Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Welcome, folks. This is House Corrections and Institutions Committee. It is Tuesday, February 17. We're starting our work this week, finishing up testimony for our capital budget, the proposed governor's capital budget adjustment. And we have with us Gus Sealy from Housing Constitution Board to go over some background of the ACD as well as the 2,800,000.0 that's being requested in the governor's budget. So Gus, welcome.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Thank you very much, Madam Chair. For the record, I'm the Executive Director at VHCb. With me is Stacy Sugillia, who has been our Ag Director and is now our Associate Director of Conservation and Liz Gleason, who runs the Farm and Forest Liability Program, which manages the water quality grants. And so we'll take turns at the table here. I understand you've heard from the Housing and Conservation Coalition last week. I didn't listen to their testimony, so I hope I'm not repetitive. And part of our goal here is not just to talk about the 2,800,000.0 in the capital bill, but to make sure you know what you saw last week with your constituents who utilize our fund. And maybe there's some other things that we can do for your constituents. Want you to know, because you hear from them far more than I do, when you should tell them to make our phone there. If you wanna know why we're here, I've been in this room, I think as long as the chair has been here. And some years that has been because the budget's been really tight and the appropriations committee would ask for some help. And the rationale for why we're in the capital bill at all is that the benefits that we give homeowners will still be there when the bonds are paid off. There's a housing we invest in has to stay permanently affordable, the conservation benefits are permanent. So that was the rationale for why. And you'll find other states to spend capital dollars on conservation and on housing. And specifically in terms of water quality, when I was in this room about 2017, former member Butch Shaw said, Isn't a lot of that conservation work? Shouldn't we be counting that toward our water quality goals? And I said, Sure. And he said, Okay. And he really renamed a chunk of our funding. It was his idea to rename a chunk of our funding in order to prove to the EPA, which had an order at that point just on Lake Champlain, now there's an order on Lake Macphanega. But the state was taking those orders seriously and was investing to clean up. So that's how we got. And we're pleased to say we support the governor's recommend here. This first picture is from Fletcher and about twenty five years ago, a group of alumni from our AmeriCorps program decided there ought to be a statewide mentoring program for kids who live with affordable housing. And they started the DREAM program. About fifteen years ago, they came to us and said, We want these kids to have a summer experience. And so we helped them buy some land in Fletcher. Last summer, we helped them buy an island in the lake where the camp is located. And that's obviously water quality benefits here, but that's why we're opening here. Here's our statutory purpose. When we think about our work, we think about conservation in the broadest terms as rural economic development, because the statute tells us that we're to pay attention to that conservation, not just for its own sake, but for quality of life and for economic vitality. The photo here is a development that took three years to get through the courts in Putney. But part of the deal and part of the community support for this, and Mike will tell you that despite the opposition of a single neighbor, the select board of the community was very secure, was that one acre was maintained as a community garden for the whole community. This is right across from the co op in Putney, and it's the site of the farmer's market in summer. So it's a different way that we put housing and conservation together. I won't dwell on this slide because the chair just released it, but you can see what our transfer tax. That's

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: my district too.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Okay. I'm glad to be here. And I'm not gonna say anything about this particular farm, but farmers who enroll in our program agree not to the 25 foot buffers that are standard under the required ag practices, but 50 foot buffers. You will often need to know how to, if we find a wetland, there'll be a wetland protection zone as well. So that's some of the ways in agriculture that we are trying to keep the waters of the state as positive as possible. This is what we did in housing writ large since the pandemic began. And I just would say thank you to all of you who've been here and supported one time appropriations that were more than I would have ever imagined than I have a visual imagination. And what you'll see here is that we do pay attention to every aspect of the housing continuum that includes home ownership, it includes manufactured home communities, which often have their own water and sewer problems, includes rental housing, includes, we started a program for farm workers to support farmers in improving their housing. We've always done accessibility improvements for people who bought for a ramp or a bathroom modification, might have to leave their homes. So that in fact, if you know one of your constituents who becomes disabled, again, make our phone ring. And as the opioid epidemic increased, we began to fund recovery residences for people who are getting clean and wanting a safe place as they get out of their rehab facilities to be sober and have a sober living experience before they get to a more permanent place. Here's the range of housing that we're doing. You can see big community development in Downtown St. Johnsbury, a shelter under construction in Hartford, recovery residence. And this last project in Shelburne is one where we created 26 units of home ownership on a site that there used to be a motel on. And among the 26 homeowners were two people who worked at Wake Robin, a state police officer, a childcare worker. So we're covering that end of the market of people who I call the essential workforce who have to show up for a living. So also, I think, one of the chefs at Shelburne Farms bought a condo here. So we think shows the success. There's also 66 units of rental housing. And I can tell you though, large portion of the folks that we house are elderly or disabled. Three quarters of the renters are in the workforce as well.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Thank you.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: When we talk about rural community development in conservation, one of the things I was most moved by this year was a proposal from Vermont Adaptive and the Vermont Land Trust to give them a permanent home. Those of you who don't know about Vermont Adaptive, they work with disabled people and their services to veterans wherever they come from are free of charge. They have work up down in Killington and up in Sugarbush area, and this gives them a permanent home. Their campus, which will be 18 acres, will include housing for their workforce at some point in the future. And there's about 150 acres of conserved land that will be for the trails and so on. So that was just for me a really moving project to hear about their work for veterans and their work for the disabled community at large. You'll see a lot of historic preservation work of what we call community gathering places. This is the store in East Callis. We've worked with stores in Putney, in Albany, one over in the Meadoway Valley. We worked with libraries. We were in Brandon last year for our board retreat. The adjustment to the library meant a disabled person for the first time is able to use the whole library because they could get in and there was a lift installed as part of the renovations that we supported. The conservation you see at the Whetstone Brook was the restoration of floodplain in Downtown Brattleboro. 12 acres, it was facility there for lumber. And when they were ready to sell, they basically took out a big berm, they took out a lot of fill to restore the floodplain and make the whole neighborhood safer in the case of flooding. We expect we'll get more applications like that in the future. Here, I just wanna say we have a large pipeline and I'm gonna turn it over to Stacy to talk about our conservation work. Get large, but there's lots that we can do. Lots ahead of us, this Bull Creek Commons headwaters in Southern Vermont is another example where we put a lot of water quality protections.

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: Right, I guess.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: And if any of you who are old, we did send you an annual report electronically. If any of you want a hard copy because you're old like me or you get so much stuff, I'm happy to provide one. Right in the middle of it is a story about a classroom up at Lake Memphremagog that we helped fund on the water as an education solution in terms of water quality.

[Stacy Sibilia (Associate Conservation Director, VHCB)]: Okay. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having us. Once again, my name is Stacy Sebulah, and I'm the Associate Conservation Director at BHCB. And as Gus said, I'm going walk you through how our conservation programming uses this wonderful source of funds from the capital bill. So this is an overview of how we work with our partners. And I'll tell you more in a moment about the Walcott Community Forest, which is a great multiple conservation value project. So basically, we provide grants to different conservation organizations, towns, groups like the Vermont Land Trust, who then work with landowners to conserve their land. And typically, they're acquiring either conservation easements or outright acquiring the land depending on the scale of the project. And as Gus mentioned, many of our projects do have water resources on them, and we make sure that all of those get special protections, whether that's adding a 50 foot buffer along a waterway or a special wetland protection area or vernal pools. I would say in a given year, at least half, probably more of our projects that come in the door have those special protections. And working farms are a large share of that, which I think sometimes surprises people. But those are great assets for natural resources as well as for the working landscapes. We love it when we can protect both of those things. So this project, the Walcott Community Forest, was a partnership between the Trust for Public Land, Northern Rivers Land Trust, the town. And this is a couple 100 acre parcel right next to the town school. So it's perfect for having kids out on the property for educational programming and hikes. So that's a big aspect of what they do. But it also got a large chunk of capital bill money because it has amazing water resources. It has tons of streams, wetlands, vernal pools. So we love to see this kind of project. It also features an affordable housing element to it. So there were a couple of acres along the road that local Habitat for Humanity wanted to partner with this group to put an affordable housing unit on that piece. So great project. The community is super excited to have this recreational resource and have all this land conserves right next to the school. So this is an overview of why do we do this work? Why does it fit in with our conservation goals? And I'm sure you're probably all familiar with all of the work being done in the state with phosphorus reduction in Lake Champlain as well as Lake Memphremagog. So a big part of this work is, like I mentioned, EPIC buffers and being able to take other measurements to help improve water quality for phosphorus. We actually have a whole program around that up in the month of Mayagog to provide grants to help support phosphorus reduction. Also, with all the talk about flooding that I know is on top of mind for everybody right now, preserving wetlands and those floodways. We know that in Montpelier, the swath of acreage around the North Branch Nature Center and all of that land along the North Branch actually was huge in helping mitigate the flooding or at least preventing it from being worse here. So projects like that, like Gus mentioned, the Wet Stone Brook Project in Brattleboro are key and things that we're always looking at when we can fund projects. And then also just enhancing wildlife and aquatic habitat is huge with this programming, making sure the streams are cool enough for cold water fisheries, which the anglers and other members of the fishing and hunting communities appreciate. And this picture here of the Long Pond Natural Area in Greensboro, this is a recent I think it's actually gonna close, be completed this week. So hot off the press. Nature Conservancy project up in Greensboro. TNC has done an awesome job protecting most of that lake frontage, which is very remote, very pristine. I think there's only one or two camps on the whole parcel or whole lake, I should say. And this was the twelfth project TNC had worked on in the area that we helped fund. And now there's a swap of 800 acres along the shore that's conserved. Great. And bond money went into that as well. So switching gears a little bit, another way that we use the bond money is with our farmland retirement program. So I'll preface it by saying that the core of our agricultural work is really keeping the working land going and supporting those types of operations. But we do also have funds in situations where it really no longer makes sense for those historic farms to be in place because the water quality implications are just too poor. A farm picture of historic farm that's sitting right next to the shore without any kind of buffer and doesn't have a place to stack manure, that kind of situation. So this particular programming is available to take farmland out of production and then restore the habitat on it. And so organizations like The Nature Conservancy, who have a big wildlife habitat focus and are really interested in water quality restoration, work with other entities like the Department of Fish and Wildlife is another key partner to conserve this land and bring it back to a natural area. And so that's what happened here with the Goulet Farm in Addison. And often the state is also interested in doing this kind of project next to an adjacent wildlife management area so they can build upon that conserved land. So this is the case with this project, 3,000 acre Dead Creek WMA is right there. And 90 acres of wetlands ended up being conserved, mile and a half of really high priority streams and has habitat for state threatened grassland birds like the adorable bobolink. Folks know what those look like if you're lucky enough to see one. And also, this has public access on it available for recreational uses. And this particular property. Also, there's some unique archaeological resources that will be permanently protected. And another example, in this case, this is a working farm down in Chutney, Sweet Pickens Farm. They are a poultry operation. They do cash arrays, as you can see, chickens, turkey. And they had been on land down the road from this parcel and had been doing so well business wise, they needed to expand. And so they worked with Vermont Land Trust to acquire this other parcel, which has a number of wetlands on it and streams. And all of those are now being buffered through this conservation process. And the conservation funding helped them be able to afford the farmland more affordably. So very cool project down there. And these two infographics are really just showing across our portfolio of conserved lands in the state that VHCB has funded, what the breakdown in different land is. And again, I just point this out, and maybe this is apparent to many of you, but a lot of Vermont farms have a forest land associated with them and wetlands and natural areas. They're not just swaths of cropland. And so we'd love to point this out in terms of there's so many dual goals that come along with conserving working farmland and conserving all these other great resources. And this bond funding is really pivotal to helping us do that. And it's covered on my screen. I'm like, I think it's 80 miles. Yes, we have 80 miles of buffers on conserve farms across the state through our funding and about 1,400 acres of wetlands. And that's in the last five years or so. So there's even more than that, but that's what we've been tracking most closely. And I won't go into every detail on these metrics, but would encourage you if you want to look back at the slide deck, feel free to review these and reach out to any questions. But this is just a breakdown of what we've been able to do in the last fiscal year in terms of acreage protected across our programming. I will point out another project that we're really excited about, the Camp Sunrise in Benson, which is a former Boy Scout property that they ended up having to sell. It's about 100 years old. And the council determined that they needed to sell it. At the same time, Outright Vermont, which is an LGBTQ ally organization that supports youth, had been looking for a camp for a long time. They had been leasing camps and just didn't have a permanent home and had to turn away campers because of that. And so they found out about this property and were so excited to finally have a place that they could call home, permanent home. And they worked with Vermont Land Trust to conserve this acreage, which is a couple 100 acres. It's a spit of land between 2 Lakes Sunrise and Sunset, and just an incredible property, both for recreation, both for being able to meet the mission of this great nonprofit, and then also has thousands of feet of stream frontage, a lot of which go into Otter Creek, and then a pretty substantial amount of frontage on both of these lakes. So another great community oriented project.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I can just infer. In looking at the no, go back. The farmland and natural resources, I think it's important for the committee to realize that for the dollars that we put in, we do get federal dollars that are leveraged. Thank you. And then additional, like financial areas, leverage funds. So it's not just these dollars that are used. You can leverage so much more. Thank you. Appreciate you pointing that. Think that's important for people to balance this.

[Stacy Sibilia (Associate Conservation Director, VHCB)]: Yeah. And I will say that from the agricultural program perspective, we have a great partnership with NRCS, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and they're typically providing half the match for all the projects we fund. And that's around 3,000,000 to $4,000,000 a year. It's real money. In addition, for our natural areas projects, it's a host of different funding sources that partners bring, private philanthropic dollars, other state funding sources. So yes, thank you for mentioning that. But that's a really key point that we were able to leverage a lot of significant dollars to make this project work. So are

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: you seeing any threats at all to losing some federal dollars after the years at all?

[Stacy Sibilia (Associate Conservation Director, VHCB)]: Well, I can speak to the agricultural perspective, and if you want to chime in at all. What

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I would say to you is that at the federal level, we had anticipated a lot of increases in lots of programs from the Inflation Reduction Act and the new administration has fundamentally enhanced the benefits. So far it appears that the programs that existed before that, such as our matching funds for farmland, are staying in place. So we're not asking you to deal with that, but we just, with everything federal, everything is uncertain right now. But the legislature, as you know, approved a bill called Act 59 that was planned serving 30 of the state in the short term later on and the resources that are going be available for that kind of work are going to be much diminished from when that act is passed. Are there any regulatory changes happening that

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: you can see I

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: think that the state has made, you know, because of the EDA orders, the state has made a bunch of regulatory decisions to protect the lakes that EPA has identified. I think that we may see other water bodies similarly compromised in the future whether this administration bill is aggressive as prior ones have been, which included Trump one. I just think we don't know.

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: Is there a list of farms that you're hoping to include in conservatory in the future? So you're working your way down sort of the list?

[Stacy Sibilia (Associate Conservation Director, VHCB)]: We have a big pipeline, as Gus mentioned. At this point, we work with our partners. Vermont Land Trust is the partner doing the most farmland conservation. And we have an eighteen month pipeline that has around 50 farms on it on average. So yes, there is a robust number of people that want to work with us and the land trust to conserve their land.

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: So I assume it's not just first come, in, There first must be criteria that's

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: Oh, yes.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Yes.

[Stacy Sibilia (Associate Conservation Director, VHCB)]: Yeah, we have a fund. Have that kind of criteria in your reports? No, but I'm happy to send that to you. Yeah, we have it on our website, but I can send you the link to our funding guidelines. What are

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: the features that are characteristics of it?

[Stacy Sibilia (Associate Conservation Director, VHCB)]: Yeah, so what we look for are a range of both characteristics related to the operation itself and economic viability, things like that. But we also look at characteristics of the land. Does it have prime or statewide agricultural soils? That's something that is really obviously a clear indicator of productivity as it's with farmland. We also look at proximity to other working lands, proximity to conserved land. So if this particular farm is in a block expanding upon, that's great. That's really good for habitat. We also look for other types of natural resources. That's always a checkbox if it has water resources that we can help conserve as well. But I would say that the most important factors are around soil quality, open land acreage, a significant amount of open land to forest land acreage, and then demonstration that this is a piece of working farmland, that it's commercially viable, or if it's not currently in production, has the ability to be brought back. But happy to share with you the policy.

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: Any other questions?

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Does it make any difference to the federal government when they do send money? Is it different for farmland and or natural areas, or is it kind of looked at as the same thing? With matching funds?

[Stacy Sibilia (Associate Conservation Director, VHCB)]: It's different funding sources.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: It's very different. So the A. S. Program, which is specifically for farmland, has specific tests around it. There's a different federal program called Community Forestry Program that is obviously focused only on forests. We had to convince the federal government that maple was an agricultural activity of local importance and that allowed us to then use their funds for what would be a large sugar bush, but we were able to do that. The Forest Legacy Program is focused again, like community forest programs, only on forests, not so much on open land. So different programs have different criteria. The Subland and Water Conservation Fund, which is a voluntary program the states enjoy as part of its focus on recreation benefits from the public.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Thanks, guys. Yeah, thanks. Any

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: other comments or questions? Let's turn it over to my colleague Liz to talk about her viability program. One, for the record, again, I'm Liz Pleason. I run the Farm and Forest Reliability Program and Rural Economic Development Initiatives. I'm going to focus mostly on the water quality grant program that we run using bond dollars. But I also wanna share a little bit about the range of programming that we do. So you've heard about VHDD's mission overall and our conservation work. The Farm and Forest Viability Program and the Rural Economic Development Initiatives are really based around economic vitality and working directly with clients in communities. So we're direct service programs. The Farm and Forest Viability Program is a business development coaching program for all kinds of farms and forest businesses. We work with between one hundred and two hundred businesses a year doing individualized business development work. So it could be helping them plan for growth. It could be around working on profitability. It could be a transfer plan to new owners as the older generation exits. And you can see some of our impacts down here at the bottom. These are all really economic development indicators that we're really proud of. We also consider this to be a real quality of life program. Agriculture and forestry are businesses. They take a toll on your body and can be just a challenging place to carve out an income. But we have a lot of really amazing successful businesses in the state. The agricultural sector, including food manufacturing, is an $11,300,000,000 industry. The last time it was measured in whole by the farm to plate programming. So it's a pretty significant portion of what we've got going on economically in the state. And it's really critical that those businesses are viable and sustainable into the future. So last year, we saw that on average, our clients increased their sales by over 50,100 percent felt that they had improved their management skills, which is really our primary focus area, is improved management skills so that folks can, into the future, make really solid decision making based on accurate financials. And we saw that in 2025, clients we worked with also accessed over almost $5,500,000 in grants and loans for business growth and improvement. So we put up at a little over $1,000,000 a year in contracts to business planners to work on the ground with that 100 to 200 businesses. And we saw those clients with support from the program and with their business plans access was 5 and a half million. So we're pretty stoked about that. This is just a graphic that shows how our program works. The Farm and Forest Viability Program is a network, not one single individual program. So we work with farm and forest business planners at all of these organizations to deliver our shared program model. We work in Vermont, but we have partnerships across the country too to learn from other kinds of organizations to do this work. And not to toot our own horn, but this program is really unique in the country. We're one of the most stable, consistent programs, largely because of stable, consistent support through the Vermont legislature. A farm or a forest business can walk in any year at any time and have almost immediate access to services that are consistent over time, which is really rare in the whole country. So I'm not gonna read these all out, but we work with a really amazing network of organizations to do this work. The Rural Economic Development Initiative, I'm gonna sort of bounce around just because I wanna talk about REDI quickly, and then I'm gonna go back to that framework and really get into the water quality grants. So Rural Economic Development Initiative was created in large part under the leadership of former senator Starr. The goal is really to help small communities and working lands businesses access big, complex dollars that they might not be able to get on their own. So whether you're a small town trying to navigate improving your water and wastewater so that you can add housing or economic development activity downtown, or you're a farm trying to get a really big USDA value added producer grant, we basically set up organizations or businesses with grant writers who can help shepherd their project through the complex, usually federal, grant writing process. Because we know we have a lot of small businesses and small towns that don't have full time staff or really dedicated grant writers. And bringing someone in at that key point can help really get the dollars in the door. So since 2017, we've spent about $1,200,000 on Ready. And the communities who have successfully gotten a grant with support have accessed I think that says 35.5. Yes. There's a little pop up on my screen. So we're really excited about that. We also work with, right at this point, between forty and sixty communities a year. Not all of whom are actively writing and securing that grant. A lot of them are sort of getting ready, putting the pieces in place. So we know that there's an even bigger leverage in terms of community capacity than this 35,000,000.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So that 35,000,000 grants to communities, that's not money from PHCB. No. That you've put towards helping these smaller communities that don't have grant writers on staff to supply those grant writers so that they can go after different grants that are available. Exactly. Thank you. Yeah. The $1,200,000 is

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: what we've spent, and the 35,500,000.0 is what those communities have successfully accessed thus far in mostly federal dollars, but there's some philanthropic and state dollars in that 35,500,000.0 as well. But you charged us to focus on federal dollars because of how hard they can be to access. We didn't wanna limit eligibility to just that because a lot of organizations need a mix of funding or aren't quite ready for the federal, and we felt like it was important to be able to support along that range, including state and philanthropic. I'm gonna bounce away from REDI, but if anyone has any more questions on it, I'm always delighted to talk about the REDI program. So water quality grants. This is primarily what is under your purview. I'm just going to give an overview and talk about a couple of recent projects. Please interrupt me at any point if you have questions. So we've been doing this since 2017, when we were asked to be part of the state's overall clean water budget. These are grants directly to farmers to help them implement long term infrastructure projects that will improve water quality in the state, primarily by reducing nutrient runoff into waterways. So that can include anything from manure pit infrastructure to improved grazing that will improve soil health. We try to be as broad as we possibly can, knowing that different farms have different ways that they will improve water quality. So since 2017, we've awarded just under 5 and

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: a half

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: million. We typically fund 15 to 25 projects a year. Last year, it was 16 new projects for about 600,000, and those leverage almost $3,000,000 So again, these projects, a lot of them are really big. A lot of them are working with NRCS or the Agency of Agriculture's Best Management Practices Program, where you have a lot more technical staff. Those projects are big and complex and take many, many years. And we can help be a more flexible funder to get the whole budget across the finish line on these really big projects. So that's where you see that super high leverage from. And you can see in this chart that there's a lot of USDA money. There's agency YAG money, and then there's a good chunk of farm cash. And I'm also feeling like this pie chart, numbers are right, but the colors are not right. It's always great to get in the room and try to have to present and then realize. But the numbers are all correct. So really, that 600 should be more like a quarter or whatever. Someone can do better perk off the top of their head math than I can.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: John? So what kind of match do the USDA funds require? Is that what the BHDV monies are used for?

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: Yeah. It's not that the USDA necessarily requires match. It's more that those projects are often quite large and need additional funding to get out the door. They might have a 10% match requirement. I think NRCS and the Agency of Ag both use 10%, but I could be wrong. Also, they have a maximum limit. And some really big projects or farms that have multiple projects hit the limit that NRCS will cover but still have really critical infrastructure they need to improve. And so those are all the times that folks might come to us. I see.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So I have a question on the 16 grants totaling the 611,000 in '25. Is that calendar or fiscal?

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: We do one round of awards a year that works at the best time with farmer schedules and NRCS schedules and BMP schedules. So that's what we did in fiscal year twenty five. And we do them every year right around now. We are deciding on fiscal year twenty six next month.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So Those are the water quality grants that came out of the capital budget. So you had $800,000 for FY 'twenty five. Casey and

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: I split. So she gets 200,000 for that farm retirement that she was talking about

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: at the And we allocate six to these direct farmer grants. So in 'twenty six, the current year, the $800,000 is that being divvied up the same way?

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: That's what we've been doing for the last several years. I think that's what's on the docket for us right now.

[Stacy Sibilia (Associate Conservation Director, VHCB)]: There's greater demand in that programming through this program, the direct farmer grants and for farm retirement. So that's kind of how we've made that determination.

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: This is Sebree Farm, John Cornwall. This was one of those big projects that was co funded with the Agency of Agriculture. They had been working on the grounds of technical staff to develop out this big set of improvements. They have a stream that runs quite close to where their barn yard is, And they made some pretty major improvements to the manure pit, to all the farmyard areas where cows are spending a lot of time, to keep manure from running off into that waterway. So we put in some funding that helps the farm be able to implement a really large project along with the agency of agriculture. And this farm has also worked with us through our farm business planning program. And I just hear really great things about their management that they're really working hard to improve soil health, soil quality, take really good care of their animals, and also make sure that nutrients are staying on the farm in the soil as much as possible.

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: You have a chart that's gonna tell us You're telling us how much has been awarded. How much is being requested?

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: Yeah, yeah. So we also separately sent you a report on any capital bill dollars that are not yet out the door in their anticipated time of spending. So I think we have about it's either four, five, or six water quality grants with, I think, FY dash now I'm forgetting which fiscal year we're talking about. But we do have a handful that have not yet gone out the door yet in terms of, like, we committed the dollars, but the farm hasn't yet requested them. Usually, it's because projects take a really long time, and we prefer that folks are completely done before we disperse the full grant award. So those details, I think, are

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: in the report. Yeah. Not smart enough to ask for the details. It's more like, there's 25 farms that need You've been able to help five. How big is the Demand. Demand versus what you're able to satisfy? Is it fiftyfifty or is

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: it overwhelming? It depends on

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: the year. So last year, the six eleven, it wasn't quite as competitive. This year, we are looking at I'm reading 31 applications right now for, I think, dollars 1,300,000.0 in requests. So we'll be able to fund a little under half.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So there's more need out there than what there is funding.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Varies year to year about how the demand flows, but this year it's more than two to one.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: And is that demand driven by ignorance that they can get money or is it because of incline? I mean, what's that variable? I would think that once farmers know there's money

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: out there, they'd be clamoring for it

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: one way or the other.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I think that there are a lot of factors that could go into it, whether somebody has an enforcement action that they're dealing with from state government. I drive somebody to decide to apply when they thought their practices were okay. So I think there's a lot of things. The availability of the federal funds as a match could drive when somebody applies to us. So I think there's a lot of different things. And if you think about how stressful it is to be a farmer today, having to do paperwork and fill out an application may not be at the top of the list of problems that we are managing when you have an ill cow or problems managing the behavior or labor that's worried about ice or whatever the issue might be. So there's plenty more work for us to do. It just doesn't come in a steady

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: flow. And I will say that getting twice the dollar amount in requests than we can award this year is going to be tough, and it's hard to choose. And in terms of the realm of other competitive grant programs in the state for farmers, I just got off of Working Lands grant review process, and they had 10 times the number in requests. So I think these water quality grants, you wanna have your project ready to go. You wanna be working with the technical experts. So I would say two to one is a pretty healthy ratio. Thanks.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Just to enhance the answer, we're water quality provider for Lake Bethabagog. And one of the things that holds up projects in that program is the availability of engineers. So actually figuring out what you're going to do, getting it priced, all that stuff can lead to delays.

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: Yeah, I can understand the delays. Just was Yeah, okay.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Thank you. Yeah, that's certainly the case on the farm side too. Well?

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: No, I guess my question, I heard testimony last week about enforcement actions regarding clean water stuff. Generally, are your applications focused on enforcement actions from the state, or is there

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: one thing?

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: It's a wide variety, from people who are doing way ahead of the game in terms of compliance to folks that are really struggling. And we will sometimes fund applications from people who are not currently in compliance with the required agricultural practices if the project is specifically designed to get them back into compliance. In terms of the more serious enforcement actions, it would have to do really on a case by case basis.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: So you guys do prioritize enforcement action issues?

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: I am, right now, feeling like I don't remember what enforcement action means compared to some of the other steps along the regulatory process. But if people are at the most extreme and where they're working with ANR, then it would be really on a case by case basis. If that project was really gonna significantly get the farm back on track and improve water quality, we would certainly consider it. But most often, we're working with folks who've been have gotten their farm specialists out on the farm, and they're like, We really suggest you look into this. Let me connect you with the technical folks who can write up a plan for you to make sure that you don't become out of compliance with the required eye practices. Or you already are. Let's get you back in. So it's mostly really sort of voluntary people recognizing a problem and working to fix it.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: The other thing I would say to you is that we work closely both with ANR and the Agency of Ag, both of whom have representatives on the VHCB board. This particular committee is chaired by the Agency of Ag. Is that correct?

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: Yeah, the Agency of Ag. We have a set of reviewers who represent everyone from DC, Agency of Ag, farmers, soil health, client and scientists. So we really try to have a great representative sample for the reviewers.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: And I think this particular program itself was the brainchild of Representative Shaw. I think the reason he asked us to do it was he probably get the dollars out quickly. I think one of the things that we learn about this program as time goes on is there's also people who never get to the top in terms of qualifying for NRCS and sometimes we're the thing that makes a project happen even without some of the big dollars from the Fed. So that's another goal we play. Here's somebody who's not in crisis and therefore they never reach the top of the priority list, another funding source, but they're ready to go and we can help them get it done sooner.

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: For sure. Yep. Just a couple other examples of the range of projects that have been funded here. Severy Farm was a dairy. These three businesses are livestock, bread and butter in Shelburne, Galfetti in Charlotte, and Pigasus Meats in South Bureau. We've got two of these, where it's gutted pack barns, which can help you move from liquid to solid manure management, which can be a really strong water quality improvement. And then bread and butter was around grazing infrastructure. So that's keeping cows in the right place so they're outside of sensitive areas or wetter areas. It can really improve soil health, which means the rain sinks in better, which means the soil is healthier and everything stays where it is instead of running off into waterways. So those are just some of the project examples. I am gonna take just one more minute to talk about another grant program that we run that is not water quality grants. And then I think we'll have a couple of minutes if there's more questions. So this is more tied back to our Farm and Forest Viability business planning program. And I'm wishing I had put this slide up there, but we can bounce around. That's fine. So after folks finish a business or a transfer plan with our business planning program, working real in-depth with their business planner, they can apply to us for a small, what we call implementation grant. It's the least fun sounding name for a grant. But these are really fun. They're great, small projects. They're up to 8 to 10,000 based on the year, folks who have spent a really long time analyzing their financials, figuring out what project is really gonna make a difference for their business and the local economy. We typically make between 100,000 and $200,000 available for those grants in any given year when we have the funding. And they have funded some really fun projects. So Lincoln Peak Vineyard in New Haven is a really neat vineyard. We worked with them when the previous owner was trying to retire. He wanted to see if his daughter would take over the business. It wasn't going to be a good fit. She didn't want to run a vineyard. She had another job. It transferred to a different vineyard. They decided they didn't really want to run it. So it went through a lot. And it's a beautiful spot. It has an amazing tasting room. And this couple ended up buying it about a year and a half ago. And they have really taken off. We gave them a small grant to help with some of their processing equipment, including all these very exciting yellow bins right behind them. But it'll help make that moment from harvest to turning the grapes into juice way more efficient. It's a really intense time on a vineyard. It's like three weeks of just like, you've never worked so hard ever, and you won't again till next year. So we're really excited about this project. And there's a couple of more on here that have gotten a small dance, including one for goat cheese. And then Diggersmirth, I think, was some processing veggie harvesting equipment. I can't actually remember now. Anyway, I'm going to stop talking and see if you all have any more questions.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: You're such a chant.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Just trying to find Chellburn And Bread And Butter Farm. So is that because they're so close to the pond? Is that their problem with runoff and stuff up there? It sounded like it was wetland stuff, and I know where the farm is. I just I was curious.

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: They weren't having, like, an active runoff issue. This was a preventative thing. They were actually taking a lot of land that had been in corn. They were expanding, and they were transitioning to this bigger grazing business. So they wanted to keep the cows in the right place and not off that more sensitive weather area. I believe that was a project that was like, we had manure running off right into the stream or anything like that. Preventative about soil health and about nutrient retention right there

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: on Farms the

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: that are up in that area that could use some help with runoff that I

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: Give us a call. Okay.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: There's a property called just there. I think it at Fitzgerald Farm retirement projects we worked on.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: Farm retirement, somebody

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: said? The last one is here.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Taking land out of production. The biggest issue there is who wants to own the land once it's been retired because it's not making money for an owner. So we've had several deals and I can't remember the specifics of that one where there's one up in the Northeast Kingdom Of The Connecticut River that Fish and Wildlife took about half the acreage. Is that the acquisition by then?

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Basic question. So two on the side, I can tell what they are. What is Diggers Mirth Collective?

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: Yeah, Diggers Mirth is a vegetable business down at the Intervale Center in Burlington. Thank

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: you. Any other questions? So this is where the 2,800,000.0 goes. Everything that was discussed today. Plus what happens upstairs or wherever. They've been upstairs. Anything else? No, thanks very much. Anything else, Chris?

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Thank you.

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: Thank you. Thank you.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Thank you so much.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Thank you, folks. Thank you. You take committee members to get worse.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Yes.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: With the brownies.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: You've had the first course.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I want to spend some time

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: the recommendations

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: the appropriations films. This was posted on our webpage. There's hard copies for folks. Okay. This was posted on our website. Want us to These are the items that House Appropriations Committee wants us to weigh in on?

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Yes, ma'am.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Give our recommendations? There's five sections. One section does not pertain to us. It's the one at the top. That is transportation. I don't know why they included that. I think because it deals with a building. So they were thinking it pertained to us. Doesn't pertain to us. That's the T bill. There's a section of the appropriations bill, the big bill that appropriates the cash fund. I don't know where we are in terms of where we overlap with the big bill at this point. I know I've had some questions from higher up folks about the cash fund. I'm assuming we will be asked to help, but I haven't heard anything directly yet. Haven't any

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: numbers attached to these? No.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Yeah. Not yet. But they know there's a good chunk of cash out there. So I think it's too early at this point. I think it's there was the chair of appropes said that will happen as they start working more on the appropriations bill. They're still taking testimony on that. That's what she indicated to end of last week.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: This is kind of a tangent to lead to that. Everything that comes in here has some sort of merit, but I think there's also you know, relative merit. And then in some programs, you could probably have slight reductions, and it wouldn't change their admission that much. And not that you would want to do that, but that's that's some that's gonna be a necessity at some point if That's how the cash fund works. We get what we're given, right? We don't really have any direct input on that at the end of the day.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I'm hoping to start markup on the capital bill towards the end of next week. That's what I'm thinking. I don't know. We've got some bills we need to get out. It's bills on the wall. And I wanna do as much of that as we can prior to the week we come back after town meeting break. Because when we come back after town meeting break, that Friday, first week that has crossed over. So any bills that we don't get out by the twenty sixth, twenty seventh of next week, we'll have to spend the week we come back on those bills. At the same time, we're marking up the.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: That's not ideal.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: We kind of clean our plate before so that when we start focusing on markup of the capital bill, we'll be bringing back more people to testimony. Trust me. I won't have to lose a lot of money on that because there's a lot of requests out there that are not in the governor's proposed capital bill. So the next item is, there's two things here, payment removal of taxes. It's a pilot project. These are payments that go out to the communities that have state buildings. It could be a courthouse, could be a correctional facility, could be a state office building. When there's a state building that is in a community, that state building comes off the tax rolls. There's no local property taxes that are applied to it, but there's an agreement with the state that we make a payment in low property taxes for the community. Montpelier gets a lot. St. Albans, Rutland Enough. New York,

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: Hottsbury. They get short frick of what they get.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: But this is the appropriation, so I'm assuming we would support what's being recommended.

[Rep. Conor Casey (Member)]: Yeah. It's kinda weird that we're weighing in on it.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I know, but every year, we have

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: to weigh in on.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: Historically, if you were a Shire town and early Vermont history, that was an economic benefit, right, to have the courthouse and other fixings with county government, but now it's a detriment financially.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So this has been there forever, pilot program. That

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: that

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: is section e one four four and then e three three eight. This one comes out of corrections directly for an additional amount to their pilot project the pilot payment for Newport and Springfield.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Is that pulled out why is that pulled out separately?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Because it was negotiated between the the city or the town and the state when they agreed to house the facility. Yeah.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: But those are new numbers beyond

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: the No. They've been ongoing, but it's a separate appropriation on top of the other. The other one is in section e one four four, so that comes out of a different part of government. Section e three three eight deals directly with corrections, so it comes out of the corrections budget.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: So those deals were set up whereby they get to renegotiate rates? Newport

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I don't think they renegotiate on top of what they currently on top of what they would normally get for pilot. This is an additional amount that they would get. And some and sometimes that could be used for additional emergency services like ambulance or fire.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: Yeah.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: It all depends how it was negotiated.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: I see.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: And the local community when they were agreeing to house a correctional

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: So how is that incremental number? How how is it different for those two places than it is for the other host communities?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I think the one fifty two is probably split in half between the two. We can ask the the DLC.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: The difference difference is that they negotiated.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: They negotiated. When they

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: said we'll take the institution, we want the pilot plus. And so that's what this reflects. It's not like there's a renegotiation every year. I don't believe that would been better. But when they said it, we'll take them, but we want pilot plus.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: When Newport was housed, when Newport and the Newport facility was being built, that was back around 1994, 9394. Springfield came along about 1999, and those amounts were negotiated back then. It's in a contract between the state. So far.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: We got it. There was a guy in Swanton about thirty years ago. He was a boat dealer, and he sold the guy a boat. And the guy wanted to trade it in, like, a week later, and he offered him two thirds of what he paid for it. And the guy complained. He's like, look. It's not my fault. You're stupid. So good for Springfield and Newport, I guess.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So, Will?

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Well, so so I think most of the was answers. We're the guys hoping. We had discussed that last year when we went to program. Yeah. It's a good year.

[Rep. William "Will" Greer (Member)]: And so I guess now it's just those two communities and not the other four facilities. But my question was actually under e one four four. Do we know what that total amount for the pilot egg certificate is there?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: You'd have to ask the probes.

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: I'll ask.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I don't know what the total amount would be. I don't think it's in the document that we received. I sent out all the appropes information to you folks. I don't think it was in those documents. I

[Rep. William "Will" Greer (Member)]: think that's one of those things. They can't change any Right.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: We find out if those third or fourth positions are available at the supervision for the license plates? I have not heard anything.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Back They're in. DOC's going to come back in.

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: Kevin? Did I understand, but these two are negotiated? So how how do we weigh in on either one of these?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: We don't. This has already been shown. To let them know that, Yeah.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: Not even a rubber stamp. But

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: like so the We could

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: say, no. We don't wanna do it, but you're gonna violate it. Because we don't wanna spend the money. Oh,

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: well then

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: But you have an agreement with those communities,

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: so you're violating an agreement. Sorry, Shawn. Shocked.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: So the top one, I just have a quick question.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: We're not part of that.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: So that central garage does not come? No. That's a t fund then. That's not institutions at all. No. I that's what I wanted to I

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: think they thought it was for Okay.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: That's what I'm think I'm trying to think, like, why did they put that in there?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I think because they thought it was a building.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Okay. Just an oopsie. Yep. Yeah. Got it.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: Real quick, Alice.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Because I just I was curious about the statute under for March, and there's it doesn't say anything specifically about those two facilities. It just says four of the two.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Directional facilities. What was agreed to when there was contract? It wouldn't be

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: in So it's in a contract. Okay. So Based on statute. Okay. Based on statute. Perfect.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: And it was agreed to for those two facilities that would come out of corrections budget. Or a pilot comes out of another budget. Incredibly out of administration, agency administration, I think. Then if you flip it up the page, this is where we're going to be spending a lot of time with pretrial supervision. The pretrial supervision program is going to be taking a different direction. I've brought you folks up to speed in terms of what house judiciary is thinking, what we're thinking, the scrap part of that program. There is concern the state's attorneys have brought up and Kim McManus is coming in tomorrow. And she mentioned to Representative Luneau that there is a very, very narrow group of folks that come through arraignment who are high risk, really high risk.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Can you clarify high risk for what?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Reoffending or Reoffending. At

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Reoffending. Right,

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: it's not on scouting. It's just high risk. And the alternative is to detain them in a correctional facility, but they don't need that level of detention. They need a level of supervision out in the community with wraparound services, and they would do better. So she was thinking of the pretrial supervision could be geared towards that population. And yes, it's voluntary on the person's part, whether or not participate in a pretrial supervision program or not. But if they know the alternative is to be incarcerated, to be detained, then she's thinking people would be more apt to stay under the pretrial supervision. And then you have the wraparound services. So that's one direction of looking at this tomorrow.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: My question is, if those people exist, and I'm sure they do, then why aren't they taking advantage of it now?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Because it's voluntary and there's no, if you don't do it, then you're going end up in parts of it. There isn't that limitation.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: This is a question that's really tailored to you. So would we have to change the statute somehow to Okay. Yep. Troy? $200 isn't a lot if you know where that

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Well, getting there.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: I just wanted to set you

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: up. And

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: then there's another situation, too, for the pretrial supervision in terms of looking if we're sending different folks to pretrial supervision than what was initially envisioned under the current statute. Then what does DOC in the statute, what do we need to change in terms of their supervision level? And that's what we need to talk with DOC tomorrow when they commit because if it is a higher risk person that they're going to be supervised, is a phone call once every other week adequate? And that's the question to ask DOC because they may want a higher level of supervision and we may have to tweak the statute around that for level of supervision. So I just wanna put that out on table for us to think about. It makes them a high level. Do they keep doing It depends what happens on the court in terms of what they're seeing for high risk. Could it be for absconding? Is it blame? Or for safety?

[Rep. Mary A. Morrissey (Member)]: What does this mean they've over and over again have done something?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Right now, the way that pretrial supervision is established, you need five or more dockets. The thinking was doing away with that completely. So it could be a first time offense. Depends what their risk level is of flight, or their risk level is of reoffending, or their risk level of public safety. So that's something we'll have to get into. Okay? The other piece that's being talked about is for that accountability docket that it gets rolled out to the other courts besides Chittenden County. Question is how many courts? And the thinking is it'd be one day a week that each court would put aside for the accountability doc. Okay? So then the next thought is, well, could we have a PMP person sitting at the court that day so that the person comes out, they're sent to pretrial supervision or maybe any other supervision, I don't know, that that PNP person could be the hub to set up wraparound services. So if that's a model that we wanna do, the question then of DOC is, do you have enough personnel to do this right now within your current probation costs? Because you did hire some people for the pretrial supervision. I think they hired three people. But they're up in the Northern part of the state. So I've asked Haley to kind of look at this and see the lay of the land. Now, what the governor has proposed here in front of us is 200,000 in addition to what's currently there. I'll get into that. 200,000 to go towards seven permanent PMP officers. And they would be dedicated to the DOC pretrial supervision. So the question is, do they need seven? The other question is, we have appropriated in FY 2,660,000 for pretrial supervision. We also appropriated in FY six, six hundred and fifty thousand for pretrial supervision for a total of one point one five, right? No, 1.2. 1.21.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Two ten, because you got 60

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: in there, right? So we have 1,200,000.0 already appropriated and probably available because we have hired some folks out of that 1,200,000.0 plus. So we need to know how much of that is left. Because if we restructure the pretrial supervision, if we don't need all of those seven positions that can absorb some of this internally in DOC with their field offices, We add 200,000 to the current 1.2, we're at 1,400,000.0. But some of those dollars might be able to be directed towards the courts to get them started or to start doing the accountability duck. Those are all the moving pieces that are are not in place yet.

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: But the first moving piece is why it's not being used. And it sounds like might be gonna require some kind of statutory change. Yeah. You Right now, it's not being used because people can be out in their own cognizance with no conditions, or they could agree to that be on conditions for the most part.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: And you missed a lot of that testimony that we had. A lot of reasons for the pilot project with the accountability docket that they're not going into pretrial supervision is because the wraparound services are being provided so they don't need to be supervised. That's the big piece in the pilot project. That's the big piece. The other big piece is that the defendant has to be voluntarily agreeable, and many times they're not. But the bigger piece in that accountability docket, why we only had one person, was because the wraparound services are being provided and they could work them through the court system really. Brian, and then Conor.

[Rep. Brian Minier (Member)]: Maybe I'm just putting it out there and don't need an answer to everything. Maybe it's a testimony question. But to get back to what Troy brought up, 200,000 divided by seven doesn't work. And then in terms of the PMP officers, are we looking at hiring some 0.2 FTEs for one day per week here, here, here and here? Are we looking for people to go around? Number of people that we're talking about observing is going to change, obviously. And so we got somebody you can speak to that too from judiciary or somebody.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: The DLC and judiciary, because they're looking at this in judiciary committee as well.

[Rep. Brian Minier (Member)]: Well, yeah. And if we're changing the number of dockets or something about who qualifies for this, they can best

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: that What court

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: is gonna be doing it? I just asked Mark, I asked him, so what courts are doing this? He said, we don't know yet.

[Rep. Brian Minier (Member)]: Yeah, because that seems like the OSAM judiciary. So

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: they're looking at it at the same time we are. And Hillary has got another draft that's gonna incorporate some of this based on the conversation I had with Martin. And Martin sat down with Hillary Friday afternoon to bring both of our concerns together. So she's coming in tomorrow with some with a new draft. It is tomorrow. Right? Because we're doing D10 moves today.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Really? Yeah.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: She's coming in tomorrow. Okay. But do they know that they've got services within the communities? Well, that's the other question you'll have to ask. Because that's huge. You can connect it with a

[Rep. Mary A. Morrissey (Member)]: lot of our agencies as soon

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: Yeah. As they get away from

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So there's a lot of moving pieces here. There's the money that right now is in two fiscal years goes directly to pretrial supervision that may need to be moved somewhere else. And then if we do this new model and the accountability docket, and trying to have a DOC person there at the courthouse, can they do that now without hiring? If not, then how many would they have to hire?

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Conor?

[Rep. Conor Casey (Member)]: Sure, I might need a refresher. I'm a little rusty on the position pool. My recollection was a position is vacant for six months. Unless they can justify keeping it, HR grabs that position, yanks it into the pool. They can put new titles in it as needed with new positions. So I wonder Is

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: it the vacancy pool?

[Rep. Conor Casey (Member)]: Yeah. So it's like, are they yanking seven positions out of that, but they don't have enough money there? So that's the 200 on top of that to fund the seven? Think that might be it.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: I didn't follow that, Conor. I'm sorry.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: It's a vacancy pool. Departments give up positions when that hasn't been filled for a long time. And it goes into this big pool. But the money, does the money go

[Rep. Conor Casey (Member)]: with the The money goes with this. So if you have a need in your department of a fiscal year, you could say I need a new position that I gotta create. It's like, okay, well, got these positions in the pool. You give up that position. So we need to settle the new one

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: by 200 divided by seven because nobody's taken these positions? No, no, no. There might be seven positions in the pool that come with money, but not enough.

[Rep. Conor Casey (Member)]: But not enough and maybe the 200 extra

[Rep. Mary A. Morrissey (Member)]: Shouldn't they have told us then?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: That's for us to

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: That's a conjecture right now.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Right. That's for us to ask.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: It's for

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: us to ask. That's Is why they want us to look into

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: there someplace we can find what's

[Rep. Conor Casey (Member)]: in the pool right now? That'd HR.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: We're trying to get DOC back in here to talk about, finish talking about this budget, and this will be part of it. And this can be part when DOC's in testifying on the pretrial supervision and ask them about these positions and where they're coming from in the moment. So there's a lot of moving pieces to this, and I don't think it's going to get done by Friday. But we can give a heads up to a probes because this is all gonna play out in a big field over the next few weeks. Shawn?

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: So, just stepping back a little bit from pretrial, because it seemed to me that we were getting a lot of I don't know if I'm stating the same thing again, but it just seemed like it wasn't working. So we're hoping that if we

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: mandate it, it'll work?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: No. That we change the requirements of getting there. Right now, part of it is five dockets or more. We get rid of that.

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: Oh, okay.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: And we we tweak who would be eligible for. But the bigger piece is we're not scrapping it totally. It was scrapping So

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: it opens the net wider.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Yeah. We're not we're not scrapping it totally. We're scrapping it. Because nobody really supports the current structure. It's just not working. But let's see if we can keep little bits of it and redefine it for a population that could take advantage of this. Knowing that if part of the pretrial, I don't wanna even say pretrial supervision because it isn't. If we could put some DOC PMP officers in the courtroom on the accountability day, the day that they deal with the accountability dockets. And then when the person is released back to the community, they go to the DOC person, and the DOC person hooks them up with the community providers for wraparound services. So they don't need to be supervised by DOC.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: And if this is one time and not based, then are we talking about a one year surge or less It is based. The 200 is.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I would assume so, because the 1,200,000.0 is based.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Is also. So this will be ongoing after a year after Yeah, okay.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: 1.2 right now is base, and they haven't spent it. I don't know how much they've expended. It's base in DOC's budget, I believe.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: $6.60 to $6.50 is 13.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: 1.3.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Yeah. So you don't do math in public. So it's 1.3 plus 200,000. 1,500,000.0.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: That's It's in rolling.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So they may have, like, one point out of the 1.3 Mhmm. They may have 1.2 left.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Oh, right. They spent some of it last

[Rep. Troy Headrick (Ranking Member)]: year. Yeah.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Yeah. Yeah. How does

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: 200,000 pay for seven people?

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: It doesn't. No.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: It's it's Did you

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: know a

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Conor said?

[Rep. Conor Casey (Member)]: Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm not sure I'm right.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I know.

[Rep. Conor Casey (Member)]: But that that would be my theory.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Right. I know. But I'm like, that's what I'm just going back to is like Anyway.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: It depends because there's money that follows Yes. That went into position. Oh.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Got it. Yes.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So those are the moving pieces right now in the pretrial supervision. I mean, we're scrapping it, but we're redesigning it supposedly.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: And

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: then we got to redesign DOC's role in it.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: And I heard that.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: So that's what we're gonna be working on tomorrow. Okay. And Hillary has incorporated my thinking and Martin's thinking into a new draft.

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: Is there a reason we're gonna hold on to the term pretrial and not just fold all of these good ideas into the It's not accountability court because that's the wrong term. What's the word? Accountability docket. Do we Why have two separate? Why not wrap it into the accountability docket?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: We haven't decided that yet.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: That's a good idea, Kevin.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: We haven't decided. Because what

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: we have heard is the accountability docket in Burlington worked well, but then some of the outliers, maybe they only needed one day a week and you send the Tiger team to that one day

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: a week there, including DOC.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: That's what I was trying to ask about, are they mobile or is it just a point to FTE?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: That's what we need to ask DOC. And it also depends what ports are going to do this. And they may need money. Courts may need money to do this where you've got that 1.3, 1,200,000 sitting out there.

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: Because part of sales is to have a name that people like. So far, don't think anybody likes pretrial, but Accountability Docket, everybody seems to like that name.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: They do. It's not a lucky.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: We'll figure out something once we figure out what the structure We don't know what that structure is going to be right now.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: Do you hear from them? They might not know. That's tomorrow. There'll be a new draft.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Bill, he's been working on a new draft. The one thing that I did just talk to Martin about was, and I'm gonna talk to DOC about this. This is something we need to talk to DOC. One of the thinking is when someone comes in for an arraignment, to be arraigned on a charge, before the person is sent either to detention to be a detainee, or they're sent back out to community, there's a risk assessment done. And they want DOC to do this. And I said, well, how can DOC do this? They don't even know the person.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Martin

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: said to me, oh, that's a good point. I said, unless they've been through the system and have been incarcerated and they have a new charge out there and they've come in for an arraignment, the DOC would have a track record, but it was a brand new person. And that's they're there before the judge. And the judge wants that information in terms of what's the risk of this person. You're asking DOC to do it. How's DOC gonna do that? Well, then standing up there before the judge. DOC doesn't know this person. So that's that's something we'll have to work through and talk to DOC about. So that's what's in the works for the judge.

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: So have they been given a primer like you just gave us so they can come in with answers? Or are we gonna catch them all cold and then

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I think we'll catch some of them cold. Given them total primers. I've asked Haley about the positions. I did ask her about the

[Rep. Mary A. Morrissey (Member)]: If it's something that should have been given to us, if it is, like, how you're saying the the positions that haven't been filled, they should have said, this is what we're working around. So I know when I was at work, they gave you all the information.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: We haven't gotten into this in this committee yet. So I gave Haley a heads up about it. It's in the DOC budget. E-three 38 is DOC section And one B I did ask her if you have the accountability docket and you want a PMP person at that docket in the court, she seemed to think they could absorb it in their field office. But I don't know. But that was last week. That was last Thursday. So outside of that,

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: I don't

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: have anything else. I do go into transportation committee, Senate Transportation committee tomorrow morning at quarter twelve to give them any language that we have so far on the non driver IDs and the driver's license. So we're getting a new draft this afternoon at 03:00.

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: 03:00.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: The flow board, I need to talk to

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: Hillary.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I'd like to get a draft. Mary Jane was gonna work with

[Liz Gleason (Director, Farm & Forest Viability Program, VHCB)]: the

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: Attorney General's office and DOC, Agency of Human Services and herself trying to figure out the legal representation piece. And I was gonna sit down with Hillary, kind of broadly put in some language possible just as a starting point in terms of for the next few years, how the payroll board could submit their budget to DOC or the agency. And what some of those items should be included in the budget. So I wanted to work with Hillary to get a rough draft of that put together. But outside of that, I don't have anything.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: You think we need to vote on

[Rep. Conor Casey (Member)]: the IDs today since you need to present it tomorrow, don't you?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I'm not. Because we'll probably change it to first draft, the new language. And everybody here will have different We'll have requests for changes for that. So we can take a break for twenty five, twenty minutes, something like that, come back before 03:00, if people want, unless there's things that people wanna talk about.

[Rep. Conor Casey (Member)]: I have one question. We did have a report, though,

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: I did not receive anything about that.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: We were also ones to receive. Should we ask

[Gus Seelig (Executive Director, Vermont Housing & Conservation Board)]: for it? Why don't we ask for it?

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: I don't Yes. Would it have gone to the general assembly as a general report at all?

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: I don't know.

[Rep. Conor Casey (Member)]: Do you want me to send you the language tapes?

[Rep. Kevin Winter (Member)]: Sort of like the executive order that apparently Sweeney's we're fault. It's too nice.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: They worked all weekend to get the data.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Exactly.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: You were asking about.

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: Hey. Did I leave that over there? Conor, do I have a thing over there? Anything else

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: before we take

[Shawn Sweeney (Clerk)]: a break? No, ma'am.

[Rep. Alice M. Emmons (Chair)]: K. Let's take a break and come back about twenty five up.