's a long story, but the total project is gonna be like three six because we have to do site work and un and unrelated site work and support systems that can't be federal funded. So we have to split the project in half.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: But you but with the federal funds, that

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: would So the funding.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Whole project.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: We're funded. Totally funded. Yep. The other big So we have several large types of large scale projects. We have the shops I'm talking about. Really represents a large project. The other thing we have, the other big thing we have going on is the three acre rule. There'll be 19 parks, something, I forgot the number, 103 acres with 13 acres, 103 acres of impervious surface that we're treating. We got 2,000,000 of ARPA funds a couple of years ago that we were pushed to spend. And we spent them and completed the work at four parks and did partial work at two more parks for the 2,000,000. The general consensus is that we got, like, let's say 5,800,000 and the projects are extended out through 2035. That's how we schedule them. Unless there's separate money for that, we have to eat it out of our capital, which is where it is.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So I see that one year pause. So are you doing a one year pause going forward, or have you already done that?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: One one year pause is 2026. So what happens, we work very tight very closely with facility engineering section out of that's housed in DEC. They're basically our in house engineering firm. So we have to pay them. It's also in a spreadsheet. Because of the ARPA funding, we had a schedule I'm not blaming ARPA. It's just an explanation of what happened. We had a schedule that we're gonna do these permits, then we're gonna start picking them off one or two at a time. You had funded You had actually separately funded us to start that work in a separate line item in the budget several years ago. And we started that, and all of sudden, ARPA money came. So they had to stop that progress and work on getting those done. So they did that. I mean, North Hero, Kingsland Bay, Thunder Hill, just a couple I'm forgetting right now. Amazing work, amazing projects. But we looked at what was ready to bid and and their workload. And we also they also do all our water wastewater. And we felt that that was important to get that back up to speed because of all the work that was going on. So they're doing water wastewater projects this year, then and we're gonna pick up the pre acre bidding next year and start kicking along.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: And with the ARPA funds, there were requirements, different timelines that that that we had to meet in terms of when the money had encumbered and then when all the bills had to

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: be paid.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Yeah. Yeah. We had that money on We had

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: to prioritize for five years the ARPA money over any other statement.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: And it's all expended. I got a couple of accounting things to fix, but it's all been expended. Hit our target with that. The real trick was that we actually had more projects in ARPA funding. So we actually had to use capital money to backfill some of the ARPA work. Because if we didn't do the project, we would spend the ARPA money and if we Lose

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: the money.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Yeah. So that's what we did. So that's that's the beauty of the flexibility that we allow in the capital line that that's that we're lucky enough to get. It's allows us to really move that money out the door. It's really appreciated. Any questions about three acre work beyond that? Facilities engineering have been incredibly valuable. I think we were one of the first people to start kicking off three acre work. And there was a lot of learning going on. We proposed fixes we weren't sure would be accepted or not. So there's a lot of negotiation with the regulators figuring out what would be proper and what not. So they've navigated that fairly well. We wouldn't be where we are without. The other thing you'll see is for the FY '27 money. For FY '26, we had slated Grand Isle State Park toilet building, which is the top of our priority list for toilet building replacements. It's a teardown rebuild. It's very interesting structure. We we didn't have the funding for that unless we matched with LFCF money, and we did. So we actually had a federal grant to pay for half of that project. And then we also matched used federal grant to match portions of the water projects that we had on the calendar already. So we were able to quickly apply for and get matching money for that, which freed up some extra money in '26, which we applied. We're gonna do Lake Saint Catherine Toilet Building, which is the second toilet building on the list for a replacement. And what we're gonna be able to do is I'm glad for that because we can use the architect to pull one design for two locations. So that's that's for economy of scale, it's really good for us. So we're gonna expand that and do another toilet building with the with the the with the 27.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So do those toilet buildings also include showers? Or

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Yes. So so we back in 2000, we did a huge survey of the state park system, and we set up some standards for construction where we would remove the showers from the toileting facilities because of the humidity and the mess and water management. So we'd build separate droughts. So every toilet building we do now has showers that are separate. Also, we included, and we started including these probably five, ten years ago. We put a family restaurant in all our new facilities so that it's essentially a gender neutral facility so that anyone can call them family restaurants, but they're essentially gender neutral facilities so that anyone can use it without It's facility that's available on the showers. There are multiple real estate cheap, not always.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: They probably are,

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: but the showers are universally accessible as well.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So off that picture, which one is the toilet building? Which one would be the shower?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: So this is just a representative picture. This is actually the facility at Maidstone State Park. That's Maidstone. Be reversed. Sorry. Polarity might yell. So the the building in the background with solar panels on it is the original toilet building that's renovated. And then the building with the gable end you're looking at is the shower facility stand alone. We did we did them at Maidstone D. R. State Park. This is an example of a toilet building where we build a shower addition and renovate the existing structure. The structures at Grand Isle and Saint Catherine are so far gone that they're full tear downs. And we've and then we've never it's been a long time since we designed a brand new toilet building. Molly Stark has one. Has the the last new toilet building, Brighton, the Little River. But we're gonna have an architect. And we actually think it's gonna turn out to look something like this because this is a great the ability to have two separate structures allows you to flex into the site so you can put them almost anywhere.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So So which one did Lake Saint Catherine? When was that one built that you're gonna be?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: So it'll be a nineteen fifties, nineteen early, nineteen sixties park. So and and interesting to know, much like me, they're all 50 years old, so they're all historic. So so we figured out about 78% of our structures are now eligible for the Liberal State International Registry. And as a consequence of that, we've taken twenty twenties or some older capital funds, and we have because we tore down the North State Park, if you're familiar with, we removed all the structures in North State Park. Our penance for doing that because that was quote historic was that we're doing a mid century modern study at the State Park buildings. So we've hired a consultant, $3,640,000 dollar contract to inventory all our mid century modern buildings. So that's kind of like what VTrans did with the Green Arch Bridges. So when you come to a when you come to a project, all that legwork's done. It shortens your conversation with DHP. DHP has been great to work with. They understand that in order for us to keep to keep parts viable and keep people coming back, you have to improve them. You have to bring them into the century. Yeah. Literally, the century. So so, they're very accommodating in terms of when we make changes and stuff like that. And we're very accommodating back. The cult cultural resources is part of our mission. So we're not we're not out there just knocking stuff down for the phone.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So how much does a new toilet facility cost? Ballpark. So

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: this cost around 600.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: 600,000?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Yeah. This is a renovation. So I really don't know how much a new one's gonna cost at this point.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Included the shower and the toilet? Yeah.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: The toilet was interior renovation. I think she had actually that one got a new foundation too, because a lot of these buildings

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: They're not cheap. That's a massive cost.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: And we we spent a lot of time putting money underground too, water, wastewater. A former colleague of mine called the circulatory system of the parks. And you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars when nobody sees the thing except the water tap. You know, that's

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: You're your own little municipality.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: We are our own little. We have 35 public water systems. We have nine indirect discharge systems and three spray fields for effluent.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: You don't think about that when we see the state parks, but you have a whole

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Sandbar and

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: all piping.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Yeah. Sandbar and Burton Island are pulling surface water and are treated, filtered, treated before it's served. And those are clouds for our operators. It's it's it's quite a quite it's quite an undertaker. I'm I'm totally off schedule here. Can I ask the question?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: It's the problem.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Are you gonna keep going?

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Yes. Keep going. Alright.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: So the I can't read this because there's so much. The remaining balance for FY '26 is 2.9. So this changes almost daily. We have a practice now in our central office. We're always in the office Wednesdays, and I do the balance sheet for the capital money. I have a spreadsheet that I put on the table. And our mantra is, what are we gonna do to get this number down this week? And so we're watching it very closely. Like I said before, the flexible funding structure allows movement, the projects. We have six currently funded projects that are matched with approved federal funding. And I've made approved federal funding in bold because we have the grant agreement. It's been approved by the National Park Service. And that totals 2,937,000

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Federal dollars.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: That's federal dollars. That's matched with capital funds. So the the the 2.9 of the 2.965 of the 26 money, a portion like, good portion of that is matched up with federal funds for projects that are going out the door. And then also we've already matched projects for FY '27 funding in anticipation of receiving that funding. To top it off, to add to that, the additional federal funding forecast for that grant agreement, for that grant program, up to $3,000,000 for eligible state projects. We're not gonna spend all of that in state parks, but state parks has incredible ability to spend that kind of money because we're used to spending that kind of money. And, also, we have the big projects. We have the total buildings that are $700,000 that that that make that grant process worthwhile. You don't wanna do these federal grants for $2,000. You just don't. It's not worth the time. But but we have the big projects, which means as we think about and I'm not gonna talk about '28, '29, even though we're not near there yet, but we gotta think. We're already thinking down the road 2829 is what we're gonna match this money out there with because it has to be a pro it has to be allocated, and then it has to be spent within five years. So we we have and then in order to get that money, you have to go down the road with your design and planning to be ready for it. So it's it's a it's quite adjusting.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So any of the federal money that comes in has to be out the door within five years?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Within five years, the grant against the matching time allowed, and they they the federal government stopped. I shouldn't say the federal government. That's unfair. The they they started started following their rules, so they wouldn't give us extra time. I guess that's a fair way to say it. That's that's quite that's quite a liability. Not a liability. That's quite an opportunity actually for us to leverage that federal funds to really park the program. And we understand we're not talking about twenty twenty nine, but just it's insight into how we plan our projects, how the flexibility of funding allows us to plan our projects and move money around so that we can really attack the projects that are ready and and and and and going from there. I'll I'll mention again facilities engineering division, our in house or policy in house engineers. They have five, six works of tiers of work ready. They're it's they have a pipeline of progress. It's not it's a scoping design. They're I think they're out there last week meeting with regions, like, what's next? What's next? What's next? We were able to match federal funding in, like, a week and a half or two weeks because we had the projects ready and designed and ready to go.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: And the federal money is drawn down based on completion of work?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: You have to change the ground. Yep. Yep. It's it's it's it's it's the it's drawn down when you've actually made the change on the ground. So you build a building, you get the bill, and you then you get the money back. You're reimbursed, basically. Yeah. We have the ability. The the state sets aside a reimbursement account so we're not drawing down the infrastructure and then pay back in. So this is the plan for '20 is this '27 or '26? What's what's the '26?

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Okay. So it's '26.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Keep going. What you see up here, and I have a bigger version of this for people my age, the the this is the projects we have kind of on our tracking list. And and I couldn't just do '26 and '27 because, again, the money is flexible, and we we we will fund projects out of multiple years of funding to keep the cash flowing. So this this this basically chart and we'll be talking with the repo committee, I think, Friday.

[Laura DiPietro (Director, AAFM Water Quality Division)]: Mhmm.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: So we'll bring this again back again to the repo committee. This

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: is

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: the plan for 2627. This is where the money's going. The items in bold are additional work that was added because of the extra $400,000 put in this year. And it includes really trying to take care of our housing. I think I'm the only person on the parts team in this room that was born in Vermont. So the director of a team came to Vermont to work in state parks. And when you come to Vermont to work in state parks, a lot of our staff do, our employees do, a lot of them stay here. I think I can name several people that have stayed here and raised their families in Vermont. But it started with working in state parks and having a place to live. Because if you come to Vermont to work for the summer and try to find housing, it's pretty tough. So we have staff housing that we are diligent in trying to make sure it stays up to standard. So the two projects in the air, like, you'll see Duplex Oliver, Duplex Grand Isle, those are old style one family houses. We're splitting them in half so we can get two employees housed there instead of just one. This really this really helps us track our workforce. Four hundred four hundred seasonal employees, maybe? No. 450 seasonal employees, not making a ton of money, but come to Vermont and work for us. And the fact that we can fill that staff, I think, says amazing things about people doing their job out there. I couldn't do it. But the they just they they every year, they hire four fifty people to open the state parks.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So the 40,000 for the duplex in Oldberg and 40,000 for the one in Grand Isle, this is when the park is open during the summer and you have a resident person.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: Correct.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So right now you can only house one person.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Well, I mean, so

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: At each of those?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Almost said back in the day, and I told myself I wouldn't say that.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I just said back in

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: the day. When the parks were first constructed, the the housing was was intended for year round park staff majors. And when that back in the late seventies eighties when we came to rely on special funds instead of general fund, all those, well, went away. And so the houses were suitable for single family. So two bedrooms, bigger than they need to be for someone just crashing after the summer. And and and so with the duplex, it allows us to create two living spaces that are suitable either for single people or a couple. We're probably probably you know, that could that could stay there. So it allows us to double the amount of housing equity that can provide.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So the 400,000 additional, which is in the BAA, is going towards those projects that are highlighted. The dollar amounts are highlighted.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Correct. And and so it help it's helping us get Saint Catherine over the line to a to a portion of that because I was able to recover some funding from the '27 funding from the federal Land and Water Conservation Funds we got. So that created some space. And then this allowed us to get that over the line. The other projects are, we have the cabins, which we'll talk about in repo too, are out to bid as a construction management contract. I'll talk about a repo, but but I I have a feeling that the amount of money we have is gonna get us done at new discovery. And I'm and I'm I'm questioning whether we have enough funds to make the cabins at at Carmi, which is the other location suitable from a economy of scale pool. So I wanted to supplement that cabin money to make sure Carmine is a suitable project for economy of scale. So that was the amount that's suitable for that. As part of a cabin project as well for New Discovery, which is a beautiful park, but very underutilized, especially where we're building the cabins, is there's a large field there that as part of a cabin project, are we gonna run the conduit in the same trench that we're gonna electrify the cabins with? It's gonna be empty. It's gonna be blank at this point in time. The intent was to create the conduit so that we could electrify sites within this field and start looking at electrical hookups in the state parks to expand visitation for people who just need that. And electrical hookups are great because it allows peep it's kinda like a cabin on wheels, but it also allows people to come and stay without running their generator at night. And they may have solar panels, but they may not be suitable. Generator noise can be they're they're much quieter now, but there's always a conversation about generator. So we we've we're ready to try this and do this. It was noted it was noted in the Barry Dunn study, Barry Dunn report about future state parks about how this is where we need to go. The cabins tee it up. This money can help us get that out into the field literally. And then I've set aside some money. We have a we're just talking about this in our project meetings. We have a list of probably 10 structures that need to not be there. And they're expensive to get rid of. And but they also when I first came into this job, we had a huge list of infrastructure needs. And I quickly realized that you attack that from both ends. You attack it by doing the work, and you attack it by getting rid of stuff you don't need. And and best example of that is North Arrow State Park. Other examples will include the center of Cheney House, the the removal structures of Central Rock. But we have several structures that have outlived their purpose their their their purpose. They are not they are not suitable for repurposing, either in situ or another location. And and, for example, the farmhouse at Little River, we need that there, but we don't need that structure there because I walked into that to do a serve to do a walk through, and I was sick for three days because of the mold and stuff in our house. Building needs to go away. So we have in order to take buildings down, so I just mentioned 78% of our parks are store, we have to go through a process of getting them through BHP, specimen surveys, flood surveys, demolition plans, recovery of the site, and possible mitigation for removal of historic structure. And we're ready to tackle that with DHP now. So that was the other other other purpose of that money. And we just thought to be upfront about it and say it costs money to remove, but it removes a liability. I've I've said to people, the demolition is the last construction cost you pay.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I'm trying to figure out how you get to 400 here. So dollar amounts

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: aren't working out. How can I help you?

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So there's 400 additional being added, what the governor on top of the 2.5. And so what I'm seeing is what's involved.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: I may have missed something. Don't do

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: math in public. But you got the total budget column there. I'm going to go to St. Catherine. There's a 100,000 there in FY twenty six. There's 400,000 in FY twenty seven. So is the full new 400,000 specifically to go to St. Catherine or is it divvied up for those other projects that are highlighted in fold?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: So the 4 and five is $500,000 for St. Catherine total building. I don't know how much new total building is gonna cost there and what the other associated site work is for that. So I wanna make sure I funded that. A portion of that $400,000 would be part of the new money.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: But you don't know how much?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: It would be the difference between

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Because I'm just trying to

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Because I yeah.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: But you got 40,000 each for the Alberg and Grand Isle housing. Then there's 80,000 for the car mine, which is out to bid. Then you got 50,000 for the underutilized conduit for the conduits to those sites.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Yeah.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: And then you got 20,000? 50. 50,000.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: So that's $2.60. So 100 minus $2.60 is what the portion of 400 is for sick apnea.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Didn't follow. Gotta follow. I'm just trying to follow it. Now may not be the time because we're

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: we

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: gotta really sit down with the numbers. I wanna

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Yeah. I want the commission to talk about the other part of the budget too.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I wanna see where that forecast is gonna go.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Go backwards. That way. So I think it's they did the the smaller projects add up to $2.60, then you take $400,000 out take $26,200 and $400,000, whatever that balance is. 40. Thank you. $1.40 is is is embedded within the 400,000 for Saint Catherine Toilet. And then the rest of Saint Catherine Toilet building is made up by the savings from being able to pull in federal funds from other projects. That make sense? Yes. Andrew.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Before you are you getting up? Before you get up, when when are we set to meet on Friday? Because I didn't put her on the calendar.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: For Rebo?

[Nina Gage (Agency of Agriculture, Food & Markets – Water Quality Division)]: We didn't hear back. Oh. So we can do any kind

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: So we may not be coming in for Rebo. I guess we are coming in.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: We're available to you.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: What kind of I couldn't remember who sent it.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: I remember getting it, but it was you. And as soon as you said that, I

[Unidentified Committee Member]: was like, that's great. Okay. We'll figure it out. Thank you.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Okay. We need to okay.

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: I'll get out of the chair. I could be quick. Yeah. Any other questions? We'll glad to come back. So don't know where it is.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: I I appreciate you calling out the scale of state parks. I think when you go to state parks, the six places where you go to relax, you don't realize across the state, we have $280,000,000 of assets. It's it's and we are, like, the second biggest city when we actually pull people. So it's there's a lot that goes behind the scenes. I just wanna recognize Frank's talent. We're so fortunate to have him. I just wanna do give an update quickly on PLAY, public land access infrastructure for FY '26. We have a pipeline system in FBR where our staff in the field put projects forward. We rank them based on safety, public access. It's a criterion based prioritization. This is the list of projects that came out for the $700,000 FY '26. You can see it's everything from trail improvements, ADA accessibility, even parking. So this is really about access and people management going forward. We have five projects that are complete. Most of them are active and a couple of them are in historic review of progress for preservation. So actively moving forward.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So you have five projects completed, but you have 17 on top of that plane?

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: Yes. They're they're at some they're active. We have a umbrella contracts that we use that we can access. So they they probably are in process and would most likely be this field season, we'll get most of the work done. But there's always a a lot of times it's great because a lot of times we'll start the process of let's get historic preservation done, then we're primed up to be ready to execute. So for FY '27, we just went through our prioritization process, and these are the projects that were identified for funding. We don't start them until actually the beginning of the fiscal year, but you can see similar types of projects, dollars 700,000, bridges, trail construction, fire towers, even. I think in the previous one, it's fire towers. So really, we had FY 'twenty six was the third year that we had direct funding capital investments for areas outside of designated state parks. It's such a huge impact. There's so much need out there, and it's really nice to have, really, the separation between parks and the areas outside of designated state parks.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: Can I ask a quick question?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: I

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: have a little more about the Okinawa Mountain Fire Lookout Paintings. You describe what a historical review between Yes. All of

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: Well, fire powers are historical. So we have to go through historic preservation review to make sure we're keeping some of the historic intent of the structure. We had an assessment done of all eight fire towers on state lands, and we're doing making sure we're preserving historic how how would you say it, Frank?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: The context care context, character, and

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: cultural resources of firetower. We're also doing it for safety improvements as well and for the sort of the durability of because it's there now areas where for people to go for recreational assets.

[Kevin Winter (Member)]: So that's $80,000, not for review, but for complete painting.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: Yeah. Painting. We have actually, we're so fortunate last year. A couple of years, we got economic development authority funds. We had over a million dollars that we were able to use to help us revitalize fire towers. We have more to go, but it was slowly now that we have the plan in place. When we have resources, we're moving forward with fire tower restoration. People love them, and safety is really important on this, but we have to do it right. So that's that was line item 77 play. For section 10, clean water funds, We get the $200,000 in capital, but we also get general funds, and we also bring in federal dollars for Lake Champlain Basin program. This is the list of projects that were funded in FY twenty six. The larger one at the bottom, the bundle roads contract, that is multiple locations across the state. But you can see sort of the these are the roads that we're investing in. And then in FY 'twenty seven, this is the proposed. Again, we don't start until we know till fiscal year. I looked up the bundled roads contract. They are mostly in, this case, in D3, which is our Essex District. And it's several different areas you'll get all the road networks done. I will share that list with you as a follow-up so you get a good scale of what the funding does do. But that's where the money's supposed to go to for FY '27. I think it's fast as I could. I'm happy to answer any questions. Any follow-up? I know the team may be meeting on Friday.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: If morning, I would be too.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: Sometime soon. I'll follow-up.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Figure it out in the hallway.

[Danielle Fitzko (Commissioner, Forests, Parks & Recreation)]: We're grateful for your attention to detail and the support you you've provided us. It really does provide access to Vermonters and visitors and Spot's safety and keeping up with it.

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: You do a great job. Thank you. You're doing an amazing job. It's well appreciated by the visitors. Thank you. Any other questions? We're gonna take a quick break. Any other?

[Frank Spaulding (Parks Projects Manager, Vermont State Parks)]: Thank

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: you.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Thank you, Gina Giles. So

[Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: let's take a very quick break. We are behind schedule by probably twenty minutes. We have a long time frame to work on the parole board's language. And so let's come back within five minutes. Let's take a great test for