Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Alright. Good morning, and welcome to the House Environment Committee. This morning, we are going to hear from the EC Watershed Management Division Rivers Program. Welcome.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Thank you. Thank you, chair Sheldon and committee. Thanks for having us here. Been a couple years since I've sat in the seat. I feel like I'm a little bit overdue. For the record, I'm Rob Evans. I manage the rivers program in the Agency of Natural Resources Department of Environmental Conservation Watershed Management Division kind of a Russian nesting doll, isn't it? I've been in this position for about six and a half years, but I've been in the Rivers Program since 2007. Prior to taking this position, I served as the state's floodplain manager and national flood insurance program. I brought with me today a key colleague, so I'll let him introduce him. Thanks. So in that nesting, I'll come right under Rob as the Lead River Management Engineer. I supervise four of our engineers throughout the state, so we're a team of five that manage permit authority or in stream work across all service lines. They're all the current streams at this time. So for starters, I think it's good to look at, when we think about stream alteration regulation, what triggers jurisdiction? This isn't the verbatim language. It's the plain text attempt from statute, which is excavating or fill of 10 or more cubic yards of internal material and watercourse that requires a permit from Jaren's program. Watercourse, and with the definition, is all perennial streams. I've underscored watercourse because that perennial determination, whether a stream is jurisdictional or not, is what is a real challenge for us, having lived with that as the trigger for a decade and Thinking about the proposal in H six thirty two, why do we want to change the jurisdiction back to a drainage area threshold like it originally was? A Venn diagram is a good framework because there are multiple interrelated pieces. First and foremost is regulatory certainty and predictability. I think everybody agrees, whether you're a regulator or a landowner, a municipal official, or a consultant. Everybody likes to know when a permit is required or not. We have that clarity. This would provide that clarity that we don't have present. Related to that, it would allow us to more effectively and efficiently protect the river resources under our jurisdiction, which is really related to the manageable workload. Jaren's team is spread way too thin. We're on the verge of burnout pretty much every year. After the twenty four floods and peak flood recovery, we lost. We had a river engineer design due to stress and just being overworked. So we really want to optimize the program that we have under our responsibility. So what I'm going to walk you through here Oh, you have a question? Senator Boston?

[Representative Ela Chapin (Member)]: Just not knowing this term of backward drainage area threshold, could you just talk a little bit about what that means? I can. I have some images. Oh, you can do that one I can wait then. Sure.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: But it's really thinking about at what point is a river draining a certain landmass upstream of it. You know, if you went down to the Winooski River right here and you said, what's the drainage area? You'd say, oh, it's, you know, 200 square miles. I don't know if that's the number, but but so the amount of land draining to that point is two yeah. So it's the contributing watershed, that landmass or runoff from precipitation brings on the surface through groundwater to our rivers and streams. Great. Thank you. Sure. And it might become a little clearer when we look at some maps here shortly. Yeah. Can you

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: give us an acreage for that number? Since we mostly don't I don't think in terms of square miles.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: 320 acres.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: 320 acres. That's a half square.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: At a half square mile, that's a square mile of 604. Right. Yes. So the previous threshold was 6,400 meters. Sorry. It was what? The the original threshold was 6,400 meters.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Oh, before I read. Thanks.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: So what I'd like to do here with the next few slides is just kind of walk you through kind of a time step sequence from original jurisdiction to kind of where we are now, of how jurisdiction changed changed and related workload changed. So the original jurisdiction was water courses with watershed areas greater than 10 square miles. If you map that out statewide, that was a little over 2,000 miles of river and stream. For the three engineers that we had under that jurisdiction that weighted to about 667 miles of jurisdiction per engineer. This is Northfield. I'd love to show you a statewide map with streamlines on it. That'd be a be a jumbled mess given the density of streams. So we picked Northfield as a classic representative of Vermont town with the river running through their village center and town center. The original jurisdiction is that red line you see there, which is the main stem of the Dog River, along with the lower reaches of a few contributing tributaries there. So that that red line segment, so you see there, that's the original jurisdiction where if you are moving 10 or more yards of material, you need a permit from our program. If you're doing in stream work along those blue lines, permit not required. We would still provide technical assistance to anybody that asked, but not there was no permit required. And, again, just reminding of the numbers there. That's the original jurisdiction. Along comes in twenty ten act one two. Well, let me just back up. I mean, I think it's fair to say that stream alteration under that construct left a lot of stream miles with no regulation. And that was a legitimate gap that could and perhaps should have been filled and was filled. And was filled with act one ten in 2010 where it removed that drainage area threshold to water courses. And, again, water courses, as defined in statute and in our rules, is a perennial river or stream. That was a tenfold increase in jurisdictional stream miles, whether you look at it statewide or on the per engineer basis. Significant increase, and we didn't get any more staff, to really manage that expanded work at the time. I show three engineers there. When it was signed into law, we actually had two engineers. We were under a hiring freeze from the financial crisis. We had a we had a retirement of one of our engineers, and we couldn't fill that position. So when this went into effect, we only had two engineers to cover the entire state. So with act with act one ten twenty ten changed to perennial stream miles, it's essentially every blue line. Not every blue line triggers jurisdiction, but when you get up higher in the watershed, the only way to know if it's perennial is to do a site visit. And that's where Jared and his team spends an inordinate amount of time, is going out there to look at the physical indicators and determine, is a permit needed for this project enough? And it's not just the small headwater blue lines on here. It's even streams that aren't mapped. I mean, he gets calls his team they get calls to come and look at streams draining hundreds of a square mile, 15 or 20 acre watersheds. So it's just it's kind of jurisdiction that you see here I label as 23,000 plus stream miles. It's really jurisdiction and jurisdictional determinations is perhaps how I should have labeled that. We know for certain that, you know, the Winooski River and the Dog River is jurisdictional, but you get up in those smaller headwater streams. It's just not clear without getting out in the field. And then comes act one thirty eight in 2012. Some of you or all of you may recall there was a lot of emergency work done after that devastating flood. There was overworking, overdredging of miles of stream that we had no authority to regulate. Towns have the ability under under their public safety powers to do emergency work. To open roads back up. So emergency leave had just been pets. We had no ability to regulate dock work, and so there were a lot of miles of river that were left in a much more unstable and dangerous condition. So the general assembly responded to that with Act 138 and gave us those emergency authorities. We now have, if you look at our stream alteration rule and our general permit, they're under the headings of emergency protective measures and next flood measures. On average, that, these days, is about half of the authorizations and permits were issued, so basically a doubling of our permitting activity as a result of Act 138. The good news is we did get two new staff. Jeremy was one of those hires, so that was definitely helpful. So again, you're still looking at all the blue lines on the map as a potential universe of jurisdiction or making jurisdictional determinations. We're not at 7,000 plus miles per engineer. We're at 4,600 miles per engineer. We try to make the districts for each engineer about equal in size. And then we have a really important thing that came along in 2017, something that we really lobbied as a state for. Our agency, along with VTrans and Vermont Emergency Management, really pushed FEMA to acknowledge the stream alteration rule as what FEMA calls codes and standards. That has real important bearing on town reimbursement from flood damage and flood recovery as it relates to public facilities. The Public Assistance Grant Program, it's a FEMA pot of money when there's a federal declaration that's administered by Vermont Emergency Management. For decades, the baseline for that program was to just replace things in kind, put back what was there. Whatever was damaged, put it back just the way it was. But they have a provision that says that the state has adopted higher standards statewide, and they enforce those uniformly, FEMA will pay to meet those higher standards. In 2017, our secretary Moore got the letter from FEMA saying, after we made some surgical adjustments to the rule and our general permit, we approve of of the stream alteration rule as codes and standards. The good thing for towns, you know, if a four foot culvert gets destroyed and it's undersized, and Jeremy's rule standards say it needs to be a 12 foot culvert, FEMA will pay for that. So that's a that's a boon to put more resilient infrastructure in after the floor versus the same undersized, not so resilient infrastructure. Challenge, though, that stacked additional process on Jen's team. For years after one flood declaration, let alone multiple, there's a a really iterative process that goes back and forth with towns and Vermont Emergency Management and FEMA to develop projects, what's eligible, what's the cost. And Jaren's permit, when it's primarily for stream crossing structures, Jaren's permit is really needed to paper the FEMA files. And so there's just a tremendous amount of process and coordination engendered in the FEMA approval. And Jeremy can correct me here, but I think over the last two and a half years since the first big twenty three flood, he's met just about weekly with FEMA staff to talk about projects. So just to kind of step back, expansion of jurisdiction from 2,000, 23,000 ish miles that we're dealing with, act 138 emergency work, emergency permitting authority that doubles our permit volume on average, and then on top of that, the FEMA approval. Yeah. For a little additional context, that the tail end of the payment process is heavily skewed. So two examples are yesterday, helped close out a project from April 2015 or 2016, and that hopefully will make the town a battle whole, but for Iran and those larger scale disasters, we didn't close out on Irene until May 2023. So there's a large amount of, I don't want to say adding the file, but making sure the records are in order when it comes to flow recovery work and making sure towns can be reinforced for their trucks, etcetera, their bank. So that kind of brings us to present day request in h six thirty two, which is to go back to a drainage area threshold that's clear to remove the tremendous amount of site visits and activity around very small streams. I'll put it back to a 10 square mile drainage area threshold, but put it at a half a square mile, 0.5 square mile threshold. This is what that would look like in Northfield, not only the red lines from the original jurisdiction, but the black lines. Those are those reaches of tributary training between a half and 10 square miles. So what is left for us to not be worried about making jurisdictional determinations, all the tails of those blue lines up high up in the watershed. And, again, just as it was with the original jurisdiction, it's not to say that we wouldn't be providing tremendous amount of technical assistance to landowners or anybody that asked, but we could just clearly say, no. Permit isn't required from us. This is what you wanna do. We advise you do this. There's all sorts of technical guidance for myriad project types that we provide folks. That's what we're proposing. Just quickly, and in terms of stream mileage, you know, it collapses it down to about 10,500 and then reduces that load on each engineer proportion. This is just perhaps maybe a helpful leave behind if you want to review this after today's testimony. It just collapses down all the slides I just walked through into a timeline, and we thought it perhaps beneficial to superimpose the number of declarations we've had over the last decade and a half. Have a lot Jernestein has a lot of limped experience trying to make this work. And so, again, we we don't come here, you know, hastily. You know, it's a it's a significant request, but we we think it's best for a most effective, efficient, and clear program going forward. And this just, in a similar fashion, just kind of stacks kind of the jurisdiction in terms of stream miles through time, what we're we're we're asking for there, far right, red box. At this point, I'm going to hand over the mic, as it were, to Jaren. He's got a few slides to walk through again. He has the lived experience. I want to pause before he takes over. Any questions? Yeah, think we'll

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: have a few questions. Representative Chapin and then Satcowitz.

[Representative Ela Chapin (Member)]: Thanks for the overview to orient us, the history and this particular request. I guess I'm hearing everything based on workload and measures around how to do the regulatory work. I'm not really hearing any justification about what's best for our rivers and all the benefits that the regulatory mechanism, weighing the pros and cons, obviously just workload, if we're not giving you the right staff amount and we're not authorizing the right budget, because then I really I'd love to hear an ecological argument about why this is the right threshold of regulation. Why things in my mind is going to Why isn't there a general permit for all the other ones that you don't do individual permits for? Wouldn't that be don't we want to make sure best practices are being utilized on all of those waterways? So where's the right balance of how much your team engages with any particular project? And and so so I'm asking for more of an ecological argument.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: No. I think you you raise a very good point. I wanna be very clear that we're not trying to devalue the importance of small headwater streams. They are very important. Right? Again, giving I I just would say, what is what is the right regulatory tool to protect those? Is it stream alteration? Then there is a staffing question there, because even general permits need to be administered by somebody. If we're keeping it a perennial, there's still a warm body that needs to make those determinations for permit requirements. I would just offer that there are other regulatory mechanisms both in place, it's a bit patchwork, mind you, that do protect small streams. Act two fifty under Criterion 1E for those higher up in the watershed or larger developments, Fish and Wildlife makes comments under Criterion 1E streams. So Act two fifty currently protects them. Our municipal loads general permit has requirements for small streams in terms of culvert sizing, when we're talking about transportation infrastructure. Go ahead, sir. 4,607, any longer type 10 prevents any sort of fish pass interference due to regulation that streams are not our colleagues in Fish and Wildlife. Fish and Wildlife's unique ability to protect streams through an ecological lens specifically. I'd say the argument we're trying to make here is a bureaucratic argument more than anything else. It's not just a matter of our workflow. It's very much a matter of regulatory clarity first.

[Representative Ela Chapin (Member)]: Yeah, I guess what I'm looking for is, in general, streams of this size just either have so few projects or the projects are so small or they don't really warrant this level of oversight and regulation. That would make me much more interested. It feels a little bit like that point five is, again, sort of arbitrary and just done on a workload basis. Then I would ask, well, why don't you ask for the budget and the staffing that really matches what you see as the best way to protect and guide projects in our rivers? And I guess I'm Obviously that's a pie in the sky way to approach things, but it is sort of generally the way I'd like to start. So I guess that feels really missing in this. The 0.5

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: square miles is not arbitrary. That was initially developed under the first stream alteration, little speaking, to 10/21. Was a consensus with our colleagues at Fish and Wildlife is below that threshold when we're not seeing fish roots resources by large enough. It also matched up fairly consistently with the USGS assessment of what would be a parietal stream or not, So the idea of that being professional reporting is historically that's where it has been regulated or suggested to be regulated and agreed upon at rule level, however,

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Can you mention that USGS threshold one more time?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: So that was at the time of the initial rule, which was 2013 was the initial rule. We had a general permit from Act 110, but the rule was 2013. So that was the USGS right now streamed term. Yep. Did a logistic regression kind of study analysis, which is presenceabsence, of a binary study. I can send a link to the report the report itself to perhaps post alongside the slide deck here where they looked at perenniality because they wanted to attribute that map layer with that information in the background, the likelihood of it being perennial or not. So you see kind of a drop off at those thresholds of half a square moment, as I recall. One last thing, kinda going back to the fact that, you know, there there are other mechanisms to protect small streams. I don't know if you've been tracking the land use review boards, development of the tier three critical resource areas. It's proposed, and it's still early. I get it. But one of the critical resource areas they've defined is headwaters. So looking at first and second order streams, not drainage area, but those initial first and second order streams where you have initial concentrated flow overland with soil type and slopes. So headwaters is at least on the table there for for act two fifty as an additional unique trigger beyond the existing triggers. Thank you for the question. Now that's again, we the one thing I wanna be clear about is we're not trying to devalue by way of this proposal the importance of small pit water streams. We we get it. I I have a question.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: If you consider it strikes me that, you know, 10 yards of material out of a tiny stream has a much bigger impact than 10 yards of material out of one of our larger rivers. And so have you talked about or considered a scaled approach to jurisdiction in terms of the amount of impact related to the size of the strain?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Interesting. I I have not. I don't know if that's something you've noodled, Jeremy, but that's a that's an interesting thing to consider. Something we've given a very cursory thought to, and that would increase the number of projects that aren't regulated. Not

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: necessarily. It depends. But I think linking it to impact, there's some logic there. Because taking 10 yards out of one of even the ones that you're proposing to scale down to may have a much more significant impact than 10 yards out of the main stem of the Winooski.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: It helps.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Yep. Yeah. So and I I'd love it if you would would think about that. And and potentially, building off of of representative Chapin's point of what's the ecological impact of the activity on the you know, relative to the size of the stream. And I would love it right now if you would characterize, if it's possible, the types of activities that you're seeing in these smaller streams. Is it mostly town road projects? Is it driveways, dams? What are we seeing?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: So when we're speaking about crossing structures, is primarily it's essentially all transportation infrastructure, whether it's public or private. A large amount do fall to municipalities and that's where we have that additional public assistance overlay as far as responsibility to make sure we get the house reimbursed, but it's a lot easier to cross a six foot wide stream than it is to cross the main stem of the Blue Sea, so we are seeing much more private infrastructure on these smaller streams proportionately than on larger ones as well.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: And what is the requirement of the town if they are simply replacing infrastructure or even increasing a capacity on an existing crossing, at an existing crossing? Do they need a new permit from you?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: So it's a construction permit, it's how the general permit is administered, so if it is moving more than 10 yards for that construction activity, it does require authorization in general. Replacing a crossing group by a new structure is almost always going to meet that acute care attraction. Thinking about these small streams, yeah, there's also the kind of restoration projects that are proposed, you know, a common project type that's really spinning up and I think you've taken testimony perhaps from the Nature Conservancy on strategic wood addition projects. Often, those are proposed on some of these smaller reaches of stream, and they currently often need a stream alteration permit. Removing that would allow some of these restoration projects to move forward without that extra process and delay of getting a permit from us. So there's kind of a flip side. I think you bring up a great point about kind of scale of 10 yards on a small stream. There's also activities that can move forward to restore some of these headwater areas unimpeded should we move to a threshold cutoff.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: We did take testimony yesterday, not from The Nature Conservancy, but from VNRC's dam restoration removal person, and they're interested in a streamlined review process. And I guess I'll put you on the spot a little bit, but we were sort of noodling on if that made sense, what direction would it go? And it seemed like maybe like, idea was to have a team at ANR DEC that was used to reviewing those types of projects as opposed to having them just whatever district they were in and having to get up to speed with the permit issuer, not you know, you y'all don't have as many, but other divisions may have four staff doing reviews for permitting. Like, if you're not prepared just to comment on thoughts on that, I'd be curious if what your perspective was on the approach to addressing restoration projects broadly within the permit review process.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Yeah. I I'm not gonna speak specifically to that bill proposal. My leadership is still reviewing it and considering it, so I'm not sure what the agency posture is going be yet, quite frankly. I'll just say high level, I understand the impetus. I mean, it is it is objectively true that, you know, our regulations were constructed in here that regulating traditional development impacts and not restoration. So I understand the desire, to do that, to facilitate. You know, our agency is putting out a lot of work, a lot of money, excuse me, to do this kind of work. So our interest is to get that work done, for sure. Whether a general permit or some existing framework we have is the best to move that forward, I don't know. But, yeah, it's interesting proposal. Absolutely. Yeah, Bill, moving forward, we would hope that this would have some added capacity for our staff to focus in on those projects. Part of the hope of having a clear jurisdictional boundary is it saves time that we can look at these more complex, higher risk projects going was just gonna just finish up on that question. The one thing I am excited about when thinking about restoration projects and dam removals in particular that trigger stream alteration review and permit more often than not is there's three different a vague issue is sediment management. How much do you leave? Can you leave it? What's the cost to move it? Every site's got its unique characteristics and fact patterns. So there's three different Lake Champlain Basin program funded, research projects just now spinning up to to look at the sediment management, the dam removals. I'm really excited that that that could help us add provisions in Jaren's general permit. He has an existing general permit. Do we need a new one? Or could we use some of the lessons learned from the research to just optimize for restoration his existing general permit? And we're also we just got under contract a consulting firm in the Rivers program to build out restoration project technical guidance for partners that will hopefully facilitate moving these projects along more quickly. And sediment management for dam removals is top of the list, top priority to build out first. We just had our kickoff meeting with the consultant last week. So yeah, we get it. We wanna partner. But in terms of the bill, yeah, I'd wait till somebody else, I think, from the agency can speak to that more. And what's the timeline

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: on that research? Do you know?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Eighteen months to a couple years, depending on the project. I'd to go back and look at the proposals and what was ultimately funded. I'm on the technical advisory committee for one of them, so I I have some emails that I could look at there.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: And then one last one. The map you showed us, you you would make that available to the public so that they could, in in essence, at least begin to do their own jurisdictional decision

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: making. Yeah. We actually have these maps. Chop the stream segments up into additional thresholds. But on our river management web page, you can go and select your town and get this information right now. It's on the last slide of the slide deck, there's that link where people can go in there. We created that piece, I think, right after Act 138. That's a very important question as well, mapping of the perennial strains. There's not a good correlation of any of the available data with what is perennial, not well enough to make those remote determinations, but we do have drainage in it. So we could, in about a few days, say this is the drayage on the threshold and make that layer available to the homeowner.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Representative Satcowitz.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Thank you.

[Representative Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Yeah. I totally understand why you wanna move from perennial to an to an area that makes a lot of sense, and the presentation's been really clear. Just want to get back to that point five number that representative Chapin was focused on. When I see numbers that end in five or zero, I feel very suspicious that that there was some guesswork involved and this kind of a rounding of some sort. And and I know you said that the number was not arbitrary, but I just wanted to follow-up a bit about where the number came from and because I I can sort of imagine tell me if this is totally wrong or or right, but that someone thought, well, maybe point five sounds about right, and then you kind of look at all your stuff and the things that would go into your decision making, you're like, Okay, yeah, it seems to jive very well with that. Or you could do it in the other direction where you say, Here are all the things that are going to go into our decision. What number does that lead us to? It seems like that would be unlikely to lead you to exactly 0.5. And so I'm just trying to get a sense of what kind of process you went through and could that number really be 0.6? It shouldn't have been point four? Like and how would that affect the maps that we that we look at? You know? Like, did you look at it through that kind of lens of what will be the effect of changing that number a little bit one way or the other in terms of ecological values of the spaces that were affecting, how much space it would take up and things like that. So that's a little before my time, so

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: I can't speak to the exact methodology, but to go back and do our research. The exact number that comes to mind though is like three eighteen acres or three fifteen acres, which is within a hundredth of square mile to that point five. So it's absolutely rounded, I have no illusion that that was not a number that was rounded to, but my understanding is

[Representative Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Is that rounding acceptable? It

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: was looked at first based on the USGS data and the consensus from our colleagues at Fish and Wildlife and that's why we arrived at that. Is it conveniently point five? Yes, and that is something we'd like to be perfectly frank. This is a nice manageable number for some. It sounds like

[Representative Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: it is somewhat of a coincidence that it just happens to be this nice round number. That's what you're saying.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Right, right. If it was two eighty nine acres, we probably would have said 300 acres instead of point zero three five square miles or something. Would have tried to make that number as round as possible for regular term burn.

[Representative Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Thank you, that's very helpful.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Representative Did

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: you are you in you had a question too? Okay.

[Representative Ela Chapin (Member)]: You just describe the general permit versus the individual permit, what's that when a project triggers one or the other, and this will affect both of those permits, is that right?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: The general main distinction is the general permit has outlined specific projects already, so is for the Windsor Bank, is streaming crossings, it is gravel removal, so removal of gravel bars. There's a few items that are very specifically highlighted in our internal permit, However, if you are outside of those or you are doing those at particularly high risk, then we can put it to the individual permit. So the technical standards are by and large the same and they are both beholden to the statutory standards, but there's just a select group of activities under that general permit that moves through a master process.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Representative Austin?

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: This is a little bit off, but I'm just wondering, there any way to size the culverts to help animals crossing? I mean, can FEMA allow a larger culvert, maybe let large animals be able to cross these are the same policy? I can't speak to the FEMA funding. The sizing requirements that we have are largely based on passage of sediment, wood, and hydraulic capacity to make sure

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: that those are not unnaturally degrading up and downstream. However, there is process and a program of fish and wildlife for terrestrial animals as well and I know Feet Trans works closely with them, I'm not sure how it prioritizes into those items, but we prescribe terrestrial crossings as part of these, fish passage is focused.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: North.

[Representative Rob North (Member)]: Yes, thank you, Chair. Thank you, Rob and Jared, extremely informative. I really like these color charts with stream. That's super helpful. So the proposal on Act six, in H six thirty two reduces the number of extreme miles by about 13,000. Right. So we've looked at this and you've helped us look at this through the lens of your graphic jurisdictional staffing and whatnot. We've kind of talked about the lens of ecological. I'm wondering about through the lens, and I don't know if you have the data, but do you have to look at this through the lens of the property owner and the cost to the property owner of permitting and constructing permits and whatnot? Do you have any data that would indicate that those 13,000 miles based on the property that is owned by them? What would be the likely cost avoidance, I would say, to property owners by reducing from 23,000 miles down to the 10,500 street miles? I'm not aware of any analysis we've done, so it's a very interesting question I wish I had the answer to, but yeah, we've noodled that comprehensively statewide. Yeah, you would have to kind of rack up design costs into that and that's really squishing up right now. I would imagine so, especially as you get way up into the smaller and smaller stream, but do you have numbers that kind of on average what the permitting and the fees associated and the costs associated with permitting or not permitting. So for a non emergency activity there's a flat fee of $200 under the general permit, dollars $3.50 under the individual permit, but that is purely for the administrative cost, it does not account for the necessary technical expertise either by the landowner or the selected consultant. And the engineering department. You probably wouldn't have any numbers on the total cost to be experienced by the landowner to meet a permit even though I would just say a principal budget here is probably about $200 an hour. And just also just worth reminding again of about half of the permits on average in those emergency protective or next flood measures, we don't assess a fee for those. You know, we don't we don't penalize a town or a landowner for flood pay they just experienced. There's a lot of permits we issue, but we don't collect a fee for those.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Thank you.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Are there questions on this part of the presentation?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Good to keep going. Good questions. Flip it over to Jeremy to talk through the next few slides. So we're not much we're not very far from the end here. Just a few Yeah.

[Jaren/Jeremy (Lead River Management Engineer, DEC Rivers Program)]: Just a couple slides here, recap of what a regulatory workload looks like, particularly during flood times past twenty four or thirty six months here, and then a bit of where we hope Kingston statute would benefit not only our team but our municipal partners as well. So for context, since July 2023 we've had seven declared disasters, that's flooded disasters that is, and that's resulted in about sixteen sixty two permits issued from our program. In the behavior there's four to five technical touch points or site visits per permit issued and about the same fold we can for technical assistance. So we're talking about 7,500 site visits over the past two years and 35,000 or so are technical assistance laws, which certainly adds up and during those emergency times can come up to the works. So this is really where we want to focus in on and that's, you know, what clarity can we provide. That's been a huge challenge for our business partners who go out and do work to repair their roads, but it's insufficiently done or it's done well and it's a jurisdictional stream, so we have to go in and say that's not the appropriate size structure, otherwise if an appropriately sized structure is put in it is not FEMA reimbursable. So we are having those touch points on all of these federally eligible projects, projects in general, but it's particularly time sensitive when it comes to federal reimbursement process. So with that clarity on jurisdiction, we would hope that towns can then advance knowing where they lie jurisdictionally and move to either the correct project initially or seek an alternate project initially as opposed to putting in a temporary measure just minimizing the amount of cost that a town lays out before they are reimbursed. With drainage area threshold we touched upon this already, We then can make these calls remotely, so of the number of site visits we conduct, we figure about a third of those are for jurisdictional determinations and don't have additional work that goes with it, at least at the time of that site visit, so we would hope over that, the past thirty six months here, instead of having 7,500 site visits, we'd have somewhere on the order of 5,000, we figure that saved a significant amount of time to put our resources elsewhere. You have

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: a sense of how many of those permits wouldn't have been needed, required, I should say? The six sixty two permits?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Of those that would not be required?

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: If you had this new threshold?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Well, we do not measure the drainage area threshold associated with those permits because the jurisdiction isn't based on a drainage area currently. So we we can have

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: But do you do you have a GIS database of the permits and where they're located?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Yeah. The database, but it is not perfectly connected to a GIS resource. That's on the wish and to do list, along with building out some field mapping tools for his team. But we would figure below that half square mile, maybe a third of the projects, that's a real rough guess at the moment. Third would be? Jurisdiction. Again, percent spent on-site visits and 20% of those are jurisdictional determinations, so we hope to save a couple hundred hours over the course of two years or a couple hundred hours each year that we could then look at larger, more complex projects or higher risk projects.

[Representative Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Representative Austin. Thank you. Do you have any future predictions of flooding, what it would entail and what the cause will be?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: No, that would be a good question for our colleagues emergency management, who also work with the PA process as well, but what we can say is over the past fifteen years we've had a major flood declaration about every eight and a half months.

[Representative Ela Chapin (Member)]: Eight and a half months? I think

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: she's testified in front of this committee before, but the state climatologist has some great graphs, Leslie Ann Dupini Giroux, in terms of kind of the increasing frequency of heavy precipitation events. Climate change is here. You know? It's it's not in the abstract anymore. Every summer, we're just you know, we got lucky last summer. Lucky is kind of qualified there. It was a severe drought. But in terms of giving us some breathing room, you know, we just had a very localized devastating flooding up in the Northeast Kingdom. But, we're prepared for devastated devastating at least regional scale flooding every year. I mean, that's what we're expecting. And, you know, again, what was that? Seven declarations over, you know, what period was that? Yeah. It was, like, twenty five months. That was, like, fourteen months. Yeah. Was, like, fourteen months. Seven declarations. I mean, we had declarations that were, you know, the off season, right, you know, in the winter.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: So I I remember doing Irene, there was sort of, like, you all would kinda deputize people that you work with regularly to help assist. Is is that process formalized, or how does it work when we get an overwhelming flood event that it's not possible for your five engineers to cover.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Yeah. We we didn't formalize that as much as we would have liked. We did put that back in practice with some staff that helped us during Irene when the twenty three floods hit. What we realized, though, that to really get technical horsepower on the ground quickly was to get consultants under a master contract. So we have three different water resources engineering firms now under a retainer contract to help us with post flood work. So, yeah, we kinda just went to private public partnership there.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Yeah. Yeah. That's what I meant.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: That's yeah.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: That's good to know. Somebody else had

[Representative Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: a representative of sacchments. Yeah. I'm following

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: up on

[Representative Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: Austin's question about the damage and what we expect. It seems like since Irene, we've had a lot of damage, but we've learned to put things back together in ways which mitigate having to do so again and again. And it seems like a lot of those repairs were done such that we've had big floods in those same spots afterwards and had the infrastructure get through really well. So I'm wondering, over time, it seems like we should see even though we're seeing increasing numbers of storms, we should also see more resilient infrastructure. And so are we going to start getting to a spot where the damage has been done and fixed and upgraded, then we're going to be in at least a better place? Mean, we'll never catch up, we'll never but

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: are we closing that gap over time in a significant way?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: That's another great question. Know, yes, kind of that bending that curve towards more resilience. On one hand, yes. On the other hand, and I wish I don't have, and maybe Jaren has the number, there's that great web page, the Vermont Culverts web page, I think the regional planning commissions put together that is you know, puts together the the full kind of suite number of culverts around the state, and it's a tremendous number. I mean, I feel like it's enough. Eighty and ninety thousand. Thousand structures. So there's still a lot of work to be done, I guess I would say. So there's that. And how many of that universe have we upsized to be more resilient in past sediment, wood and ice? I don't have that answer, but it's a great question. The other question that I just wonder about, again, with what is the future flood, you know, fifty years from now? You know, what we're designing for now, is that the design flood that's appropriate for sizing a structure fifty years from now when the polar ice caps are even smaller than they are today? It's a big question, it's a great question. So there's two things I'd like to put finer point on what the future flood looks like. There are studies out at UPM that are focusing on the Mac River watershed, so you have to extrapolate that to other basins, but they suggest that a one hundred year storm event is going to be 30% more frequent than 30% greater within the next fifty or sixty years. So that's what you can expect is these storms are getting larger. So while we are building more robust, we can't really predict what that storm's going to look like or if we get a storm like St. John's Brewery and Lyndon had in 2024, we don't have the physical horsepower machines big enough to move the stones at that stream pass. That thing would need to protect that infrastructure. So at best you can put it back to a better state, but you're never going to be able to protect from that magnitude of flooding. And then the other item I want touch upon is while we are reconstructing these more robustly, what we really want to do is not reconstruct them initially and then reconstruct them more robustly, that's an additional cost on taxpayers and much of that isn't reimbursable and we would call them being able to clarify jurisdiction early or have a reference for talents to look at early on can help stem some of that reinvestment or misuse, not the best use of funds.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: But that was a UVM study, the future?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Yes, was probably from 2019 or 2021 around death. And

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: it was a fifty year time

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: frame? Yes, I would say both me, but I do not recall it. I

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: just wanted to make sure I

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Yeah, it was it was, like, 30% larger and 30% more frequently.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: And this makes me wanna ask, repeat damages on roads. I know it's not necessarily your area, but you might know, are towns tracking them? And is VTrans tracking them? Or are you tracking them? I mean, it's well, many of us live in towns that go back to the same spots year over year. So,

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Yes, it's all of the above, but it's not as comprehensive as we would like it. We have new databases on our side to hopefully track that going into the future. Vermont emergency management, where they have the declared disasters and the federal dollars have been spent, they have that tracked. E Tran has some history of that as well, and at the time it can be a bit of a scattershot, some towns are really good about tracking it, others they just don't have the staff to commit those sort of administrative services. Yeah. AIMA used to track it. I don't know if they still do. After Irene after Irene, we got a data set from them for public assistance funded projects, which, again, by and large transportation. And it was, like, 15,000 points on the Vermont map from over about a thirteen year period, and a lot of those dots were stacked on top of each other. That was before they acknowledged our stream alteration as codes and standards and started paying for upsized bridges and culverts. I don't know if they're still tracking that. You know, they're a skeleton crew down in Boston and not sharing much information today. So Yeah.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Power, time, maybe.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: You mentioned a number of 80,000 to 90,000, I think, was structures that either need to be replaced or damaged. That's total inventory. Inventory. The municipal roads. Can you tell me how many of those 80 or 90,000 are just culverts that need to be upsized from, say, 12 to 18 or 24 inches? Might be something in that body of work that the regional planning commissions did to stand up that Vermont culverts page. I just haven't been there in a while. Do you have numbers of how many culverts have been replaced each year since some of these catastrophic floods, say, '23 and '24? Not at our fingertips. Yeah, something, well, we would have to We have the permit numbers we've issued. We've also We'd have to code that out to fund that. But I would guess about half of those permits issued during that time period were across them, so that would be on the order of 800 structures that came up to current size and standards. Because 80 or 90,000 sounds like a lot, but I can't remember the exact number of town highway departments we have, but I don't know how many they actually each get replaced every year, so that number could be shrinking. If it's just simply cold, it could be shrinking pretty rapidly. Yeah, that's a very good point, that Melbourne does not discriminate between our jurisdiction, just for our standard of perfect jurisdiction, or anything that any municipal inventories own there regardless of the percentage. Yeah. That's an important distinction that there's a lot of culverts that don't carry a stream. Right? There's just it's just road drainage across culverts that ultimately, at some point, outfall to a stream. So that's part of that large number that is outside of our jurisdiction. That is part of our capital. We generally have to wait jurisdictional. That number sounds very large. That's why I Yeah. I know. Just to Somebody who's not doesn't have a lot of information, that could sound like a number you're never gonna reach. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I hear you. When I first saw that number when I visited the website for the first time, I I was taken aback to make sure. Any other comments on this, I think, work that you wanna do? Generally, I should do quick math. He's an engineer. Was just He's good at doing it in his head, but he's also I

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: mean, that's 40 culverts of town, that's totally within the realm of possible.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Yeah, that's why I brought it up, because you get a talented crew who knows what they're doing, and they can get the road closed, they can get a bunch of culverts done. Yeah. Somewhere around 13,000 probably stay at 300 over $300,100 per town. That sounds right. There's definitely a capital budgeting component to it, leaning on the FEMA funding and capitalizing as it were on the flood recovery funding. Towns really lean on that just because during the blue sky years, the budgets can only do but so much. That's

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: a bigger hill to climb than getting them replaced for sure. For sure. Questions for river management team? Representative Chapin.

[Representative Ela Chapin (Member)]: Just going back to the 10 cubic yards. How do you feel about the size of 10 cubic yards? Should we be reconsidering that? And do you have the data to help us just understand how many do you have the data of projects per if you cut up how many cubic yards per project? Is that data you have that you could show us to help us scale?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: We don't have that number, sorry.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: So it'd be nuts and apples to oranges. You'd have buckets, I guess.

[Representative Ela Chapin (Member)]: How do you feel about that size?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: As we touched upon earlier, it depends on the size of the watershed. If you are talking about going five scoops of material out of the main stem of the windows being down here, it's not going to make a whole lot of difference. But if you were on one of these streams that are six to eight feet wide and you fill out 10 yards of material, you can move in. So the scale approach is very logical.

[Representative Ela Chapin (Member)]: I guess I'd just say I think there'd be some interest in this committee to understand all these tiny little projects in large streams and could we be looking at both ends of the spectrum rather than just high up in the house.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Can't speak to where that 10 cubic yard came from, that was with the official trafficking of 10/21. It's been around for long since we came on board, that was scaled to have square miles, which is why when you spoke to scale, you immediately thought you were going Tens and fives. Tens and fives. Yeah, it feels good, right?

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Representative Tagliavia.

[Representative Michael "Mike" Tagliavia (Member)]: Just for those of us in the committee, and maybe people listening online, 10 cubic yards is if you see dump trucks going down the road, tandem dump trucks, that is not a full load for one truck. Yeah. They are 14 yards legal living. I can guarantee you when there's an emergency, those suckers are not going legal. In a good way, because they get a job done. The material bumps when you excavate, 10 yards in a string is just about done. Just about fourteen, thirteen, fourteen years. Yep. The density, a little less of density when you just deserve it. Right?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Right.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Well, was really informative. Thank you very much, and thanks for your work. I'm not seeing any further questions. One more. Just to follow-up

[Representative Larry Satcowitz (Ranking Member)]: on the 10 cubic yards and being connected to that 10 square miles, if that really was the connection, and that number seems to really be way too big now that we're lowering the the thresholds to the for the drainage area as as you've indicated that it would make it would make a big difference in the smaller streams. That's that does sound like something that we should be

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: paying attention to. Yeah. I think we we would be interested I mean, I realize it would be very interesting to to follow that thread on the scale impacts on smaller streams and what does make sense. What is a disturbance in one of the 0.5 square mile areas of jurisdiction?

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: You have a bit of the back of the envelope on that.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Have a bit of the back of on that.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Any structure on a perennial stream is going to require fish passage and to do that the structure generally needs to be embedded. So if you are embedding a structure two feet below a stream bed and it's a six foot wide stream, and your standard roadway right of way is going to have a 40 foot structure, you're talking about 16 cubic yards of disturbance to put in a structure like that just below stream grade or below disturbance. So that's kind of what you're looking at, any stream crossing, adequate stream crossing, is going to exceed 10 cubic yards regardless of the drainage area once you're above a six foot wide stream.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Love it. I guess what I'm thinking is more what is the amount of disturbance that is potentially going to disrupt equilibrium condition in the smaller streams? Yeah. That sounds like a research. It does. Sounds really interesting to me. Might be what I should do in my summer vacation. Yeah. You know,

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Sharon knows this with your background. Mean, depending on landscape context, you don't have to do much to trigger adjustments in the stream that can cause it to unravel and start, you know, headcuts migrating upstream, impacting stability and infrastructure. So so good question. On,

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: and maybe we'll find out. Thank you again. Yeah.

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: Thank you so Appreciate having you having.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Members, that's about the witnesses we've heard from already. We have a so we're gonna file a bill. We had a a drafting request with a bill number. We're gonna walk through that on Tuesday with Michael O'Grady. It'd be really good for you to do a little bit of homework and look at who we've already heard from. If you need to refresh on their testimony, not I it's good if we didn't invite everyone back and redo the work we've done. So let's do some homework on that. And also, you received in your email the list of reports that we have had submitted over the whole biennium. I would like you to look at those and see which ones pique your interest and read it and come back with some sort of a summary for the committee. So that's your homework assignment for your long weekend. Representative Hoyt?

[Representative Michael Hoyt (Member)]: Thanks, Chair. Just a question on the Obama bill. Is it basically still in the same state as we left it from last year? So we're just picking up where we left off.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Yes. Were looking at Picking up where

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: we left. Not go back and look at what

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Draft request 25Dash0091. But it's it's up under Michael Hoyt's name, in many places now. Even in the current year? Yeah. Yes. Kat's been posting it, like when match admin came in yesterday or whenever it

[Rob Evans (Program Manager, DEC Rivers Program)]: came in. Very good. It should be there.

[Chair Amy Sheldon]: Right, with that, we're adjourned.