Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Live. Live.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: Thanks for warning me.

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Hello. Hey, Mike. I

[Larry Labor (Vice Chair, acting as Chair)]: just wanted to say before we turn it over to representative Mahali that as most of you know, this is a bill I've been working on and preparing and it's landing here on our committee. But I really have been working on dam safety work previously with Representative Malhotli, and so I asked him to really be the one to present more of the background of how we got here and the Bill since we worked on it together. I just wanted to share that with you. Thanks.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: Thank you, and thank you, chair labor and members of the committee, allowing me to come and testify. It's nice to be in a different committee.

[Larry Labor (Vice Chair, acting as Chair)]: For record.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: For the record, I'm Mark Mahaly, and I represent Plainfield, Marshfield, and Palace. And I'm chair of the General and Housing Committee. So we've been working on this bill on the whole issue of dam safety for a while. There's a dozen dams or 11, probably a dozen or more dams and that either are or will be regulated by the Division of Dam Safety in the state where if there was a dam failure, and by that not necessarily the whole dam like eroding, but even a threat to the point where they have to open the floodgates if they have them or something, there's about a dozen where there'll be over a thousand lives at risk, and there's a lot more 33 dams with over 100 lives at risk. And, you know, this whole area is problematic for government because it's very difficult for government to deal with situations which are very low probability but really terrible results. You know what? I'll tell you. I I can't resist where I learned that. I used to represent the city and county of San Francisco, not as a city attorney, but as an outside counsel, and I convened in my office a group of people who were criticizing the city for not being prepared or not having, you know, for the earthquake. This was before 1989. And so we were all in the room together, and I asked the planning director, Well, is there an earthquake plan? And he said, Yes, absolutely. We have an earthquake plan. And I said, Great. Can we see it? And he sort of gets red in the face and says, Well, I think we lent it to Oakland. And I realized this is a moment of you know how you have these moments of moments? This is a moment where I realized you should be surprised by nothing when it comes to disaster planning, and I'm sure mister Foreign can sympathize because these low possibility events, matter how catastrophic, don't seem to it's something in our nature. They just don't seem to be as important as events like what's going to happen with Section eight housing or, you know, we're losing money for this or for that. And in fact, the planning often is attacked. In San Francisco, every single environmental report that had to be done had to look at the earthquake, and they always assumed the worst case situation, which was Friday afternoon at 05:00. And oh my god, why are you making us do that? It will never have that. Think of all the hours and minutes in the day. Why are you picking 05:00 on a Friday afternoon? As you all may know, the big quake in 1989 hit at 05:00 exactly on a Friday afternoon. Fortunately, both teams and the baseball teams in the Bay Area were playing in a World Series opposite each other with the result that everybody was home watching the World Series and not as many people were killed as might have. But it really is hard to deal with this. And where this came to a head for me and to Ela was the situation in our local district called Molly's Falls Pond, which is a big, beautiful reservoir with a dam known popularly as the Marshfield Dam operated by Green Mountain Power. It's a power producing dam, and it has an old it has some new sluice gates and stuff like that, a very old what's called floodgates. And you've probably heard the term open the floodgates, you know. Well, what it means is you don't open the floodgates unless the dam, the water has risen so fast and so high that the dam is really going to be overtopped, and you just can't let a dam, particularly a dam that's a dirt dam, you just can't let it overtop. So you open the floodgates. Now Green Mountain Power says, and I think there's a lot to it, that their current weather modeling indicates that that's not going to happen, that it would take such a substantial event that we haven't seen in a long time for it to happen. The problem is that climate change is changing the name of the game so much that modeling, which is based kind of on past many past experiences and models that have past data fed into them, very often aren't necessarily accurate. And in fact, we found this out in Plainfield where a storm cell or a series of storm cells hovered over one particular place in an absolutely unprecedented way, dropped so much water that basically it just wiped out more 30 homes in Plainfield in no time at all. And it was like the flood in 1927. It was like that. It just destroyed a whole portion of Plainfield a couple of years ago. And so what are your options when you this kind of thing can happen where you have these rare but not not unpredictable events where a body of clouds and storm cells hovers over and you don't know exactly where it's going to be? Well, one is you can try to use your weather predictions, and of course, Green Mountain Power is a dam owner that is relatively well informed, right? They can actually afford to spend money on much better weather predictions than you and I have. But what can you do about it? Well, three days out, maybe you can start emptying your reservoir, but Molly's Falls, for example, doesn't empty very fast. There's just no way to get the water out very fast. So in the event, you'd have to open the floodgates, and once you open them, you can't shut them in that dam. And there are other dams in the state where other actions like that would happen, which are just one way it happens. So what would happen in the case of the Marshfield Dam if you opened the floodgates? Well, within minutes, the town we know of as Marshfield would cease to exist. It just wouldn't exist anymore. And within an hour, ditto Plainfield Plainfield Village would be just gone. And the water would go on and flood much of East Montpelier, which is in Ellens District, and in fact the water, because think about when this happens, it doesn't happen out of the blue on a day like today. It happens when everybody's worried about flooding and there's flooding everywhere. Montpelier would just see a lot more water added on to whatever flooding it has and as part of what we call emergency action plans, which are the dam owner's responsibility, they do a kind of rough map of inundation and much of Montpelier would be inundated because of it. It's just a lot of water. So and and bad things happen because, like, Route 2, which is the exit, gone. Route 2 is gone. It's not accessible. So you'd have a whole school full of kids completely isolated, unable to get out. It would be a bad scene. And so you need a plan to save people's lives. I mean, we're talking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, and in other cases, of people and not in one town. You know, it's it's subregional. What do you do? Well, you have a plan, and when you think about what's in the plan, it's not rocket science. It's like, where do they live? How many are gonna get in the floods? Who's in the flood footprint? How do we get them? How do we warn them? How do we get them out? Where do we take them? I mean, that's what the plan is. Where do do we need boats? You know? Do we need helicopters? God forbid. What do we need to get them out in a very short period of time, and how do we do that? And what we realized in the current situation, we don't have such plans at all. We don't they're called the term is emergency operation plan plans. And we really don't have adequate emergency operation plans that can do just those basic things. And, you know, you don't have a lot of time. In Plainfield, I don't know if you probably didn't. Plainfield, there's a multifamily residential building called the Heartbreak Hotel, and the emergency responders went in, got them out maybe seconds before it was just thrown down the river and all their pets killed. I mean, literally, if they'd been minutes later, would have had deaths. So right now, who's responsible? Well, the town emergency manager. Well, you know, there are towns that had do a great job of this. But our smaller towns, there are towns with no emergency managing. There's towns, I know this, with an emergency manager who does not know that he or she is an emergency manager. There are there are towns where the emergency manager, I think one of whom you'll hear from, is completely overwhelmed and overloaded, and there are no town resources. The dam owner is partly has has certain responsibilities, but not a lot. As you'll hear, the state the state emergency operations administration is short staffed. They don't they they do not have the personnel to step in and do all of this. The regional planning commissions are interesting because they're sort of an intermediate sized group, but they don't have they lost a lot of federal funding. So last year, we worked on a bill which passed that called for a study. We had a summer study. Like a lot of summer study committees, it had a lot of stakeholders and ended up concluding that there wasn't much that could be done. Does this sound familiar? But that the regional planning commissions might be ideal, but there was no money and the towns knew the lay of the land, but maybe they should be responsible. But of course, that didn't deal with the fact that many towns are often involved. And so it it did say we should consider a pilot program. So this bill, which you will get a walkthrough of in a minute, what this bill does is I think the most important thing the bill does, there's a tendency to say, well, if you want a high hazard you know, the dams are ranked by hazard, and there's a lot of high hazard dams. High hazard dam is defined as possibly, I think, one person could die, and there's how many?

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: It's just any time.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: I know, but how many, like, 89 or ninety? Seventy three? Seventy four. Four. So something like that. 74 high hazard dams. And so there's a tendency to say, well, let's do all the high hazard dams, and that takes money and time. And so this bill says no. We wanna focus on the really worst situations because we don't have a lot. So let's start with the dams that are over a thousand lives at risk. And so what it does is it creates a pilot program and funds it minimally, and gives the State Division of Emergency Management the responsibility of running a pilot for two dams that are state owned with over a thousand lives at risk and complete the plan. Like, how many lives at risk? Where do they live? How do we get them out? Where do we Who does it? What's involved? Complete the plans and report to the legislature by mid twenty eight. So it gives them all the second half of if this bill passes of '26, all of '27, and half of '28. So it's two years to put this together and get back to us. And it contemplates that the vision would complete emergency operation plans for all dams where over a thousand lives are at risk by 2030 and all over a 100 lives at risk at 2031. And the rest, he doesn't say anything about the rest. We're just trying to operate within a world where we have limited resources. But in the end, I just say, where I don't wanna be, I don't wanna be in a situation where something really bad happens, and everybody's saying, what? Where the hell were you guys? You know? Why are we here? I I don't I don't think we should be there. Even if it's a low probability, it's not low enough and it sure isn't zero. Happy to answer any questions.

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: I know you've thought of this. I know the counties thought of this, can maybe the way that the water is measured coming up in the dam so that people can get a warning that they should evacuate or and then a siren? Yes. Really? Okay.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: Yes. And we thought I'll I'll tell you that one of the keys say I mean, if once you open the floodgates Right. Right, it's like an hour. Right? There's no time to say, governor, would you declare us I mean, you know, it's just there's no time. Right. So you have to have a plan where you can respond instantly. So the way around that is to anticipate it. And the problem there's several problems with that. One is some dams, there's not a lot of ways to get the water out very fast. Some dams, like in Irene, the year before, there was a terrible event at Mollies Falls Pond, and I have heard anecdotal stories all over the place. Some people say, Oh, you know, it all worked out. Others have said, Oh, so and so called so and so, who called so and so, and they all said, Oh my god, what are we gonna do? And they came and they looked at the water and they thought we ought to open the floodgates, but then one person said no, and they didn't. Thank god, and then the water receded because you don't know what's gonna happen.

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: But I'm talking about evacuation.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: You can have telephone trees, you can geotag and you can, yes, there are towns. One of the towns, Chittenden, a small town, has done a great job. They have you can do sirens. You can do telephone warning. You can do there are things that can be done. You can call people ahead of time and say, you should get rid pack up. Get ready. Yep. You can do

[Larry Labor (Vice Chair, acting as Chair)]: that. Okay.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: But somebody has to do it. Right. It's from our presenter. You're you will about to hear the detail from the master of it. Presenter. Kristi. Thank you. Thank you, Mark, for coming in and Sure. On this. Although this is dependent on the position of our emergency management. There are also a lot of fire departments in towns and cities have emergency operations plan. Are they are

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: you looking to coordinate it or duplicate it?

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: It has to be coordinated. The problem is, like there's a fire department. There are many fire departments who will tell you, We don't this is beyond us. It's too big and we don't have a device for coordinating among fire departments. There are fire departments where they won't exist. They'll be wiped out within a few hours. They're gone. We ought to know that. There are fire departments that will tell you we can't get out. We won't be able to get out because the roads will be gone. But we're imagining that an EOP, its fundamental element will be court figuring out what's the role of each fire department. What can they do? What do they need? How you know, how do they do it? There are towns that have places where they can put people because you have to put people when you evacuate. There are towns that have that, but there are towns where the only place they can evacuate to will be underwater. Oh, I fully understand. Yeah. But yes. I'm member of a fire department that has a local emergency operations plan and evacuation drills, except in a place to locate people if you can get to them. Where if you where where is that?

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Can get to them. Is yeah.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: So I think they're a fundamental component of this. That is the are they are on the ground emergency. It was in Plainfield, the fire department people who saved lives who saved lives and really took their own lives were at risk in doing it. And also under state's emergency operations plan, we have task force one, which is responsible for evacuations Right. Rescue. We we think that that needs to be enhanced and looked at at the worst dams, and I think that we can do that. I think we can do that.

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: My pleasure.

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: And I apologize, Rob. I to take a phone call.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: Well, at least your password. I gotta go back. Thanks,

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Mike.

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: Good afternoon. This is Michael Grady with legislative council. I think Rev Mahali gave you a lot of background, but I I think it's worthwhile to review that background and the context a little bit more. A few years ago, you started looking at inventorying dams in the state and identifying all the dams and where they were and then classifying all those dams according to to the standards for classification. As Rutland Mahali said, there's high, significant, and and low. High is when there is any risk of loss of life significant, where the failure would result in probable loss of economic loss or environmental disruption. And low is when there is basically no probable loss of life and low economic or environmental damage. So ANR, DEC, they're the ones in charge of that program. They're the ones in charge of the of the inventory, and they're the ones in charge of approving dams, improving modifications to dam breaches to dams. They are the ones that are supposed to go out and do the assessments of high, significant, or low. But then you have and and underneath that program, the dam owner is required to come up with an emergency action plan, which Holly referenced, so the EAP. And the EAP is is there's components of it, Blood zone, what to do in terms of like immediate failure, etcetera, etcetera. But it's not the entire regional response. In addition to VEC, there's Vermont Emergency Management, and they there are statutory requirements underneath the emergency management chapter 10 VSA section six that each town and city of the state shall establish a local organization for emergency management in accordance with the state emergency management plan and program. And so those plans are called LEMPs, the Local emergency management plan. As part of the LEMP, there needs to be an EOP. And the EOP is the emergency operations plan for a dam when there would be a failure of that dam. And that is on the multi municipal, regional. It's supposed to be multi municipal and regional. What happens, though, is, as Reverend Holly said, you have the different municipalities with different abilities and different scale of what they can do. And it's expensive. Right? If you're gonna be prepared, you need equipment. If you're gonna be prepared, you need vehicles. And you have to if you're they're going to be serviceable, you have to to replace them in on scheduled on a schedule. And so when you were doing the flood safety act, general assembly doing the flood safety act in 2024, the the question came up of, like, who is responsible for the EOP? You have the study committee, and the study committee met and and basically how to to do dam operations planning. And it's it's a good report. It it is. And it it provides a ton of information, like what are the high hazard dams, where are the as high hazard dams with potential loss of life, shows you examples of It's a really good report, but it doesn't make a final recommendation. If it gives you alternatives, and one of the alternatives is to require Vermont Emergency Management to be in control, if not responsible for doing the emergency operations plans for dams. But as Rep. Mahali said, they they don't have the staff to do every one of the high hazard dams. They don't have the staff to do it for every dam. And even if they were to contract that out for every dam, that would be significant expense. Consolants would be they they'd be be making a lot of bank. But so what this bill does is not name it all the way, not every EOP by VEM, not the dam owner doing the EOP, not the municipalities doing the EOP, not the regional planning commissions. Like, the regional planning commissions on paper, that sounds like, oh, they're the regional entity. They're the ones that can coordinate the town. Not every municipality is part of a regional planning commission, and and not all of them are part of the same planning commission. And a dam might go into different planning commissions, areas of different planning. So you you have this really kind of fractured, underfunded system that is probably inadequate right now to deal with with an actual catastrophic failure. And so what this bill is doing is it's not it it starts the process of how to to manage emergency operations plans and creates a pilot project for two dams to see how it can be done and whether or not it needs to be done another way or can could continue on as contemplated by by the bill. So I'm gonna stop there and see if anybody has any question.

[Michael "Mike" Tagliavia (Member)]: Addison, Tagliavia. It was referenced and you originally brought up when you told us about Right. So these floodgates I have a misconception about floodgates. I thought they were easy to open and easy to close, but, apparently, not all dams have that ability.

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: All of these dams are so different. When you go and you like, you don't you might not even know you're on a dam. Like, some of these dams are are just earth berms. You go play golf. You you you're probably gonna walk by one or two dams while you're playing golf.

[Michael "Mike" Tagliavia (Member)]: Ones that we know that have a floodgate that is you know, it's either open, you wait for the water to drop, and that's it? Can part of this plan be to maybe update those so that they're not a, you know, all or nothing? I I I mean imagining cost is gonna be what the is the particular

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: Well, there there's cost, and there's also things like the FERC license for the dam and what the FERC license says and and how that plays into it and whether or not under the FERC license they have that schedule for review and repair of the dam. You know, most of these are not gonna be FERC dams. Most of these are gonna be DEC regulated dams, but there's this subset of dams that was pre FERC that was generating electricity that PUC was regulating. You've transferred you contemplated transferring them to DEC. I say contemplate because when you said that they will be transferred, you also said that they should look to see if FERC should take jurisdiction over any of those dams. So it's a little bit of a limbo. It's it's probably long odds that FERC will take any of them. FERC doesn't want the hassle. But they are generating electricity. You know, the dam owner wants one uniform ownership and regulator. You know? That that that's the kind of thing that you're looking at. Those dams, if they're FERC, they're gonna be FERC. They're probably gonna say, hey. We're gonna wait until we know what our regulatory regime is going to be. And then for the dam safety, DEC has been working on rules for that. And they haven't been finalized. So there's two sets of DEC rules. There's safety and applying, registering, all that, inspection. And then there's how you design a dam. And that's where they've been and what you need to do if there's need for repair, and that's where they've stalled because it's hard. And the division has been under a lot of stress. And so just saying, oh, just make them fix it. Well, fix it to what standard. And and who's gonna then pay for that? Is it the dam owner that pays for that? Well, then the state owns a good amount of these dams. Is the state paying for that? Sometimes it's just one owner. Sometimes it's it's like a neighborhood association that owns the dam. Are they gonna pay for it? So so you have those types of considerations to saying, oh, they need to fix it so that it's easy and that that they can resolve. There's so many different forms of dams, so many different types of owners, so many different capacities, and money available to those owners. So it it's it's harder than it than it looks.

[Larry Labor (Vice Chair, acting as Chair)]: Just to add to that, though, there is a revolving loan fund that the dam safety program operates, and there is a capital bill. Pieces of the capital bill are aimed at fixing what we do know we have the highest The Dam Safety Program is My understanding is they're prioritizing repairs on certain kinds of dams, and they run programs to help support repairs. Is that correct?

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: Right. Until a couple of years ago, the Dam Safety Fund was the emergency dam fund. And it was only available for emergencies. But why wait until the emergency is going to happen before you respond and fund it? Why not? So you bifurcated that fund. There's an emergency account, and there's emergency assistance and non emergency assistance. So you can get money now under that program. It's a revolving fund, so it's going to have loans, and it's going to have interests, and you need the people that are willing to apply for that. And so that it's better than it used to be. Is it gonna be a total resolution to the funding and responsibility needs? Likely, no, but it's better than it was. So let's talk about the bill then. So h seven seven eight, as I referenced earlier, BEM, they have that requirement that municipalities in town come up with the local emergency management plan. And so within that chapter of law of 20 VSA, after one or two, there's a new section that's added on dam safety and emergency operations plans. So if DEC classifies a dam as high hazard potential, remember, they're the ones that classify the dams, The division of emergency management in coordination with DEC shall complete or fund the completion of an emergency operation plan for the dam according to the requirements of this section. This goes into effect on passage. This becomes existing law and existing requirement right away. There is a pilot project later on in the bill, but this is immediately, soon as it's passed, becomes effective. The Division of Emergency Management completes the EOP on or before 01/15/2030 if a dam has a population at risk of 1,000 or more persons. Rep. Mahali noted that there were 11. And on or before January 2031, if a dam has a population at risk of 100 or more but fewer than 1,000 persons, there are actually 22. When you add it up, it's 33. So there will be 33 dams total that VEM would be doing an EOP for. And in order to ensure the sufficiency of the EOP, we're on page two, line 15, and to protect public lives and property, the division coordinates with the owner of the dam regarding the substance and application of the EOP. And that coordination shall include collecting input from municipal officials, emergency responders, regional planning commissions, and other relevant interested persons located in a regional area that would be inundated if the dam were to fail. It's that EOP has to be developed so it sufficiently prepares municipal and regional entities to respond to dam failure in a manner that protects public lives and property, including identification of alternative routes for emergency responders if highways and roads are are flooded. Upon completion of the EOP, the division gives every municipality in that area a potential inundation a copy of the EOP. And the division may hire a contractor to complete an EOP. There's no long term funding for that. If there's going to be money for it, you're probably going to have to contemplate in the future how much these EOPs are going to cost. And that's partly what the pilot project's going to be about. The division already has requirements to do local emergency templates and and etcetera training. Well, this is specific that they will develop training courses and structural material and templates that municipalities may use to develop an EOP when they're when the division is not required. Remember, there's only 33 that the division has to do the EOP for. There there are hundreds of other dams in the state. And so the municipality needs to take on the EOP requirement for those other dams. And so the EEM will create these templates and training and instruction for those dam owners. It's part of what they already do. They they already do training. They already have templates, but this is specific for the EOP. And for each EOP prepared, under the section or voluntarily prepared by municipality, DEM in consultation with DEC will consult with the Vermont Center for Geographic Information to identify within the inundation zone where persons would reasonably be expected to deliver work or that person would reasonably be expected to otherwise act. But now you would think, I know you know this, that DEC and DEM would have all this great LIDAR and other GPS stuff where they could already do this themselves. They don't have the capacity to do that right now but the Vermont Center for Geographic Services should be able to go further than what the two departments have the ability to do right now with that type of technology. And this is this is one where I think you're gonna have to get some some testimony from the Center for Geographic Information about what they can do and and how soon they could do it and also what they would need for money. Upon identification of structures where there's gonna be people that are living or working or reasonably expected to be, they they shall be geotagged as part of the Vermont Alert system so they become part of that automatic alert once they've been geotagged. And then at least every five years, the EEM will conduct exercises to practice emergency response under an EOP for high hazard potential dams. And it shall involve all stakeholders in the EOP implementation and shall, at the very least, test communication emergency responders, and public notification. I want to know that I probably wasn't clear enough here on page four, line eight. Is it each high hazard potential dam, or is it each high hazard potential dam with a population risk of a 100 or more persons? Because that significantly will reduce the number of trainings that would have to go on. And that that is me, and I was reading over the bill over the past couple of days, I'm like, oh, that could be clarified depending on what you want. And then section two, there was a lot of feedback in the drafting of this bill from from the sponsors and from others that indicated that the governor couldn't declare a state of emergency without municipal approval or for an evacuation if there was a dam failure. And no one could really point to where that requirement was or was not, But there is a provision in the emergency management chapter that said, for in order for all hazards event to be declared by the governor that there has to be consultation with the legislative body, the municipality, the city, or town manager, or the mayor. But there's a sentence added here that this section now shall not be construed to prevent the governor or the director of emergency management without municipal approval from requiring evacuation of an area subject to inundation from a dam failure. I think the governor already has authority. I I I think it's there and the the governor's general authority. I don't want this section to be read as somehow misconstrued as limiting the governor's I think the governor already has the authority. But this is just to take away that argument that the sponsors and I were hearing that the municipality had to approve it before the governor could order an evacuation. And that might need further refinement depending on input from VEM or others. And then Section three, you're moving into the pilot project. VEM in coordination with DEC, Kentucky's a pilot project under which the division develops two EOPs for state owned dams that have been classified as high hazard potential and that have a population at risk of 1,000 or more persons. On or before 07/01/2028, they submit to you, the General Assembly, the results of the pilot project, including copies of the two EOPs, the summary of the process for developing them, including whether the division completed them on their own with division staff or hired contractors, the summary of how the division or division contractor coordinated with the municipal officials and emergency responders, the cost of each EOP, the recommendation of how EOP should be completed by other dam owners in the state, and any other information that the division deems relevant to the results of a pilot project or future regulation of the safety of dams in the state. There is an appropriation, dollars 250,000 to the Division of Emergency Management for the completion of the EOP pilot project, and an additional 125,000 to DEC for the department's assistance in completing the emergency operations plan pilot project. Now as you all know, all appropriations, new appropriations that aren't in the line item budgets of departments are being stripped out and contingency clauses are being put in. I would expect that same response from your appropriations committee. But you've set what your original expectation or at least what the sponsor's original expectation would be for an appropriation. Expect if this bill moves, it's gonna have contingency clause in it that says there'll be no duty of VEM to do anything unless the money is provided. And then the act takes effect on passage.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: Any questions?

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Are there any thank you. Are there any positions for schools to plan?

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: That's part of the whole local emergency management planning process. If you need to do an EOP as part of that, how you're gonna And

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: are children counted in the count of people?

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: Yes. Yes. Yes. And remember, to be eyehazard, there just needs to be one life at risk, any life at risk. But then they do three stages of the potential of loss of life.

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: And are there any requirements for training? Do we oh, that would be part of it.

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: There is training. They do do training.

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Well, mean, like, where the kids would go through an evacuation, getting on buses, the bus drivers would

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: go I don't know the answer to that. Okay. There is a provisional there for exercising. For? Exercising.

[Larry Labor (Vice Chair, acting as Chair)]: There are. Okay. Great. If you speak, you need to introduce yourself. Sorry.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: I'm the director of Vermont Emergency Management.

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Okay.

[Larry Labor (Vice Chair, acting as Chair)]: Michael, can you just describe a little bit more about, if you know, when they say over a thousand people, how they're counting those lives. So continuing on Sarita's question, is it while at work? Is it while at home? Like what I do think think it's about

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: the inundation zone. It's like

[Larry Labor (Vice Chair, acting as Chair)]: Where people might be either

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: Where people may be at the time of failure.

[Larry Labor (Vice Chair, acting as Chair)]: It could include the people who live in that area, plus if everybody was at work, those people on top, plus school was full.

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: Yes.

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: I understand that some dams licensed by FERC. Other dams are controlled by. What about the small private dam?

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: Most dams in the state are regulated by DEC. And you took the PUC dams, you you're in the process of transferring them to DEC for intent and purposes that DEC is regulating them, but there's this potential out for them, which probably won't happen. And then there are the FERC dams. And then there are the the Corps of Engineers dams. And so there are four or five entities that regulate dams in the state. DEC is regulates the most by far.

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Any other questions? Stay thank you very much.

[Michael Grady (Legislative Counsel)]: And I have to excuse myself. I am too incentivized.

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Thank you. Excellent. It's two fifteen. Presenters

[Larry Labor (Vice Chair, acting as Chair)]: available? They're not.

[Rep. Marc Mihaly (Chair, House General and Housing Committee)]: They're not

[Larry Labor (Vice Chair, acting as Chair)]: available. We're waiting on representatives.

[Sarah "Sarita" Austin (Clerk)]: Good. Thank you. We're good.