Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Goodbye, ma'am.

[Rep. Kate Logan]: We are live.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Alright. Good afternoon, and welcome to the House Environment Committee. This afternoon, we're going to continue our conversation about water. And we welcome Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen to share his perspectives on broad topics in water generally. Then also, actually, he's going to give us a high level walkthrough ish, not a walkthrough, we'll do that tomorrow with Michael O'Grady, but of a DEC miscellaneous bill that I've introduced at the request of Neil. So we'll get the what's the problem we're trying to solve walkthrough from Neil on that today too. Great.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Good afternoon and Happy New Year to everybody. Neil Kamen. I'm Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation for the record, and thank you for having me in. Chair Sheldon, thank you for sponsoring the bill. There's a grab bag of things that we'll talk about a little bit later. I'm prepared with a presentation that touches on a number of things the department is working on and may also seek to provide complimentary information to what you may have heard from Mr. Goldman and Mr. Carpenter on Tuesday afternoon. They had nice testimony. I appreciated listening to it and wanted to add some thoughts to it as well. And then before I share my screen and just get started, I'm gonna ask your forgiveness. I am nursing a very persistent injury in my lower back that makes that I have to sometimes just stand up. And so if I either wiggle or wince, just letting you know that that is the deal. Driving in particular exacerbates it. So, you know, once I get out of the car, it

[Unidentified participant (likely staff/member)]: takes a little bit of time to

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: loosen up. Do you have

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: heated seats? I do have heated seats. I actually have a new vehicle, which I just love, and it does a great job. So let me go ahead and share my screen for you all. And the question is, how do I share the right screen? Post disabled participant screen sharing cat. Can you help me? Okay. And I do that by Beginning sharing.

[Rep. Kate Logan]: If you hit the arrow next to share. If you just hit this. Yep.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Why don't I leave and come back in? Sorry about that. I feel like

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: this happened last time. Was with you guys. I just accepted your

[Unidentified participant (likely staff/member)]: Oh, boy. Very good.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Well, I'll accept it again.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah, I'll jump back in. Yeah, right, exactly.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Yeah, sure. Ela would like to introduce her guest.

[Rep. Kate Logan]: While we're waiting just a moment, I just wanted to welcome Madeline Connery from Shelburne, who is a student at Brown University and is here to testify on House Judiciary today. I'm also a Brown alum, so she has been corresponding since the shooting. I'm really glad that she reached out to legislators and welcome. She's an environmental science and economics major at Brown, and so she's sitting with us today. Nice to meet you all. Thank you.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Sorry you had to endure all that. Okay. We'll try this again. Let me know if that screen pops up. Yep. Chair. There we go. That perfect.

[Unidentified participant (likely staff/member)]: Right window up through the wall. There it is.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: And share. Okay. Perfect. Alright. Good day. Let's see. I'm gonna have to do that thing where I move all sorts of stuff out of the way, and now I should be ready to go. Okay. Wanted to firstly just provide a couple updates on a few things that are kicking around from last year, give you a little update on progress on things that the Department has been working on based on last year's legislation. We wanted to provide a couple of highlights around the clean water area, which I think will be very interesting. And a lot of these things that I'm gonna go are kind of teasers, give you an opportunity if you want to learn more, I'd be happy to tell you who or which legislative report that we've already filed has the content in it, so forth. Something nobody asked me for from this committee, but something that's very interesting to folks in the building and also other members of the General Assembly is sort of streamlining permitting. And the department has been doing a fair bit of work under the hood to look at a different model for permit administration in the department. And I'm going to share that with you all for the first time today, just in a high level. The chair asked me to speak to the executive order and the wetlands provisions, so I'm very happy to that and take questions. And then I'll walk through the miscellaneous provisions and any other bills DEC is tracking. A lot there. Just stop me when you're done, and I'll be happy to come back if we don't get through all of it. But firstly, just happy New Year to you all. I had a chance to meet with some of you over the course of the summer or fall, and all of those were really great meetings. I think the Dead Creek was a lot of fun, is one example. And a number of other meetings. So in terms of 2025 outcomes or, you know, work that came from the outcomes of the 2025 session, I just want to touch on the CAFO work a little bit around the three acre stormwater bill a little bit and dam safety a little bit. So we'll start with three acre stormwater. You know, as part of that bill, we were charged with a number of provisions delaying the applicability of the go live for three acre permits for retrofits. Also convening a stormwater regional utility committee. Really pleased to report to you all that I have to miss that meeting, that fourth meeting today, because I'm with you all. Gianna Petito, that's fine. Gianna Petito, my completely expert deputy director of Water Investment Division will cover administering that meeting for us. But we are making good progress. And thank you, Representative North, for coming in on the kind of doing a little table set for the first meeting. That was great. We are also working through the recommendations from the Clean Water Board that came from your recommendations in the statute to attach money to some loan opportunities for stormwater. So all of those things are happening, and I'm pretty happy about that for now. I'm going to talk a little bit about dam safety. Dam safety seems to be a perennial topic nowadays. With flooding comes stresses on dams. ANR owns just around 100 dams that are owned and operated by the three, departments of ANR. DEC is the Dam Safety Program, and we run we operate the largest flood control facilities in the state. So some of the things that you're likely to be interested in, the phase two rules for Dam Safety Program, these are the rules that dictate if you need to update your dam, if you're a private dam owner or a public dam owner, and then you need to do work on your dam, these are the design specifications. This is the technical requirements for how to fix a dam so that it is safe in the modern age. My team has made those now the top priority. We've asked you for date extensions for that in the past. Some of those date extensions actually are in old H319 pinned to a different wall, that's fine. We're not asking for any dates for anything dam safety. It's our top priority to move those to the interagency committee by about June. So they are working hard on that. And that'll be a recurrent theme when I'm asked about dam safety. It's that is our top priority. Green River Reservoir, I know that I believe it was either mister Groveman or mister Carpenter referenced the Green River Reservoir report. There's an excellent short legislative report that presents four alternatives for what would happen were the state to take ownership of the Green River Reservoir, what the costs would be, what the benefits would be, what the drawbacks would be. And I did hear oh, it's it's Stuart Brady that spoke about that absolutely Tuesday. He was really good, by the way. He knows his stuff so well. Under Act 121, we were tasked with an emergency operations planning legislative effort, which lingered by about six months, but got done and got done super well. Representative Chapin has been talking to Dam Safety and Wind Director Emily Bird about a bill on that, but that was a good outcome. We also have, as required, newly under Act 121, a report for you all on our progress assigning dams that were in PUC's portfolio that may come to DEC's portfolio and sending those over to FERC, if that's appropriate. So we are a little over halfway through the process of requesting FERC determinations, which is really interesting because I've met a couple of them, and you get into some old information with that. I was reading about a project down in Manchester area, Lake Madeline, and there was some stuff back from the '30s and '40s that they had to put together as part of this. Was really fascinating. So good progress there. Act 57, which was over in GovOps, passed a small provision in there, allowing when the governor declares an emergency that dams can be dewatered proactively, and the department hasn't received any requests for that, but has developed a procedure for how we would evaluate them, and has actually tested that procedure on a number of the dams that we own and operate as well. So that's useful. Can you touch a

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: little bit on how you develop procedures?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: How we develop procedures?

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Because we're pretty interested in rules versus procedures. Of ways you implement things that are in statute.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: I am going to take the word procedure back and replace it with process. Because, you know, you're right, Chair Sheldon, so, you know, you've got law, got rulemaking authority, and then we may develop procedures to implement rules. This is not quite that. This is more like the process that the dam safety program would use.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: To your question. Yeah, because in this case of anti deg, it's a procedure, not a rule, and we're interested in it being a rule, so help us understand the difference. I

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: think there's some provision of law somewhere that requires that. So, the Department has in the past used procedures to communicate to the regulated public how to comply with a particular rule. Oftentimes, we do something like that, we'll notice that procedure, take input on it. They add that anti deg procedure, which is quite old, was actually subject to an awful lot of stakeholder engagement back in the day. I was involved in that. It was around ten years ago. And if you'd like to talk anti degradation, happy to do it. So I'm not prepared today.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: No. I just was wanting to know, because you were totally allowed to retract procedure in this instance, change the process, but it's on my mind in understanding the continuum of the ways that the department or the agency implements statute. So we can put it in a parking lot, or if you want to talk about just the difference broadly, not specific to that, the time. Want to talk about anti degradation

[Rep. Kate Logan]: at some point, but I

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: don't want to derail your presentation.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Okay, if we come back to it? Sure. Mostly because I wasn't completely prepared for it. Would have done a little bit of a wraparound around where procedures are at versus not. We've reduced some of the reliance on procedures as LCAR in previous years was a little bit less interested in procedures that are referenced by rule and instead incorporating those procedures into rule. So I'll give you a good example. There's an appendix of the water quality standards, which is very technical and dictates exactly how one measures a stream to determine its compliance with the water quality standards. That used to be a procedure, and it is now in the water quality standards as rule. And that's because, you know, that's pretty important stuff. And so you wanna make sure you're doing it in accordance with something that's duly adopted. And I'll leave it there for now. I'll just finish up with a statement because dam safety is always a poignant topic that the 100 dams that the agency owns and operates comes with a significant price tag, both capital and operation and maintenance. Our budget this year, we've requested some additional operations and maintenance dollars as base funds in the budget. That reflects the investment that the capital committees have made in our knowledge about the integrity of Vermont's dams and the state's dams. So it's there's a lot of work there. And there's a reason I will say that often and early. So let's chat a little bit about CAFO too. It might not seem like it from the dates that were passed in the bill, but the Department is making a lot of progress on that. We were given the authority to add or given the funding to add staff, and we had existing authority with a couple of positions, and we brought the KFO program from two to five positions now. It took us until November to complete the last two hires, And then in the interim, like, you know, Marcin who had been there left, so there's that revolving piece. But that's done. And so Abby Payjack is the manager of the KFO program, and she's actively working on training for capacity building and program development. Some of the deadlines that are in the bill are predicated on stakeholder engagement, and the stakeholder engagement is something we're taking seriously. There is a meeting, I believe this afternoon or tomorrow afternoon, would comprise the fourth session, three open sessions we've had with the farm community, plus a session with the folks in New York State who administer CAFO and folks from Cornell University who provide technical assistance. So all of that is happening. And while I know that Jared had mentioned to you all, you know, there's an MOU that's required and that we hadn't met that date, and there's a really good reason for that. So that MOU is done and it's with EPA. We have been waiting for input from EPA on the outcome of the bill on our KFO plan for quite some time, and we've requested directly to the regional administrator a couple of times on this and have not heard back. My sense is some of the decision making is instead of being vested at the regional level is at national level with EPA these days. And so it's a little harder to get quick timely decisions out. I'll talk about it when we speak to the request in the bill that I'll talk about in a bit. There are some changes there that EPA has already requested from us, but we're still waiting for more from them.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: When did that MOU go to APA?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: It was Luke, I don't know an exact date, but I want to say the October timeframe. We had worked back and forth with Agency of Ag for that, so. I wanna make sure you all understand that in the context of all of these updates, our team is available to provide more detail whenever you want. And that's why I'm kind of flagging it. I'm not the dispositive final expert on these matters. The stakeholder process is on track for a report mid March. Yes, that's a month late, but it's not that bad. It's being facilitated by a gentleman named Patrick Field, and I forget the name of his organization, but he's a really good facilitator. And I understand some of those meetings have been quite good. And we actually met with advocates about this at the same time that you were hearing about it from Lake Champlain Committee. We were meeting with LCC's executive director and VNRC, their executive director, about the process and getting some engagement from them as well. So it's moving. It really is. It's a big, complex piece, and Abby would be very happy to come speak to you if you'd like on that. Switching gears to some clean water highlights, if I can. I was going to just touch on progress on the TMDL. It's really exciting news.

[Rep. Kate Logan]: Oh, representative. Just one question. On the LCC and the CLF discussions, were some resolution reached or arrived at? And it's the last note on the exit. Sure. Are you moving closer to some?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: I think the issue that I, as I understood it, is that the advocates wanted inside of the stakeholder process at the very beginning at the onset. And I think that the department's perspective in coordination with the agency of ag is give the farmers an open space to have a discussion. There's a lot of interesting factors happening on the ground right now in the agricultural space, which is why the Department felt important to let the farmers begin to have their safe first. But the process is opening, stakeholders are stakeholders, and they're welcome.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Great, thank you. How they're going to be together?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: I would ask you to ask Abby.

[Rep. Kate Logan]: Thank you. I just wanted to get a sense

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: of how that was done.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: And I'm not trying to cop out or defer anything, but Pete LeFlam was basically the primary on this bill last year, and I wasn't really tracking it at all. So I'm high level aware of the progress, and that's what I'm reporting to you now. Good. Some highlights on clean water. I just want to talk a little bit about TMDL progress, both nutrient achievements, reduction achievements, clean water service providers, and I have to ring the bell of Lake Carmi a little bit with you all. You may remember when we presented year on clean water that there is this lag that exists in our reporting, and the lag relates to incoming information that isn't necessarily available by the time we do the performance report of the year, and it's also related to accounting methodologies. And a lot of that came together this year, and we are showing essentially an additional 20 metric metric ton reduction over the 50 metric ton reduction that we had booked last year. I don't want to steal any more of Claire's thunder than this. I really would hope that you might bring Claire Madden in with the Clean Water team to present on the Clean Water Performance Report. It's always a really impressive document, but in this instance, those numbers are real and we are making real progress. So at this point now, at the 50% mark of the TMDL, we are 35% of the way there in terms of reductions. That might not sound so good. You might think that it should be fiftyfifty, but I would just offer to bear in mind that the first five years we were operating on small money, 3 to $5,000,000 a year, and building regulatory programs that didn't exist that were put into place by Act 64. So in a way, you can think about when we really started to hit it hard is about 2019 to 2020, and that's where the curve starts to kick up. I'll show it to you if you want to see it later. I have this figure that I created when we wrote the phase one implementation plan in 2016, and I thought in my mind, how fast would the progress happen? And I basically made this theoretical curve of a slow start and then a real steep rise and then a plateau. And against that, I showed the timeline of the rules coming together. Those curves kinda are working very much in concert with, like, my gestalt of what I thought would happen. So, you know, we can talk we we can and should talk about clean water and our achievements and how things are going and whether there's other ways to do things better or more effectively. There is real progress happening.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: I just asked though, is that relating to the drought from this year?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: No. No. It's prior year's data that are now being booked because there's always a lag in the in as Jared put it to you the other day, and I like to use this analogy too, it's kind of like the jobs report. The jobs report comes out and then it gets updated next month. And in the next month it gets trued up with additional information. Right? So But what we've noticed is every year, the true up is an increase in the prior year's number, every year. So I think we can reliably count on that. And I'm not showing you the figure. Get to see it in the performance report. Don't think it's fair to steer it from Claire, but it is exciting, and it is good news, and we look forward to talking about it more. So I know there's some substantial interest in those discussions. Clean water service providers are also doing a good job. So recall that as part of our clean water apparatus, there is priority placed on all those non regulatory projects that have to happen in order for the TMDL to be achieved. And so we provide formula awards to watershed based organizations that work with stakeholders like watershed groups to build clean water projects and make this work happen. And the figure that you see on the right essentially shows the growth over the last two years, shows the growth in project origination, design, and construction. So the thing to pay attention to is the topmost, that kind of light green shaded area, which is getting up to one point half, 1.6 and a quarter metric tons, sixteen twenty five kilos. I think I have math wrong. Don't don't quote me on that. Anyway, they are doing a great job of now finding projects and beginning to design them and build them. I just talked to a stakeholder out in the card room who was super pleased at the Basin five, that's the North Lake Champlain service provider, providing Friends of North Lake Champlain funds so that they can go out and originate these projects. So things are working. It's just slow to start, and once they get going, they get going. Oh, what's oh, did I

[Unidentified participant (likely staff/member)]: go the wrong way? Yeah. Yeah. Didn't wanna go that way.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: I wanted to go this way. Am really whether you like the idea of using chemistry or not in order to fix a lake, I am incredibly proud of this photograph and this project. I wrote the first Lake Carmi TMDL, and I don't even remember when, in late 90s. I did the first Lake Carmi sampling to document its impairment back in like '92 and '93 and '94, and then again in 'three and 'four and 'five, and then subsequently other iterations. And we've thrown the book at this watershed. We've gotten the watershed under control. We've reduced nutrient loadings in that watershed to meet the TMDL loadings, and still the lake had a tremendous amount of legacy phosphorus coming up out of the sediments. And if you can think about a balanced system, the more we were reducing what was coming out of the watershed, the stronger that internal loading signal became. And so we contracted with a really excellent engineering firm, Barr Engineering, to document whether this was advisable or not. They came back with a resounding yes. This was funded with a combination of state revolving loan funds and clean water funds, dollars 3,700,000.0 intervention. I can't wait to see what happens next spring. So this picture was taken last October. During the treatment, there was an event up there. I think some members of the General Assembly were there. It was a beautiful day. I am incredibly optimistic about this. I have two major restoration projects that I wanted to see happen in my career before I go do something else. One of them is Lake Carmi, and the other is down in the Rutland area. So, see if I can get them both done. Any questions about this one?

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: We do have a little history with ALLO treatments. So I guess I'm curious, like, how long will it is is it expected to last? And it sounds like you think the phosphorus loading is under control. So does that mean you expect to not need to reapply? The

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: engineering estimates for the durability of this treatment, I don't want to give you a wrong number, but it is in the fifteen to twenty five year range for the durability of this treatment based on the current loading coming from the watershed. We treated Lake Mori last year for the second time, the first time having been forty five years prior. So that treatment lasted for forty three years before it started to break down. And when DEC realized it was breaking down and there's a fun story about that, but it's irrelevant now when we realized it was breaking down, we kind of very quickly pivoted to let's do an engineering analysis, let's review the watershed, let's see what chemistry is telling us is happening inside the bottom of that lake. And sure enough, the treatment had broken down, and it was starting to bleed up. Secretary Moore and I went to Lake Moray this fall as well, and it's just spectacular. I mean, it is absolutely spectacular. So I am confident that the watershed interventions will stick, because there's a tremendous amount of interest in making sure that that happens. I'm confident in the lower bound of the durability on that treatment. Oh, we'll see. This is the largest alum treatment we've done. I want to say that I think there's a bill in play around this that's come up. This is not an intervention for everywhere. This is an intervention for a very select set of facts and circumstances. We have, you know, a pretty tight permit around this application, same with Lake Moray. And then Tickle Naked Pond is the only other pond in the state that we did this intervention on. Was also one that I wrote the TMDL, did the math, hired the engineers. So it's not like Lake Iroquois or, just pick your lake, Curtis Pond or whatever one you might want, would be suitable for this. You have to have a situation where you have a history of significant phosphorus loading, that it is accrued in the bottom of the lake, that the chemistry is right to be sending it back up out of the lake on a regular basis, and that your watershed is in control. All that stuff has to be in play. If not, it's not worth it. I don't know if anybody remembers the name Eric Smeltzer. He was my mentor. Ten years ago, he and I were talking about, Well, is it time to do an Allen Creek Lake Carmi Lake? And he just he wasn't there. He couldn't get around. He was like, The watershed is not clean enough yet. It's not tight enough yet. And so we didn't pursue it at that time when it would have been probably about a million dollar, $7.50 to $1,000,000 treatment. No shade, right? We needed to be sure.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: And what's the recovery of the aquatic life like in something like this?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah, wrote a paper on that for Lake Moray with the chief fisheries biologist from Fish and Wildlife and the chief macroinvertebrate biologist. The biology does recover. If you do the treatment over aggressively, as was done in Lake Morrie at the beginning, you can essentially change the chemistry of the lake and make the pH too high, and that affects aquatic biota. It affects fish reproduction and it affects bugs, macroinvertebrates that live in the bottom of the lake. For that reason, this treatment, in fact, example, the picture right behind you, you see these two tanks on that barge. One tank has alum, which is one formulation of aluminum. The other tank has sodium aluminate, which is another formulation of alum. When mixed in the right proportions, that controls any modification to the pH of the lake as the aluminum goes in. They're, I don't, don't ask me what the proportions are, but they're going out there and they're injecting x parts alum and y parts sodium aluminate to buffer the pH changes to preclude effects on aquatic biota. The engineering report did a really nice job, and I'm happy to get it to you all if you are interested, but did a really good job of documenting aquatic biota effects, and we worked a lot with Fish and Wildlife on this.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Representative Austin? That was the same question. Representative Tagliavia.

[Rep. Mike Tagliavia]: I've got a few questions. First, explain to me what you mean by loading. The other is this, how do you prevent it being stirred up by either weather or boat And you said something about it breaking down. What do you mean by breaking down? Sure. I'm curious about that picture when you're done answering those. Are those feeder tubes, are they weighted so that they're hanging just above

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: weight bottom? Let me take it in reverse order. Those tubes are just loading up those tanks from, like how big are the big frac tanks anybody's done construction? The the the big frac tanks are, like, 50,000 gallons or something. So they've got these big frac tanks on land of alum sodium aluminate, Trucks coming in twice a day loading those tanks up. Those pipes are just filling those blue tanks on the barge, and they get disconnected.

[Rep. Mike Tagliavia]: It's like the booms, and there's something hanging on those feeding what's

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Those are little tubes that are just six inches below the water. Okay. And they're going like this, right? So the alum mix is coming out of each tube along the booms, and they are literally using GPS to run a grid to provide an entire coverage blanket for the entire bottom surface of the lake for the treatment area. So that's how that's working. Alum? Understood? Good? Alum treatments breaking down. The way the chemistry works is alum chemically binds up phosphorus preferentially, and it does a good job of it, and it will continue to do it. So, as phosphorus tries to come up from the bottom, that alum layer that's on the top will chemically bind that phosphorus and keep it from going up into the lake water column. Over time, the alum gets charged out, and over time, clean sediment or sediment comes in from the watershed and is continually covering up the layer of alum. Ultimately, at some point, it gets down there too far that it's no longer viable, no longer active. And so that's what happened in Moray, and that's why it was time for a retreatment.

[Rep. Mike Tagliavia]: So it's not actually breaking down, it's just too deep to be effective?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah, I'll call it charged out. Like, can't take any more phosphorus, and it just becomes part of the lake sediment layer. Okay. Your second question, I think one, well,

[Rep. Mike Tagliavia]: first was loading, second was Yeah, stirring that

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: was Okay, stirring up. Yeah, great. That's of interest. The folks at Lake Mori were talking to us about that, or looking into that. You're not gonna mess it up by dropping an anchor in there or something like that. In fact, if the flock layer gets agitated and it resettles down, it actually is not necessarily bad at all. It's actually kind of good if that happens. But you don't want to have an activity that consistently perturbs the layer, especially at the shallow most extents of it. So, just to put a plain name on it, there's a dialogue right now about the wakeboat rule and whether wake boats could upset treatment of a lake like this. And the department is actually engaging with folds lap around that, talking about that right now as part of that whole rulemaking.

[Rep. Mike Tagliavia]: One more, if I could. You said that I don't think the was the whole lake, like, for the example of Lake Morgue, was the whole lake done or just certain quadrants or sections of the lake?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: It's a depth zone, Right? So at or below a certain depth of water, all of the sediment would have been treated. And I don't remember the numbers for Lake Mori. I think it's four and below or five meters of depth and below, 50 feet of depth and below for Lake Carmi. And the reason is that that's the area of sediment that's predisposed to the chemistry that causes the phosphorus to get released. In shallower water, the water's always moving over the sediment water interface, so there's always oxygen over the sediment water interface. This is getting into the chemistry. The oxygen goes away is when the phosphorus comes up. So you only treat where the oxygen goes away. You could treat more, but there's no point. It's just money. There's no reason to spend the money. What do you do about or how do you prevent drift to keep this from going where you didn't intend it to be? It sinks. I mean, you know, during wake chop. Well, during application, it sinks, and it's in there. This is a tried and true technology. This has been done in a lot of lakes nationally, and successfully now in two of three, and we'll see about the third. Loading, sorry, I should have been a little clearer about my terminology. So that's just basically how much phosphorus or nitrogen or sediment flows from the land into the water. We just term that loading. So phosphorus loading to a lake would be all the phosphorus that flows in in the stream, or that might flow directly off land into the water, or flow from land into the stream into the water. That's loading. So when you do this treatment, you do a treatment planning on it, putting enough quantity in to last for like a fifteen year period? Yes. And that's all predicated on how much loading is happening. You want to make sure that the loading is controlled so that you're not putting lots of fresh phosphorus on top and charging it out sooner.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Are there effects in people or animals who drink these waters?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: No. During the treatment, obviously, we had it signed up, but anybody who drinks water from a public water system actually is drinking water that's been treated with alum, because alum is the final finishing step to precipitate any junk out of treated water. It's a super common chemical. It is also the chemical that's used to remove phosphorus from wastewater before it goes into the lake. So Burlington and everywhere that does tertiary treatment is using algae. I'm not

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: sure if that makes me feel better.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Well, stick with the drinking water part, Ben. Fold the posters.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Think my will. Alright. Carry on.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Can we move forward? Yes.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: How am I doing on time?

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Don't have anything.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Okay, great. Okay. I do want to speak a little bit about permit The floor

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: at free.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Of course.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: My time is yours until you need to boogie. This is just a picture of people doing the technical assistance thing. It doesn't have a lot to do with permitting, but it was a photo I grabbed this morning. But I did want to talk about this a little bit. This is something that Commissioner Cinzigali and I feel pretty strongly about. I'm going to tell a story without any names or locations, but it's exemplar, and it was last week that it happened. Individual got in touch with the Department through one of our programs and said, I am interested in developing this old building here into 150 units of workforce housing over in Eastern Vermont, and tell me what I need to do to permit it. I think I'm pretty good. I know it's an old industrial use site, so there could be a lot there. 115 units would need drinking water, and wastewater, and storm water, and all of that stuff. So our program person responded, Hey, thank you for this. In terms of my program, I think you'd need to do this and this and this, and I'm happy to help you with that. And I think you need to talk to this program. I've copied them. And then that program person, being helpful, read the email and string, said, Oh, well, that's pretty interesting. In order to do that, you'd also need to do this and this and this. By the way, it's a little bit hard for this and that reason. And you probably need to think about this program as well. I'm purposely being vague, but this really happened. And I'm copying them. Enter the third program. I think you're going to have a really hard time doing this. I don't think the capacity is there to do this and that and that, but we can certainly talk about it. And by the way, I think you need to talk to this person. Do you see where I'm going? So this person who is trying to do the right thing and ask the right question and not knowing who to ask it of is now getting spun out all over the place. Everybody is trying to be helpful. Everybody, like, you know, that's a cool thing. A big housing redevelopment in an existing site is good. But if I'm the developer guy, fuck, I mean, where do I go first? Right? So, at the agency level, the agency has an Office of Planning that interacts with the Act two fifty program and interacts with people who come to Act two fifty for permits. And they do a lot of coordination for those big projects of that type. But DEC doesn't actually have a similar functionality. We used to, but it was never really put into its optimal use. We had the staff called permit specialists that were there to basically look at a project and figure out what permits a project might need, but that was the end of the story. Then that was sent back, and the person then trying to build a thing would then have to call all these people and end up with the same set of spirals and do loops. Right now, the best resource that exists for somebody who wants to come to DEC and build something is a tool called the Permit Navigator, which is an electronic system. It's a GIS based, Salesforce based system that essentially looks at features on the ground and says, you probably need wetlands, you might need river corridor, you might need storm water, you might need this, that, the other. And typically, it just gives the applicant the book, Right? Here, you probably need most of these permits. And so it doesn't really leave that person who wants to build something with that much more knowledge. What we intend to do is to build a system where there's this front door, where, Representative North, if you want to build a thing, you come into one office and you interact with one set of people who do the coordination for you. And, you know, your consultant or you wouldn't interact necessarily with a stormwater technician or a wetlands technician until it was time and until it was figured out, and until that was the right time for the intervention. We're not doing this as a result of any legislative push or any law. We're doing this because we need to do it. We're not doing it necessarily because of the housing executive order. We're doing it because we've just observed these complexities that have emerged over time. Part of it is with the growth of our regulatory programs. The Vermont Environmental Permit Assistance Center is gonna move us kinda away from a pretty unintelligent, pretty artificially unintelligent online system to some pretty unartificially intelligent humans. To be buttressed by technology as well. But one of the things that we want to do with this is to internally construct, or prospectively externally, but more likely internally construct some data systems that would allow Representative North, picking on you again, if you're the applicant, to see where your stuff is at and see who your stuff is with. Right now, you can do that through the environmental notice bulletin once everything's fine. But when we're trying to figure out what you need, when we're trying to do pre application review, we don't have that. So we have a set of three really qualified senior DEC staff that are being assigned to this project, kind of a detail assignment to do that. They are convening with us next week, with leadership next week, to get it going. They're going to be working with the programs. They're going to be fleshing this out. So this is kind of a little bit of a teaser. If you were to ask us to come in and testify on it, we'd give you slightly more than I gave you here, but not a lot, because the team needs to build it. But it's a good opportunity, and we are invested in doing this. We want to make it easier for Vermonters to do right by the environment and build the things they want to build in the places that make sense.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Who's heading it up?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: So it's gonna be the team of folks that's gonna head it up. Carrie Hoytstenberg is a senior manager in our Administration Innovation Division, and Carrie has been responsible for tracking the Permit Expediting Process, the HEP report, for many years. That's a report that you all will receive shortly. It's sort of like how long it takes for permits to issue out of the Department. Along with her, Megan Cousineau, who has been in charge of the Healthy Homes Program for the Environmental Compliance Division and has done a lot of work with public trying to build the wastewater systems, right? And trying to navigate like, well, I need the wastewater system, but I need to navigate around wetlands and I can't put it where my stormwater is. And then the third is Shane Miller. Shane Miller is the program manager in watershed management who administers all of the business process of permits that flow into that shop. These are really great people.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Representative Pritchard. A question I never asked. Can't believe I haven't, and I've

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: never heard of MS. How many permits are under the umbrella of ANR? Like, of ANR? I can give you DEC. That's a good start. About 4,500 a year.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: No, different type of How many Oh,

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: permit programs, about 45. 45.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: 45

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: flavors of permit. More like 15 permit programs. So for example, stormwater, you might need a construction permit if you're building something larger than a certain size with a certain level of risk, But you also need to have operational stormwater controls, like that stuff we were talking about all last year. So those are two different flavors of stormwater permit or MS four, flow restoration planning, all of that. And how many out of those permits, how many need to be renewed yearly? I'm not sure many need to be renewed yearly at all. Think Well, Natcas Corey has to renew. Solar operational, it may be a yearly, yeah, there's a yearly certification that the system is operating. That's yearly renewal. The other instance would be an in ground wastewater permit. Those run with the land, and they are one time authorization. National point source of NIPTY's permit, like wastewater or MS4, that's a five year cycle. And last question, what revenue is generated by all these permits in DEC yearly? Are you asking for the total amount? Yeah. I can't tell you that off the top of my head. That's part of our budget testimony, though, and as soon as that's given, that number's available, and I could go get it. Within a few million. Yeah. I want to give it a proportionate value. I wasn't prepared for that question. I can definitely answer it, but not a problem, but I wasn't prepared for It's quarter ish of our revenues, quarter ish of the revenues. A quarter of the revenues or quarter of your budget? A quarter of the revenues come in, and we use that on the staff that do that work. So it doesn't necessarily translate exactly to a quarter of the spending plan. Let me not get any more over my skis on that. That's a really good and important question. Other questions on this? I keep hitting the wrong thing and jumping to the wrong slide. So there we go. Alright, so you wanted to speak about the executive order in wetlands, and I only have one slide on this since mostly because I want to address the questions that you guys might want to ask as opposed to sell anything one way or another. So the executive order is put in place in order to accelerate housing in the designated areas of Vermont. It also attaches to what are called opportunity zones and attaches to the outward extent of a wastewater collection system or a water distribution system associated with the designated area. Leaving aside the opportunity zones, the total area of the state that is involved in the wetlands modification for the executive order is 3%. Including the opportunity zones, it's 6%. And I think mister Grogman gave some perspectives on on that the other day, so let those stand. The purpose is to streamline housing development in those designated areas by essentially providing some regulatory certainty around wetlands permitting. The way the executive order was structured and delivered, the department had to take a careful look at it and see whether we could legally do what the governor had directed us to do. We determined that in order to legally do that, we needed to pursue a rulemaking, which we have. The approach that we've taken to the rulemaking is, I think Mr. O'Grady and Mr. Grover noted, to create an allowed use of housing in those designated areas when all a whole suite of factors are met. We put that rule out. We're getting a lot of comment on it right now, a lot. And we are actively engaged in both reviewing the comment and in conducting meetings with stakeholders who want to provide additional comment and or talk through ideas. So once the comment period closes, we'll be able to have a look at all of that and determine whether the allowed use approach that we took is in fact the most expeditious and or most appropriate defensible approach to take. And I'm going to stop there and take questions.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: President Tagliavia?

[Rep. Mike Tagliavia]: When we got to this section in the presentation the other day, there was an illustration that was put up. And my question is, can you give us a better example, a more realistic example? Because my concern is that illustration could be misinterpreted. And I'm curious just if there are any specific locations where this 25 foot buffer would be actually put in place, if you could give a better description of the actual location, some of the ones that the EO directly refers to.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: So these are all super site specific. Right? So I can't kinda if gonna create an illustration for you, try and verbalize an illustration, it would have to be specific to a site. So, I can try. Class II wetlands, mapped or unmapped right now, the way this works, class II wetlands, mapped or unmapped, essentially are comprised of those areas that have all those functions and values, and then a 50 foot buffer around them. When wetlands are mapped by delineation, which is the process that we go out in the field and look, We know where those wetlands are, and we can clearly draw that 50 foot boundary, and that is what it is. And so when there's a reduction in that buffer, you're reducing the protective buffer around that, but you're not impacting the functions and values. That's in a delineated known wetland. Now take a wetland that may be mapped, but it's not yet delineated. So we've used remote sensing, we've used the best available technology, soils, everything to understand that, you know, your property might have an area that is mapped Class II wetland. Now, may not have been picked up in the mapping that immediately adjacent to that is an extension of that same class two wetland that has those same characteristics and same functions and values. It's just not on the map. The way the rules are structured right now is if that land exists with the same characteristics, functions, values, that it is considered class two wetland even if it's not mapped. When we are truly cooking with gas, the maps are updated with delineations in a way that we have a really, as best, an assessment of the mapping of the well and extensiveness in these designated areas as is practicable. And when you have that, then the reduction of the buffer to 25 feet, the intent behind that, Governor's intent behind that, is to allow additional infill and to allow housing developments to be kind of jiggered around a little bit in such a way as to not lose units that you might not be able to put in were you to protect the 50 foot buffer. That's the intent. I wonder if I should answer the question you asked Mr. Grovman that he wasn't quite clear on in terms of what the process is for obtaining wetlands authorization.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Go ahead.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah. Okay. I thought that might be of interest. So, let's say, sir, if you don't mind, you're going to be building a set of houses on the land that you own. Your first step is going to be to look at the ANR's Atlas, and you're going to look at a couple of different things. You're going to look at the Vermont Significant Wetlands Inventory. That's known Class II mapped wetlands. You're going to look at the hydric soils layer, and you're gonna look at what's called the wetlands advisory layer. So the wetlands advisory layer is a much coarser assessment of a confluence of factors that suggests that class two wetlands might exist. And if on your property you see anything GSWR, or you see areas that are part of the advisory layer or underlain by hydric soils, it's highly advisable to contract with to contact the program, as Mr. Grobman said. The program will then say, okay, very good. Let me look at the map with you. I agree. I believe you should hire a consultant to go and delineate your property. So you can do that. You'll get on the list with a there's a list of consultants that we have. The consultant will come out, they'll do the delineation, and then they'll provide that back to you, the owner, and they'll provide it to the wetlands program. At that point, you'll know exactly what you've got, and then the process from there is one of avoidance and minimization, and lastly, mitigation. If you can build staying away from those known polygons, you get no wetland permit needed. If must if there's no other way that your project can get built but by either impacting the buffer or wetland, you've got to minimize. So if you've avoided, you're good. You can minimize, you have to minimize to the maximum extent practicable for the stated project purpose. And if all else fails, and in order for the project to be developed, the only way it can be done is to be built in such a way that it does take a chunk out of a Class II wetland, then you have to mitigate. And under Act 121, the mitigation is two to one mitigation ratio. Although Mr. Government is right that we have not gotten that one in rule yet, but we will.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: We will when?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: As soon as we get let us get through this process. You know? CEO process. Understand that, you know, the governor gave the department a directive.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: The legislature had already given the department a directive in previous years.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Don't intend to I I don't intend to Right. Spar it, obviously. Good.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Can you talk about how the maps are used now? And I guess I'm really interested. It seems to me what you're proposing is having two review processes and two permitting processes, whether you're in a designated type of area or not. And so we're going to have these two ways that we are regulating our wetlands, which strikes me as actually potentially confusing for people in the world of private land ownership and development. Ideally, we get to a place where the maps are sufficiently robust that we actually can regulate to them. What folks will

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: tell you is that wetlands breathe, and Mr. Government was right. They do. Right? And that's why the delineations are helpful. The rub in the designated areas is that you've got a situation where under our climate goals, we are intending and desiring to develop in centralized areas so as to reduce greenfield development and to capitalize on all the amenities and infrastructure that we have in those areas. And to the degree that projects are not able to be optimized due to the protection of wetlands, you're losing the opportunity for that infill development, which necessarily will spill out into sort of greenfield spaces. So I think the opportunity with the implementation of the executive order is to see how regulating two maps in practice functions and to allow for an acceleration of the process. One of the things that does happen with wetlands permitting, and it's because of the nature of our landscape and our climate, is you can only do delineations during a certain time of the year. And because there's a lot of activity, there's a lot of action and there's a lot of demand on delineators' time and a lot of demand on the wetlands program's time. So as a result, a developer may want to may have in their mind's eye that they're going to be able to start their foundation in October or whatever, but in reality, you're going to lose a year on that going through the delineation process and the negotiation process, which translates into cost. The executive order is purposeful only to the designated areas, recognizing the importance of flood control functions and values, wildlife protection, clean water protection in the remaining vast majority of the state.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Why do we have buffers on wetlands?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: We have buffers on wetlands as a protective area surrounding the area that provides for the functions and values that those wetlands provide.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: And what is reducing that buffer? What are the effects of that?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: I cannot answer that.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Can you answer that?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: That would be a technical question for the wetlands program folks.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: And then I don't think you answered my question of how the maps are used now.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Oh, well, back to back to the example of of of the representative wanting to build a build build something. If you've got a class two map wetland on your property now, I mean, that's basically that that essentially and you do not have a delineation. That's basically a signal that under the current process, you need to go do a delineation to see if there's any extensions of that wetlands that are not that wetland that's not captured on the map. They're updated. The maps are updated routinely. The General Assembly has given us a lot of money to do that, with the ultimate goal of getting to a place where we can be more reliant on the maps to provide that regulatory certainty. Otter Creek Basin and I believe Missisquoi were updated this summer. We are about to notice the entire Connecticut River Basin and the North Lake Champlain Watershed. So those are the updated maps. Are they perfect? They are not.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Where has this been a problem? Why is this on the radar?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: It's about timeliness and regulatory certainty. So if you come in, you want to build a project, you have in your mind that you're going to build something, you might be building your funding stack and thinking about your finances, and it may be backwards, the process they're doing, but a lot of people are like, I have this much money, I want to build this much thing. You come into it, you begin to go through the permitting process, you encounter the time steps associated with the regulatory process, and you encounter the expense associated with the regulatory process, which if it translates into loss of units, increases that price per unit for the housing unit that's trying to be constructed.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: But that's like I guess I'd just like to know an example of where this has been a problem.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: I've heard a number of examples of housing, mostly individual homes, where it is a problem.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: That are in designated growth areas? It would be helpful to have those.

[Rep. Mike Tagliavia]: Are there any projects where you use the word infill I'm thinking existing multifamily units already existing where they're looking for expansion, thinking some of these are what spurred part of the CO. Are there any that you know of, number one? And number two, are they next to already delineated wetlands that this process would be helpful? Because there's already delineation. It would be very easy to see if that 25 foot buffer would really not be a problem so that those units can be built.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: There's a project in Barrie that is pretty exemplary of this, and I can't remember the name of it. But based on whether you are operating with mapped wetlands or delineated wetlands, there's a big difference. And the 25 versus 50 foot buffer, there's a significant difference in the number of houses that could be put up there. If you wanted to talk about projects and project locations, I really needed to defer to my colleagues at Commerce and Community Development. I don't have my finger on the pulse of every project that's prospectively out there.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: I

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: have a question on something probably in the executive order. Okay.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Let's see if representative Morris' question is on it.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. The executive order you mentioned the time constraints and time of pre permitting applications etcetera. That's this the EO doesn't reduce that at all.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: If you are regulating to maps, then you do not need to conduct a delineation. If you don't need to conduct a delineation, you don't need to wait until between April and October to do it, and then have the time step of having the review process and the permitting process if it if it kicks in.

[Rep. Kristi Morris]: The map to that detail. That you can go from 50 feet to 25 feet and be comfortable. They

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: are not. It's about trade offs. It's about identifying where you want to incent your housing and where you want to de incent your housing.

[Rep. Kristi Morris]: I get that, but it seems to me the delineation would have to be reviewed anyways.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Under the executive order, the executive order can't affect federal permitting, and Vermont co regulates wetlands with the federal government. So the Army Corps would still require delineations for projects in which they engage, in which case that delineation is there?

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Representative Satcowitz.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Tell me if I'm wrong, because I don't I really don't know the answer to this. But I'm imagining that the 50 foot buffers, that that number has some sort of ecological significance, that if it's at that number, that we're gonna be feeling pretty good about protecting the health of the associated wetland. I'm wondering if we if the 25 foot number, like how it was picked

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: I can't. I I it's a technical question then, and I'm not a wetland scientist, so I would need to need to defer to those good folks on that.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Representative Logan.

[Rep. Kate Logan]: Could you tell us a bit more about the process for establishing these maps and then how often they'd be updated?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yes. Hold on just a sec. Sorry about that. I have a little unit here that's hooked up to my back problem, so it gives me a little bit of review. The help? Actually, I may need to stand

[Unidentified participant (likely staff/member)]: up in just a moment.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: I'm afraid to stand up. Any one of us will stand up at any time.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Thank you. I'm going to stand up.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: We could all stand up.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: It's been about an

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: hour, so good for all of us.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Sorry. Thank you. So we have staff that are actually actively working on developing the maps in coordination with the contractor, University Saint Mary's in Minnesota. They're very good at it. The maps basically start with the National Wetlands Inventory. They're updated using geographic information sensing. We have a staff member who's really, really sharp at this work. He oversees the contracts. He coordinates sort of plugging the delineations in with the remote sense maps, and then those are brought forward, you know, kind of compile all the GIS is done. And then as I said, those get public noticed. And nominally under, I think it's 01/2021, nominally they're updated on a five year cycle coincident with the basin plans as the basin plans are updated on that five year cycle. So we're in a place right now where a lot is coming together. So a lot of the geography of Vermont is gonna have fresh maps. Again, they're not perfect, but they're gonna be fresh maps. The other thing that we will be doing is to be looking at all the areas where we have delineations within those designated areas and seeing about updating based on that to provide the maximum regulatory clarity that we can.

[Rep. Kate Logan]: Thanks. And what kind of projects will state and federal wetlands regulations overlap?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: They don't overlap so much as complement. So federal wetland permitting applies to wetlands that Vermont does not consider significant, not consider class II or class I. So, it's class III wetlands that the Army Corps regulates. The programs work together, but they work together kind of to separate those out. Did I answer your question or not? I don't feel like it did.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: So, someone's in one of these Opportunity Zones. Their wetland is not on your map, but it triggers a federal review. What happens to that development?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: I am not sure.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: It seems like we're creating uncertainty where we had a program that was pretty certain. And I know it's not you, so I'm not frustrated with you. Anyone else have more questions on this wetlands EU? No word.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Well, representative Morgan. This is not gonna ask again. Just wanna let you know that I have.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: He's all set. Different topics.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Okay. Good. Alright. Yeah. Let me stand again for a quick second. Maybe I'll do this part standing, if you don't mind. Okay, miscellaneous change requests. A lot of this I've termed it policy, and then there's another slide on dates. But really, when I say policy, it's small p, not capital P policy. Most of these are relatively minor, and all of them can be discussed. So healthy homes, personally identifiable information. This was in last year's technical corrections. We're just asking for the General Assembly to direct that we cannot divulge under Freedom Information Requests, PII. We would hold it back anyway, but we can't necessarily hold it back. It's a very simple provision that goes back and identifies certain appropriations and says that the state can't give, or the department can't provide information about those owners to intervenes. PII protection.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: I have a question. You mentioned last year's bill. Was that r three nineteen?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah. I think so. Okay.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Yep. So we will have seen a few of these, I think. Mhmm.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah. Okay. I'll I'll let you know. I I should tell you which ones are old. I think this is an old one. There's clarifications for when storage tanks, fuel storage tanks are red tagged. The real surgical limited, they just basically update the language to reflect the modern approach to permitting storage tanks, where the language now reflects older language before there were permits for these tanks. Clean water project accounting. So there's a provision in Act 60 and Act 76 in the Clean Water Service Provider Act that says that if somebody asked the department for the development of a new accounting methodology for a new type of clean water project, that we have sixty days to produce that. It's not a reasonable timeframe, and we're asking for the law to be amended to allow for a year of time to develop an accounting methodology. And I'll rewind to Mr. Carpenter's comments to you on Tuesday when he showed that table of all those accounting methodologies. Those are all the methodologies that are either complete and that we can make mathematical calculations on or that are in development, and we can't make mathematical calculations for those project types. So if friends in North Lake Champlain says, Hey, I want to build this new thing, how much phosphorus am I going to get reduction out of it? And we say we don't have accounting methodology for that. Okay, can you develop one? Yes, we can. But we're asking for more than sixty days to do it, because we can't do that in sixty days. Sometimes it's a research project. Some of the accounting methodologies we're working through right now for the Clean Water Performance Report are subject to two and three year research grants that are funded federally and conducted by the university and things like that. So that's the intent there. This is one I want to talk about. This is new stream alteration. So, in the time of Irene, prior to Irene, you were only required to get a stream alteration permit if the watershed of that area that you were looking for that permit was 10 square miles or larger, which meant there was a lot of river for which the state had no oversight in how a culvert or a bridge was built or riprap or fill or anything like that in order to manage that river road conflict or river property conflict or whatever. After Irene and the massive flooding and with the development of river corridor protections and fluvial geomorphology as the foundation of how we manage rivers, now, essentially after Irene Act 138, reduced that jurisdictional threshold to all perennial streams. Which means that a stream alteration engineer needs to visit a site and make a decision call as to whether something is in fact perennial or not. Perennial means it has water flowing in it year round, March. What the Rivers Program is requesting of you is to consider raising the jurisdictional threshold to one half square mile. At one half square mile, that's the, based on the 2023 and twenty twenty four floods, and the hundreds and hundreds of site visits that the stream alteration engineers have done, they're basically going up there, spending a lot of time to determine jurisdictionality for limited incremental gain. So what they're asking for is to set that half square mile. It sets regulatory certainty for a municipality who's doing a bridge project, think Middlesex. It sets regulatory certainty for our teams and it reduces work on our teams. So that's the request there. And Rob Evans would be the right person or Jaren Borg would be the right person to come talk about it.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: And will there be a map that they can share with us to Yeah, get a sense of

[Rep. Kate Logan]: definitely.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Just a follow-up on that. So by reducing that distance, 10 miles, you've said that.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah, 10 square miles.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: The size of the watershed, not a distance.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah, so if you had Would it be

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: less site visits by your department?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: It would be marginally less site visits, and it would be less time spent deciding whether something was perennial or not. We can tell you, looking on the desktop right now, whether this point on the landscape has a half a square mile or bigger sending watershed. So, in or out. If it's less than half a square mile, the risk of doing something improperly is much lesser than if it's larger. But I'm gonna stop there because that's a good thing for Rob or Jarron to comment on that. Interesting. These are new. I got a good question from Legis Council O'Grady. So there's a few modifications to last year's CAFO bill that we're requesting. They come from EPA and they largely strengthen the definitions of animal feeding operations. They talk about things where you have two separate farms that are part of a non CAFO, when those come together, they are treated as a CAFO. In a general sense, the purpose of the modifications, which was they were requested by EPA, is to just slightly strengthen the language. And I would have to have Abby Pageak come in and walk through the intents with you on that. There are also a few date proposals in there that reflect our stakeholder work that we're doing right now, and try and true up the capacity of the program, the pace of the stakeholder work to what is expected by the bill. I mean, bill was in fast negotiation all the way till the end. Indeed it was. The next is storm water impact fees for three acre retrofit sites. I remember coming to you last year and we talked about this. It didn't get traction in last year's bill. There were a lot of things in last year's bill, a lot of discussion. If you are willing to entertain the conversation, we'd love to have it. The stormwater impact fees are applied for a three acre retrofit project, when the engineering says you just can't get treatment because of all the site constraints. If And you can't get treatment because of all the site constraints, you're required to pay an impact fee. The impact fee is well under half the value of the money that would be needed to achieve that phosphorus reduction. I'll say again, as I did last year, in a way they feel a little bit punitive, because if you've owned a site forever, you bought a site that was not subject to regulation a long time ago, and you can't do anything legitimately with it, doing your best with what you've got seems fair, having to pay for somebody else to do something, maybe that's our perspective on it. So happy to have the conversation again. Kevin Burke and Terry Purcell will be the right folks to come down and chat about that. This came up last year and we're proposing it again, but it never made it into H319. So last year, we did do some language about federal rules by incorporation, right? So if we had a rule that incorporated a federal rule, and the federal government eliminated that rule, that incorporated rule content would remain on Vermont's books, so long as Vermont published that incorporated content. We did that last year. It was to guard against the concern about substantial environmental rule losses at the federal level. The second piece that we had talked about, but it never made it in the, and we even said language, I think it just got crossed in the mail, so to speak, was the emergency rulemaking to preserve aggregated federal rules. So if the feds just go ahead and eliminate illegally, eliminate a federally binding rule that Vermont is implementing, that we would continue to implement. That is the purpose of it. Our General Counsel Jordan Gonda would be the right person to speak to this. She's real articulate. And I had spoken to Senator Watson on this matter late last year, kind of when the whole end of the session was coming and it was determined at 03:19, the remaining pieces would stay. But I think that she was understanding of it as well. And then the last policy program is pretty minimal, but it is also new. We have a vehicle emissions repair program. If you have an older car, you're a lower income Vermonter, you need to fix your emissions and you can't, you can get a waiver for a year that your vehicle will inspect and you have some time to fix it, and then the state has a program that we can help defray the cost of that. It's administered through our air pollution control division, and what we're looking to do here is change the income eligibility guidelines, so that they square up with federal income eligibility guidelines. Presently, square up to LIHEAP guidelines. They're somewhat different.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Okay,

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: so anyway, that would be Deirdre Rutzer in the AIR program.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Kate's our expert on income eligibility things. Yeah,

[Rep. Kate Logan]: I mean there are lots of different federal guidelines, so depends on that goal.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah, and I mean, I could look in the language and tell you that there's some 185% of federal poverty, I think is one number that I remember from.

[Rep. Kate Logan]: Who do we have in on that one?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Deirdre Rutzer. Oh, sorry.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: You went. Let's see how it goes.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Oh, representative Pritchard. The fuel storage tanks that encompasses, is that commercial or is that everything?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: It's storage tanks that are permitted, and I'm not sure, so I didn't say who that would be, but that would likely be someone from Matt Chapin's team. I just didn't know what fell in that.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: I think it's residential. Yeah, that's that's I think it's

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: using so I'm using the term red tagging pretty loosely here. So there are there are underground fuel storage tanks that may also need to be replaced, and that may need to be taken out of service. So this is strictly underground? I'm not sure.

[Rep. Mike Tagliavia]: We'll learn more.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Again, I didn't want I can personally come back more educated, or we can get the right person to do it. The last slide I have on this is just some date modifications as well. I'm hitting the down arrow and it's doing weird things. There we go. Battery stewardship. So under our battery recycling program, we were to procure a stewardship organization to oversee the recollection of used batteries, and then to produce a report. It took a lot longer than we anticipated to get the stewardship organization in place. So we're looking for a year there. RiverCorps Are they in place? Are they in place, the stewardship? I'm gonna say I think.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: We'll ask Matt?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yes, please do. This was a request that was in H319 to move the River Corridor base map updates to 2027 from 2026. I worked with Legis Council of Grady to confirm sort of all the dates in there, and we didn't change. We didn't ask for any more time in most cases than we had asked for last year.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Yeah. And so begs the question, though, of like, if we agree to this, how do we know it's really going to come? What's our assurance? Particularly here, where we did give you staff.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah, it took a while for the staff to get in place. Happy to talk about it when we talk about it.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Who should we have in on that?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Oh, that would be probably Rob Evans and or Rebecca Fife. You've heard from both of them before. You've heard from both of them before. As part of Act 121, there is educational outreach required through the Environmental Justice Advisory Council. And so, because things are taking longer, we want to have more time to do that outreach to stakeholders in order to then bring that and work with the Environmental Justice Advisory Council. And this is all about the river corridor map adoptions. So we're looking to do stakeholder engagement with communities, bring that stakeholder engagement of the communities to the AJ Advisory Council so they're aware of it, and then move forward with the River Corridor maps. And then the last one is a couple of CAFO deliverable timelines that would allow us to true up to the stakeholder engagement process that's happening. And I know that dates are a topic, and happy to come back in and check on that.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: On the EJ Advisory Council one, who do we have in for that?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: I think for now that would still be Rebecca. Okay. Wow. Last thing I just would chat about for just a quick minute is other things that we know are happening around the building, and new things are coming all the time. So, emergency operations planning for dam safety. There's a couple of different wastewater bills kicking around. I'll be interested to, see what is in Senator Watson's committee on Friday. I haven't seen that one yet.

[Rep. Kate Logan]: Is there a new technology coming that you know of for wastewater on, let's say, private sites, you know, that are being developed?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: There's always new wastewater technology being developed, and the team that works with that, like if there's a new technology that we haven't used before, that's not part of our kind of manual wastewater rules, there's a provision to have a look at it. It's called the Innovative and Alternative Treatment Technologies. So yeah, I mean, I'm just I'll paint you a visual picture to answer your question. Just saw an interesting one from Mississippi. In Mississippi, there's an area that transects about a third the state from east to west called the Black Belt. It's all really tight, tough clay. No infiltration. And so they have these wastewater systems that are like septic systems, wastewater systems, and leach fields all in a box, that essentially provide enough treatment to allow its discharge into groundwater, essentially via stormwater. I'm not sure we would ever do that in Vermont, but it's an example.

[Rep. Kate Logan]: Right.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: It's an example.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: We're hearing all about Mississippi these days.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Oh, I think you did yesterday, didn't you? You knew. There was no purpose in me connecting those So,

[Rep. Kate Logan]: I'm not sure. But there's hope for expanding building. Sorry? There's hope for expanding building. Yeah.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Mean, we're always looking at new wastewater systems. I mean, the the point about waste about individual home and multifamily building, but individual septic system approach, you want to protect public health, you want to make sure this stuff doesn't surface, and you want to make sure it doesn't hit somebody else's well. That's what it's all about. The ground, the soil, the soil is adequate, does a really good job of treating wastewater. You just have to have the right amount of space and the right pretreatment technology to allow it to.

[Rep. Kate Logan]: Okay. Thank you.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah, there's a couple of wastewater related bills that kind of dance around that space a little bit. The chloride bill looks like it is coming back before us, so we're keen to be tracking that. Stephanie Sargent will be engaging with that. We've been speaking with the NRC about a restoration permitting bill. I'm aware of an alum usage in Lakesville, so I'm glad I brought up Lake Carmide. I didn't bring it up for that purpose. I brought it up because I'm really proud of Lake Carmi, but it's a good prompt for the discussion. I saw something about regional utilities also being proposed by Senator Hardy, which I'm interested in, insofar as we are doing this regional stormwater utility legislative study now. And then I'm aware of generally of anti degradation and some interest in lake classification I've heard of as well. So those are all things we're kind of aware of and very happy to get in here and talk about them.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Can you remind us what the timeframe for the three acre regional utility work group is?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: You'll have a report by December. Thank goodness I didn't offer to do it by December.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: You mentioned their meeting. How many

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: more meetings? We're meeting monthly. We're getting into chapter drafting now, literally. That's today's meeting as it's taking place in real time. We've got a set of chapter outlines. Different members of the committee have signaled their interest to participate in different chapters. Different members of DEC's team are leading that work and will provide the the fingers for the keyboard.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: How many people are involved in that?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: In the regional study committee? Maybe eight or nine.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: We laid them out in the statute.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yes, and they're all filled productively, so good numbers. And then we also have what is actually kind of cool is, in addition to the named members, we have some, I'll call them frequent flyer, additional technical people that are providing really useful information.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Representative Satcowitz, I'm pretty sure I know what you mean by restoration permitting, because someone brought it to my attention previously, but I'm wondering if you

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: could just tell us very briefly what you're meaning there.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah. The intent there is, you know, we've we've created our environmental authorizations and environmental reviews around the concept of development and making sure that development projects don't unduly impact water, land, air, right? Those same permit programs attach when somebody comes forward and wants to do an environmental restoration. So, if you're gonna do a dam removal that's gonna substantively affect Class II wetlands, it goes through the wetlands permitting process Somewhat similarly, although, well, shouldn't we use that example? River corridor. It goes through the river corridor permitting process. Not really very much differently from a housing project or an anything project, a road project, whatever. So the idea here, the idea the advocates are championing is can we develop sort of one general permit framework that would apply for restoration projects where that general permit would incorporate river corridor protections, wetland protections, construction stormwater protections, final stormwater operational protections if they're needed, as opposed to going to each of those permit programs. That's the idea of it.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: I do have one more question on the wetlands and mapping. Is the intention within these development areas that the maps would be frozen in time or that they would also be updated as maps are?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yes. The maps would be updated based on new Just

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: the way we do now. It would still be a moving target potentially.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yeah, we will need to work out the map that applies when an applicant applies kind of a thing. I heard Mr. Grobman bring that up, and that's a fair comment.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Thank you, deputy commissioner. That was really edifying.

[Rep. Kate Logan]: Do you

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: have one more question? Oh, You had another question that we need to add. Yeah. Hank, from Tuesday's presentation with Karen, where I asked him a question and I emailed you that question so he was prepared to answer it so he didn't respond the same way he did to representative strategy here. That is, what is the relationship between water quantity and water quality when you're calculating those reduction, phosphorus reduction, does matter how much rain comes and how much water is flowing over the surface when you calculate the reduction values of phosphorus trying to give a project or product type?

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: It does. Yes, it does. So when we calculate project specific nutrient reduction values, that's based on, I'm gonna say modeling, but it's actually based on a whole body of evidence that's been developed. Like, we built this practice and we monitored below it across a whole bunch of instances of this, and this is the generalized reduction. That's what our accounting methodologies do. Because we can't really monitor every single clean water practice we put in the ground, because there are thousands and thousands of bones. No, no. But your question that you had asked Jared was about, okay, so what happens when it rains a lot, right? And what about the river loading when it rains a lot? Jared did a nice job of bringing up Matthew Vaughn, Chief Scientist, Lake Champlain Basin Program, his figures that kind of showed the percent of the annual load that was comprised by the July 23 storm, for example, or I mean. So, there are instances where you can have storms that provide an overwhelming amount of nutrient load in any given year. In any normal year, period, the vast majority of your loading occurs during snow melt and into the spring. Like, 70 to 80% of it happens then. It's literally because more water holds more phosphorus. More water still holds more phosphorus, and then when it's raining, it's flowing that phosphorus in. So it's more like a geometric curve. So, more intense rainstorms absolutely equals more nutrients flowing during those rainstorms. But take 2025 as an example. Matthew will do the math in March or so, and we'll get a chance to see the numbers after that. But with the droughts that happened, you're gonna have a really low loading, really low quantities of phosphorus having gone in during those periods. I know we had some water in the earlier summer, but there was no We didn't have a 07/10/2025.

[Unidentified participant (likely staff/member)]: I don't think we did.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: So the short answer is yes. It's

[Rep. Kate Logan]: I

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: think you might be answering a different question than what I'm trying to ask. I'm just not doing a good job asking the question. I totally understand that the more water you get, the more loading you're gonna get. What I'm trying to understand is those calculated and projected and then actual calculated and recorded reductions that Jared was mapping out for us, these bars that are growing, to achieve our TMDL, are those dependent on water quantity? Those

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: reductions. Okay. No, they are not. They are not. Because the way the TMDL was built in the beginning is we monitored all of those major rivers. Every time it rained, you know, we'd be taking samples, and we would know the relationship between rainfall, flow in the river, phosphorus in the river, phosphorus load out to the lake. And the TMDL was built based on all of that. So we don't necessarily scale up or down the amount of phosphorus reduction that's achieved by a practice. Those practices reduce that amount of phosphorus that then is available to the rainfall to deliver to the river, to deliver to the lake.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: So the reduction practices and the accounting of the phosphorus reduction from those implemented practices is independent of the rainfall in any given year? It is

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: Yes, unless Yes, unless. Yes, the practice itself is one that's Oh, practice itself is one that's predicated on a rainfall quantity, like a ten year storm or a twenty year storm. Stormwater practices are sized to certain storms. There are some practices. Yes. Okay.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: We had some really heavy rain years, and then we had a very low, and so I'm just wondering if he's going to be able to continue to plot going up that nice steep curve, or because we had a dry year, it's going to, the reductions are going to be less if we had a dry year, or is it gonna be more if That's

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: we had

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: a dry what I was trying to understand.

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: The reductions that we book from the Clean Water Performance Report represent practices that go on the ground and the reductions that they reduce. So it means there's just less phosphorus available in that watershed to move, load, discharge. Yeah.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Thank you again.

[Rep. Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Thank you all very much. Good

[Deputy Commissioner Neil Kamen (VT DEC)]: to see you. I hope your back gets better. I do too. It's been a

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: long