Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Alright. Welcome back to the House Environment Committee. Continuing our testimony on s three twenty five, we have Neil Ryan with us.

[Neil Ryan (Farmer, Corinth/Orange VT)]: Good morning. Thanks, Neil Ryan. Corinth, Vermont. I'm happily unaffiliated with any organization. There is a farmer and a neighbor. I farm a little over 200 acres in Corinth and Orange, Vermont. It was a portion of governor Dean Davis's boyhood farm. So it's, you know, it's been a farm for two hundred plus years from the sheep boom on. It's also in part conserved by the Nature Conservancy. It forms a piece of a 5,800 acre contiguous block that's been voluntarily conserved, which is kind of colloquially known as the Orange County Headwaters Projects. So I think probably on most things, I'd be right there with this committee. You know, our farm pollinator gardens, creating, maintaining edge habitat. We plant oaks and propagate butternuts every year to kind of return mass crops to a forest composition that doesn't have them. So You know, I believe that conservation is a practice that's informed my life. My farm would have triggered the road rule. That's the 2,000 foot piece of it. We had to construct road. We'll talk about some of the the concerns or talking points about roads a little bit later on, but it would have triggered the road rule. When I purchased that land, I owner financed. I dragged a $1,200 trailer onto that piece of land, and I had a thousand bucks left in my bank account when I got there. So, you know, the act two fifty process and the costs, probably meant that project didn't happen when it did. My family started two other farms in two other Vermont towns over the last fifty years. Both of those would have triggered the road rule, the 2,000 foot version. The farm I grew up on would have triggered additional act two fifty permits over years because much of that is map tier three now. The cow pastures, the barn complex, they're all hit with tier three. So that's how I came to this. And I've talked to hundreds of Vermont landowners over the last few months. And for me, this has become an equity and a social justice issue. So if there's one thing that I'm gonna talk about, one thing I'd like you guys to walk away from this conversation knowing is that tiered land use architecture always becomes class architecture. Everywhere, it's been tried. So the mechanism at the center of I'm gonna read for a moment. The mechanism at the center of act twenty one one eighty one, a tiered map based framework coupled with reliance on administrative bodies, does place Vermont within a long and well documented lineage of governance approaches. So this has been done. It's legal. But that lineage has been studied extensively across political science, economics, planning, systems theory, and the conclusion across those fields has been strikingly consistent. When complex place based systems are governed through frameworks, failure is not incidental. It is structural, repeatable, and often severe. So tiered land use schemes are increasingly repudiated internationally, where they've been tried in places like Brazil, Sub Saharan Africa. There's numerous examples you can look at in Brazil in efforts to stop deforestation. Those types of programs, a, did not stop deforestation, and b, excluded existing subsistence rural landowners. So the process exclusion, that's a globally recognized problem. Everyone from governments to human rights NGOs, social scientists, human geographers, and, of course, the people most acutely impacted, that's commonly rural working people in indigenous communities, have reject this. It it's now called conservation induced displacement or green lining as opposed to red lining. The UN special repertoire repertoire and a multiple human rights treaty bodies have identified conservation induced displacement as a systemic violation of the right to adequate housing and the right to benefit from natural resources. So I would say that's what what's true in the global South is equally applicable in Vermont. I'm I'm pretty shocked that you know, I've asked the lurb over time, and I don't think it's happened. And I don't think the conversation's been had enough. What are the socioeconomic overlays when you look at tier three mapping and the road rule? But first, I'll talk about some of the things that I've heard in over on the senate side and in testimony even within this committee in the last week or so four things that, you know, proponents of tier three and the road will will offer to me. And the first is that ag and forestry are exempt. Hear that a lot. But the farmer, her family, and her home are not exempt. The Farm Bureau has testified before Senate Natural Resources that almost all new farm creation in Vermont happens with home construction. Most of the available prime ag land is currently held by larger consolidated farms, and Vermont's old hill farms tend to have very expensive homes on them. So the land that is available for people to farm is more marginal land. It is often raw land. It is land they convert to agricultural uses, but that generally starts with home construction. That's been for true for me twice over in my life, and the Farm Bureau has given testimony that that's almost the sole basis for new farm creation nowadays. So home construction is not exempt. Accessory on farm businesses, mostly not exempt. Additional on farm housing, exempt. Intergenerational subdivision, not exempt, and so on. Another point, long roads are expensive to construct, so the road rule will not really impact low and middle income Vermonters so much. I would dispute that categorically. You'll hear more testimony about that later this week. I'll use my own example. Built a half a mile of road, borrowing an excavator for two days, grading it with my tractor, and putting stone on it over a series of years as money allowed. So Vermonters frequently build roads. They do them economically. They replace water bars with culverts over time. Road construction can be very expensive. It certainly doesn't have to be. One thing I heard is repeatedly from all corners is that act one eighty one will prevent wealthy people from building palatial homes deep into our forest. I heard that from this committee, actually, in correspondence with me. We've just heard over and over again permits aren't denied. 98% of them are granted. So if you have the means and the access, your project gets built. Those barriers disproportionately fall on low and middle income people. I think all we're saying is that we accept rural gentrification. We'll take the affluent being able to do what they wanna do, and we will preclude lesser resource people, and it's just a numbers game. And then lastly, I wanted to talk about this this common refrain that the maps aren't finalized yet, and they may get smaller. So Vermonters have only been able to react to the maps that they've seen thus far, and what concessions have been made by the LERB or adjustments have really only come because of the limited landowner pushback and their knowledge of their own land. So we can only react to the maps as they stand today. There'll be new maps in April. We can respond to those then. But here are the facts. Over 500,000 acres are currently mapped tier three. That's almost 11% of the private land in Vermont. More than 27,000 parcels, unique parcels, are mapped with some tier three. Almost 10,000 landowners find all or the majority of their property mapped tier three. One in 13 Vermont families are impacted by tier three. Of course, the road rule functions in exponent expanding that act two fifty jurisdiction to millions of acres. So I would ask the committee what number of encumbered families would be acceptable in the next round of maps. 10,000, 18,000, 5,000? Like, what's the appropriate number of families to have subject to tier three restrictions on their property. You know, probably the mean, let's just try to be a little bit quicker. But act one eighty one is an inversion of environmental justice principles. So I'll get to why. The fair treatment it's fine as the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. So the distribution of act one eighty one's regulatory burden follows income. That's now uncontestable. The land use for view board has not, to my knowledge, incorporated socioeconomic overlays. We have now, in collaboration with Middlebury College. I think we should be ashamed of the learnings. The current draft tier three maps disproportionately ensnare rural Vermont's lowest income existing housing. The burden of almost total tier three parcel mapping, so when your property is all or mostly tier three, that generally happens within the habitat corridors, the largest piece of the tier three maps. Those are generally small wooded lots with existing trailers and small single single family homes along class two roads and state highways. Town by town across Vermont, the preexisting median assessed value of those tier three map properties is, versus the same scale of lot median home price in the rest of those communities. It's 40 to 60% less across the state of Vermont. So we're sweeping up an entirely overlaying tier three or greater than 75% on literally the lowest income existing housing in Vermont's towns. It's disproportionately the the mapping is disproportionate in the 30 poorest legislative districts in Vermont. So low income existing housing in rural communities is bearing the brunt of tier three mapping. We can say the process is navigable. There's it doesn't have to be expensive or reduce criteria, all of that kind of stuff, but you're still subjecting our rural poor to a process geared towards institutional developers. So act one eighty one fails distributional justice because it burden its burdens and exemptions are inverted relative to wealth capacity. So I'll provide one example. I have a neighbor. He's developmentally disabled. He lives in a rundown trailer on a wooded 10 acre lot. He lives there because he's walking distance to his 86 year old mother. When he leaves his home to walk to his mother's home, he, with the exception of his trailer and a small buffer, is entirely tier three. He walks down that road. He walks past the southern summer Rev residence of a Harvard professor who has a landscaping company that has managed to keep open land right down to the edge of the road that is not, know, under 38 acres versus 10 acres, not tier three, then he gets to his mother's, also not tier three. So because of the land use choices of the Harvard summer resident over a period of time versus his circumstances, wooded lot. He's tier three, and they are not. Habitat connector is defined as forest cover on both sides of the road greater than 75%. That was the criteria that got us to that habitat corridor. So wooded lot, right next door, open lot. One, sort of assessed value of $40,000. Other 1, 1,100,000.0, And that has replicated all over the state where you have neighbor next to neighbor. Different land use patterns got them there. They're either tier three, habitat, connector, or they're not. It's purely based on roadside forest cover. I will say that Alex has told me that the lurb got to that because Fish and Wildlife does not have datasets for wild where wildlife are actually moving within the state. So they created what they call a novel theory to link these connectivity blocks. But that's sort of the distributional justice issue in a nutshell or in a concrete example. So act one eighty one fails procedural justice because the people most regulated were not meaningfully consulted in the laws designed. So the process concentrated engagement with environmental NGOs, institutional stakeholders who had the capacity staffing and access to participate. The rural landowners, homeowners, small farmers, and woodlot owners most affected by tier three and the road rule were mostly engaged in it after the law's architecture was set, not during it. And a majority of Vermont landers still own their land is slated to fall under jurisdiction. And you've obviously seen the results of that over the last month or so as, you know, 9,000 people have come out of the woodwork on Facebook and so on and so forth. I think I'll just probably mention one more thing, and that is that you have folks from the Rubenstein School, Middlebury, board members of some of the very groups that are testifying in support of one eighty one and s three twenty five as written that are coming out and saying this is a disaster with with potential unintended consequences. The delay in particular is concerning because we're already seeing preemptive land use patterns that not ecologically sound. Anyone with the means to do so is going to scramble to subdivide. That's already happening. People are constructing roads that they wouldn't ordinarily have constructed because they think they're on a timeline. So I think this disincentivizes care. It turns a collaborative model of conservation to work very well for a very long time, adversarial, and trust has been broken. So rural Vermonters, and I speak for a lot of them, increasingly view its tiered framework as one that creates first, second, and third class citizens. A law that makes belonging more expensive does not produce Aldo Leopold's land ethic. It produces alienation, resentment, and ultimately disinvestment from the land. So that's the reason organizations as as diverse as vast and NOFA members, ecological design practitioners, and dairies, social justice groups, and rural hospitals are all saying in unison that the road rule and tier three are not acceptable as written. The delay is an insufficient remedy. The process was the poison. And I would say that repeal of the road rule, which I'm certainly asking for, and repeal of tier three, which I'm also asking for, is not a retreat from environmental values. It's the honest acknowledgment that act one eighty one was built on an incomplete understanding of the landscape and the people it governs, that its impacts fall heaviest on Vermont's rural working class, and that bad policy instruments do not serve good goals. In place of the road rule in tier three, Vermont should build something that is not yet built, a genuine participatory process that starts on the ground and works its way up. Not with maps already created to present that created outrage, but with questions to ask. What do you know about this land? What wildlife have you observed in it? Where are the genuinely sensitive issues? How do you already protect them? What infrastructure infrastructure do you need to remain viable, and what does that infrastructure actually do to land around it? Questions like that aren't soft questions. They're questions that a scientifically rigorous ground truth process demands, and they have not been asked at the scale that this issue requires. The answers would produce something more valuable than a GIS polygon, a map of the land built from the knowledge of the people who know it best, its owners and stewards. From that foundation, Vermont can develop policy that is actually calibrated to ecological ecological function. Policy that distinguishes between roads that threaten sensitive areas and roads that are ecologically neutral or beneficial between working land practices that degrade habitat and those that sustain it, between the kind of rural development that fragments forests and the kind of rural presence that holds it together. This will require the state to sit where land at the table with rural landowners, working farmers, foresters, and the and their communities, not as commenters or for feedback, but as co designers. The goal, an ecologically healthy, economically viable, culturally alive rural Vermont is one that most Vermonters share. The legislature must fix something that is broken this session. If they do not repeal the road rule in tier three, this equity issue becomes a conflagration burning up decades of common interest in conservation. It'll eat up much of our time over the course of that delay. Ultimately, it will not reach a positive resolution short of repeal. If the voices of rural Vermont are not heated, I think it does damage in Vermont's environmental movement and creates generational animosity that will be difficult to undo. So delay is insufficient. It'll create a fight for the next three years when we could be doing better things. So I urge you to amend s three twenty five to repeal the road rule and tier three. I'd ask you to choose a different path that respects the people who live along it. That's the only approach to conservation that has ever really worked. Thanks. I'll take questions after stumbling through that.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Thank you for your testimony. I hope you'll submit it, the written form of that. That would be helpful for Sure. Do members have questions? Representative Austin?

[Rep. Sarah “Sarita” Austin (Clerk, Colchester)]: It's just interesting you didn't mention housing plus, where when I look at January and mainly is the need for housing, especially in rural Vermont.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Uh-huh.

[Rep. Sarah “Sarita” Austin (Clerk, Colchester)]: I think in Chittenden County, we're going game plus Yeah. With housing. So my concern is rural Vermonters. Mhmm. And the fact that people are growing older, the workforce is working out. Yep. And we have to have people move up here. So I'm just wondering what your solution is to meet the quotas of housing that rural Vermont will need in order to sustain economic development.

[Neil Ryan (Farmer, Corinth/Orange VT)]: Well, my solutions that are putting further roadblocks up to small subdivision on family pieces of land, or taking hundreds of miles of town road and state highway out of circulation for home construction is the opposite of solving for our housing needs. So I would say that, you know, there's low hanging fruit here. Five and ten acre subdivision rules are wrong. They create more sprawl. I think we should be infilling those types of lots. And those that's exactly what I was speaking to. We disproportionately sweep up these relatively small parcels that have an existing home on them. Why can't that 10 acre parcel with a trailer on it add another trailer or not another small single family home? So when you take all of that land that's right on the existing infrastructure of of maintained town roads and state highways, that's hurting rural housing creation. So that's one of my beefs with the Habitat Connector as currently mapped.

[Unidentified committee member (facilitating Q&A)]: Thank you.

[Neil Ryan (Farmer, Corinth/Orange VT)]: Thanks.

[Unidentified committee member (facilitating Q&A)]: Other questions?

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Oh, okay. Chapin and Tagliavia. I

[Rep. Ela Chapin (Member)]: really appreciated your vision of an alternative process to protect a lot of these resources that we're so concerned about, starting with the landowners. And it and I'm just wondering if anything like what you're envisioning has been tried any place. Do we have any models that we can look to for guidance if we wanted to stand up. I think

[Neil Ryan (Farmer, Corinth/Orange VT)]: I think the Land Access Opportunity Board is gonna talk exactly about those process models in just a moment. So, yeah, you know, one last thing. When we talk about these critical natural resources, there's a couple things that I kept hearing on the senate side, you know, ultimately this tier three helps protect things like our waterfalls or roadless areas for wildlife that can interact with roads. So, you know, we also have DEC. So the headwater stream areas in tier three are not streams. It's simply elevation, slope, plus USDA soil maps indicating hydric soils. So that that's something that's not our headwater streams. Our headwater streams are regulated by DEC. So that piece of the mapping is I think people are confused about it. It's it's not our headwater streams themselves. It's upslope elevation and purported hydric soils, but based on faulty maps. And then the habitat connectors themselves as an indicator is sort of a novel novel theory where existing people already live. So I had I tend to think our most critical natural resources are already covered by a number of different jurisdictional triggers across ANR and elsewhere. And what we're doing is finding these criterias on the edges that we think plug a hole, but we're showing over time that we're using bad data. There's inaccuracies, particularly in the headwater stream areas. I think the lurb has talked about dispensing with that criteria altogether or that segment of the map. So I think we're just finding that the process of even the mapping, as it's been a scramble, is really flawed.

[Unidentified committee member (facilitating Q&A)]: Senator Chapin. I guess I'd just love to start with a thank you for the work and research and clearly many, many conversations and thinking that you've put in to present this particular talking points with us today. I am interested in learning more about greenlining, and if that's something that you have references or that may be helpful.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: I

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: really appreciate your testimony.

[Unidentified committee member (facilitating Q&A)]: There's

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: no time leaving.

[Unidentified committee member (references Corinth bylaws)]: Thank you. I'm going to ask as quickly as I can, because I've got three, but I'll tie them all in. Denials and delays, rural businesses, and lower and middle income people doing more than 800 foot roads. The reason I say that, I bring these up, is because in Corinth, we just had a vote on bylaws changes, and 300 foot roads were actually a vote of contention. Maybe you could speak to that because you and I both know the roads of Corinth pretty well, and since they're along creeks and wet areas, wetlands, however you want to describe them, you can maybe elaborate a little bit more about how that might

[Neil Ryan (Farmer, Corinth/Orange VT)]: How a road rule would impact rural homeowners? I mean roads are serpentine, generally speaking, and access and topography is what it is. And a lot of times, people to get to a an appropriate home site move upslope to do so, which, you know, in many cases makes sense. So I, you know, I just think the vagaries of a site determine how long a road needs to be or should be. When we built, we built on the exact footprint of the original farm. So we leveraged the existing foundation, and that just happened to take us half a mile. You know? So we exceeded that 2,000 feet. To me, it would have been silly to say, oh, I've gotta get under the 2,000 feet, so I'm gonna clear cut 10 acres right here to, you know, fulfill the letter of the law in that respect rather than move the extra 400 feet to build in a site that was the original farm site with the right slope aspect, water source, etcetera, etcetera. So roads need to be what they need to be. And particularly as you think about intergenerational land transfer in the context of agriculture, Once you convert that farm road to anything else, that's a jurisdictional trigger. So it's problematic on a lot of fronts. Small parcels, large parcels. Thank

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: you again for your testimony. Next up, we are hearing from co directors of the Land Access and Opportunity Board. We need a chair? Preferable for us to un chair you.

[Unidentified committee member (facilitating Q&A)]: So we could have two chairs. Thank you, Megan.

[Ornela Mata Figueroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Oh, no, Megan, please don't. I'm mad. Thank you. You very much. Thank you very much. I apologize to be reading from my phone this morning. I have a little technical difficulty with the printer. Good morning, everyone. Chair, vice chair, and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this morning. For the record, my name is Ornela Mata Figueroa. I'm one of the codirectors of the Land Access and Opportunity Board. I'm here with

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Hi. I'm Jean Hamilton.

[Rep. Sarah “Sarita” Austin (Clerk, Colchester)]: I'm the other co director of

[Ornela Mata Figueroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: the LAOB. We like to begin all of our working community by sharing our touchstones and inviting folks to join us in working with them in mind. And they are. That we listen generously and we speak our truth from our heart and mind. That we make the way that we work together an example of what is possible, and that we trust, that we each hold a piece of the puzzle, and that we need each other's pieces to understand the whole picture. Do you all consent to working with these touchstones in mind during our time together today? Thank you. I want to begin by acknowledging that we're walking into a very real and very difficult conversation. I'm deeply aware of the testimony that's come before us today, particularly from farmers and rural Vermonters who are naming the unintended impacts of this rulemaking on their ability to live, work, and remain on land. And before I offer any recommendations, we wanna start by naming what we're seeing and hearing. We're hearing many Vermonters terrified that without strong land use protections, no one will protect our environment. That forests will be cleared, waters further polluted, and that the natural beauty that defines Vermont will be lost. We're also hearing from Vermonters afraid they will lose their homes or farms, our working lands, and our rural communities. Not because people don't care for the land, because somehow we've made living in Vermont so unaffordable. I also hear from Vermonters that have no option but to sell their land to the highest bidder because their long term financial security is their land, as well as the generational housing that's made the farming possible on their land. And now they can't afford to keep the farm. They can't build any housing to support the farming, and they can't support themselves unless they sell. These fears are not abstract. They're grounded in reality. We've all seen the disputes in local zoning arguments and the ways that any construction project for any person with limited resource is a big deal at a maze of regulatory stops, fees, permits, and surprises. And if we don't hold both at the same time, we risk designing policies that solve one problem while creating another. I also want to name that we're currently operating in a federal landscape where environmental protections are being weakened and where public lands and natural resources are under threat. And where people working to protect land are increasingly marginalized and dismissed. At the same time, maintaining the status quo, knowing that many working Vermonters experienced the current system as inaccessible, adversarial, and costly is also not acceptable. For me, personally, this is not a choice between protecting land and people. It's a question about how we protect land and who carries the cost of that protection. Earlier in the week, the LAOB team revisited the 2018 Act two fifty report. What stood out most clearly was not what the report concluded, but what it did not examine. We don't see a meaningful assessment of the economic burden of Act two fifty on small landowners, farmers, or working households. There was no racial justice or equity lens applied to understanding how permitting costs, delays or access to professional support affect different communities. And there was limited analysis of how Act two fifty interacts cumulatively with housing access, land security, and rural viability over time. Without that information, we're making decisions with an incomplete picture. We also look at regional comparisons across other rural and environmental sensitive areas in different states. We saw systems that retain strong environmental standards while pairing them with expectations, more predictable processes, and embedded technical assistance, especially for small scale and working land uses. Unfortunately, our approach in Vermont remains unusually costly and complex for people without money or lawyers on speed dial. I believe there's a middle path available to us, one that does not weaken environmental standards but changes the posture of regulation. This is what we're thinking. Right now, Act two fifty often functions as an adversarial permit system. It assumes conflict first, capacity second, and places the burden of navigation almost entirely on the applicant. That structure continuously disadvantages farmers, rural land stewards, small builders, and households specifically without access to capital, legal, and technical expertise. Over time, that reinforces class inequality, even when the intent is environmental protection. I think a different model is possible, one where land use regulations works with Vermonters to care for land rather than against them. At the core of our proposal is a shift in positionality and power. And instead of positioning the state primarily as an enforcer, we propose positioning it as a facilitator, a collaborator, and a steward. Some key elements could include facilitating clarity early so people understand expectations before investing time and money collaborating with working Vermonters to design projects that meet environmental goals incentivizing good land use outcome rather than penalizing effort or blocking development Providing technical support at no cost so environmental responsibility or access to development does not depend on personal wealth. The goal is simple: protect Vermont's land by making possible for Vermonters to remain on it. At this point, I wanna turn things over to Jeanine, who will share another opportunity we see for improvement. Thanks,

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: so building off of what Ornella Ornela. Just shared, our research has revealed Our research and participation in this 181 rule making with the LERB has really revealed two structural challenges. This first one that Ornella spoke to about a regulatory framework that is adversarial versus one that is working in support of. And the second structural barrier is really a lack of a true earnest public engagement and consultation process throughout the predecessor to 01/1981, the legislation of 01/1981, and then the rulemaking that we've been witnessing and experiencing as a result of 01/1981. Neil, I think you spoke really well to this. The challenge with, I guess we can provide a very detailed analysis of all of the misses we've seen. We clearly don't have time for that today, and I'm not sure there's even time throughout this session to document all of the misses. What I wanna highlight is just a couple of things. One, we see in the Act two fifty fifty year commission report that there was a public engagement process, and there were four twenty three public meeting attendees and nine thirteen survey respondents. So 1,300 Vermonters participated, if I'm understanding the data correctly, in that commission report. While these numbers are definitely higher than we see in some governmental public engagement processes, it is really hard for me to imagine that 1,300 voices were adequately sufficient to represent the multiplicity of needs that Vermonters have relating to land use and land use permitting and regulation. I wanna really uplift one of our board members who did try to speak into that process multiple times to highlight a need, an urgent need to look at these green lining impacts, potential green lining impacts that laws like Act two fifty have had on the entire state of Vermont. So Mark Hughes is one of our board members. He's the executive director of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance. And on three different occasions, he tried to give testimony into the Act two fifty fifty year review commission, really encouraging that there is time set aside to look into, investigate, and understand the racialized economic and exclusionary impacts of Act two fifty. I wanna highlight Mark's testimony because then throughout my own experience of being in rulemaking, what I saw is that dissenting voices and marginalized perspectives were further marginalized in the rulemaking and the public engagement processes. So voices that do not align with the sort of mainstream or the standard narrative or the proposed solution from the outset were diminished and dismissed. I really want to underscore this moment that we're in, that we are having these robust conversations, thanks to the 9,000 Vermonters who are landowners, who have spoken up now as they've understood what this impact will be or could be from road rule and tier three. And I really value that. And our board, the Land Access and Opportunity Board is struggling with what does it mean that 9,000 people, rural Vermont people who are predominantly white people, who are predominantly landowners, were able to get the attention of this body. But when black members of the community spoke up, silence. No invitation for further testimony. No invitation for more research. So I am not trying to do oppression Olympics here. That's not the point. My point is when we bring in dissenting voices into public engagement, those dissenting voices are our gold. When we have conflict in our points of view, that is when we have the opportunity to learn. And right now, the public engagement and the rulemaking processes surrounding this act is very status quo with how we see our government systems working across Vermont, which is that the public engagement processes are under resourced, they are underfunded, they are under capacitated in terms of skill and expertise, in terms of facilitation. And what that leads to is urgent panicked processes that really work to just reaffirm the assumptions that went into the processes. The messaging that is coming out of the movement right now, so this movement of rural landowners reflects messaging that Ornella and I have been speaking into the process, that many rural RPCs have been speaking into the process, that were not heeded. And this is an example of how insufficient public engagement and insufficient dialogue processes creates more expensive policy and more waste of our government resources. Because we could have been addressing these questions two years ago, four years ago, at an earlier stage of the process. We could have, think it was Neil, I'm sorry, I'm getting mixed up here now, suggested that rather than leading with, okay, now everybody, you get to give feedback on, does this law make sense or this rule, or how do we micro tweak this? We should be prioritizing what are the questions that community has? What are the concerns community has? And really looking to validate way back here when we're doing the research, then we can create policy that actually addresses all these different needs. But now we are here trying to reform a law at the second half of the session that is highly complex, that has a lot of heat and fire under it, and we have created a tremendous amount of distrust, and there is nothing more expensive for our government and public resources than trying to navigate deep distrust between government and people, deep distrust between parties. Our communities face real challenges, really complicated challenges, climate change, flooding, declining demographics, hollowing out rural communities, infrastructure projects that are unimaginable, the collapse of our healthcare system. To be able to navigate any of those, we need to be able to trust that we can work together across difference, to trust that when we raise concerns, that people who don't look like us or vote like us can hold our concerns at least enough to investigate the data points on it, and that there is some power and capacity for us to build meaning and build a process forward that is respectful of our difference. Nicole, please jump in. Yum.

[Ornela Mata Figueroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Where at this point, we relied on a supermajority. And in that way, then we pushed through regardless of what was the whole of Vermont. And that inadvertently created a real violence. When we push through with a super majority, then we silence, and we didn't mean to, and now this is where we are.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: No, that's okay. So I'm gonna pass out here a tool that we bring almost everywhere we go, because it is such an important tool. It's a framework that we have been working with as the LAOB to build a new governance technology, to really innovate. How do we do governance together led from community? So rather than relying on the same governance technology we've had in this country for the last two fifty years, which is representative, which really prioritizes the decision making power of an elite class of people, how do we actually build a democracy from the ground up and empower communities to jump in, to step into their civic leadership and to build policies that really serve the multiplicity of democracy. So I want to tell you all that the sad story that I just shared about the public engagement process for Act 181, again, to be so clear, this is not a 181 problem alone. Is across the system. This is official from LAOB. We can tell you across the housing and land systems, there is absolutely inadequate, insufficient understanding of how do you effectively engage the public and meaningfully get their input to generate better outcomes. Right now, what we have is something worse, which is we have a check the box process. So we call for open meetings, we demand public engagement, and then we don't resource it. And so we have processes like this that say, Hey, we had a public meeting. We had a public meeting. Were you able to come at 04:30 on a Thursday afternoon when you were picking up your kids? Oh, no. Okay. Well, your voice doesn't matter. So we have a public engagement process that actually further marginalizes marginalized perspectives. That's the sad story. The positive story is that there are people working on new tools, including the LAOB. We have over the past few years, while participating in the lurb rulemaking and trying to figure out what's going on here, we have also been engaging in multi stakeholder, nonpartisan community listening and community empowerment activities that are in plain language, that are culturally relevant to the audience, that are focused on learning, listening to our community members from a place of wanting to believe their perspectives and to learn from their perspectives, not with a focus on educating them so that they can come along with our perspectives. We have been doing community listening and training the institutions that we're working on to do this public engagement with an open mind, an open heart, and an open will. And we really believe that public engagement needs to be reciprocal. It needs to be mutually responsible and mutually respectful and non extract These are the kinds of tools that are present in this framework, and this is why we are really actively working with this. One thing I wanna point out to you here is this table. This table goes from, this is the spectrum. On the left side of the spectrum is what I would consider the worst form of governance we could have, which is we ignore people. We ignore marginalized people. We make laws without consulting them. You see at the bottom, the resource allocation ratios. In the ignore system of governance, we invest 100% of our resources into how cousin the system administer and administer itself. On the far left hand of the spectrum, we have the defer to community ownership. This is the model of how do we really set up a bureaucracy that gives people on the ground the power, as much power as possible to debate, to discuss, and to make decisions about what will impact them. You see at the bottom, the resource allocation ratio, 80 to 100% of the public governing resource is actually invested into community's ability to do those things. This is a tool that we are working on and that we have gained a lot of traction with. And we would like to work with this committee and the full LERB and the 181 system to do land use planning right. Part of the problem with the process and the siloed process and the status quo process is that it creates this false hope, as Ornela said, that we can fix this problem here, and then in another silo, like we can fix environmental problems in this silo, and then whatever problems are coming up about housing, those will be fixed in the housing silo. And then whatever problems are coming up in the housing cycle, those will be fixed in the shelter silo. And whatever problems are coming up in the shelter silo can be fixed in another silo. I very, very, very much believe that we have enough land to house us all, to support our food and agricultural systems, to care for our ecology. We have to because this is the only land we have. This is the only land we have. The only way we can do that is by actually creating processes that get us out of those silos. We cannot make land use policy that looks environmental issues outside of the context of how does that impact housing, and how does that impact shelter, and how does that impact economic development. Recognizing that there is now a lot swirling around 01/1981, this movement from the rural community has really shaken things up, and gratitude for that. But here we are in the second half of the session, how are we going to address all of these issues? How are we going to build community ownership in just a few weeks? We're not. We're not gonna do all this then. I really want to close by saying, or close my time by saying that we do have a number of specific next steps that we can offer this committee to work on this session. We have language in a bill called H. Eight twenty six, which is an act relating to land access and opportunity to create a land security working group that would provide an assessment and recommendations regarding disparate economic and environmental justice impacts of Vermont's land use and conservation policies and regulations. And also as a secondary purpose to identify, to create a assessment on the identification and protection of agricultural land for community food security purposes. This is a working group that we really encourage this committee to consider adding into three twenty five.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Can you say that? H826?

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Yep, eight twenty six, introduced by Rep Chittenden.

[Unidentified committee member (references Corinth bylaws)]: Thank you.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Okay.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: We are also developing an approach, as Ornelas said, to shifting our land use regulatory system to be less convoluted and adversarial. This came up again and again in the appeals rulemaking group, in the tier three rulemaking group, and in all of our community listening. We have to address how complicated, unpredictable, and adversarial it feels for Vermonters to go through permitting processes. We can do better. We can get better outcomes by working together. Those are near term things we can work on. We also need to work in the near term on what is the strategic policy that we can enact this session that will reestablish trust so that we can actually work together moving forward? Because right now it feels like we are in a very low trust environment, which means none of us are going to be able to have those complex nuanced conversations. So, in the background and in the long term, we are working to build community voice and policymaking. We are working with this tool. We are working with all of the institutions to really develop this expertise and to figure out how do we resource and empower our communities to step up into the civic engagement that we need our Vermonters to step into. It's the only way we get through these big challenges we're facing is more Vermonters are part of the solution, and we alleviate these bottlenecks and capacity gaps in decision making over policy. I'm sorry, I was a little bit all over the place. I have so many thoughts. The last thing I want to say, because I couldn't fit it in anywhere is 01/1981 just categorically fails to address the need to protect agricultural lands and food lands in our communities. It feels like agriculture was kind of left out of 01/1981 as a consideration. And we really, really, really encourage all of you to take actions as soon as possible, immediately to address the planning, the needs we have for planning to secure our food lands. Food security is absolutely essential to our security and our safety, and our agricultural lands are a huge part of that. We would like to see agriculture added to tier one as a potential use. This is a low impact addition, but would at a minimum acknowledge that agriculture does not just happen in rural communities, it also happens in town. And all of our Vermonters deserve access both to housing and also to land to grow food on. Before we close, I don't know if you have any last

[Ornela Mata Figueroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: We're here. We wanna work with you. We have we have a draft for us that that we could work from in developing a process, and we know this is not gonna this may not be able to happen right this moment. And we don't we know that you all have a lot of different pressures that are, like, pushing and pulling in your decision making, and we're here. We wanna keep and stay in dialogue with you all.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Thank you so much for your testimony. Representative Jacob.

[Unidentified committee member (facilitating Q&A)]: Yeah. Thank you both for all the work you do and for putting so much thought and effort into this feedback. I think everybody's mornings, I've just been really appreciating everybody's testimony this morning. It's really thoughtful. It's really well researched and it's giving us a lot of food for thought. I was just hoping you, I don't think you did this, but if you could just articulate a little bit more how LAOB was integrated into Act 181, what exactly the legislature as your role, and I know you talked a lot about your experience in the rulemaking process, but if you could just articulate that for us.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: Sure. So, yes, thank you. Thank you, Juan, for creating the Land Access, and Opportunity Board. We have really been an effective and valuable investment and creation of this body. So thank you for creating us. The way that LAOB interacts interacts with 181 formally is we are named into a number of the LERB working groups. So in the rulemaking working groups, appeals, tier three, forest block, criterion 8C, and also the wood products manufacturers, sector, forest sector reports that came out last year. Being named into those working groups was revolutionary because suddenly there was somebody sitting at the policy making table that represents black and brown Vermonters, immigrants and refugees, all low income Vermonters, the queer community, disadvantaged Vermonters, and psychiatric survivors. Without us there, I am sure that members of the working groups may sit in some of our communities, but not extensively. Our communities are not sufficiently represented in government when we are not there. In addition to those formal specific places within 01/1981, our statute, the powers and duties of our statute to name that we are to research and understand all of the different land and housing programs, laws, institutions, and basically the whole system, to work within those systems, research those systems, and identify where are those systems perpetuating inequitable access to land and housing, and then to provide remedies for those. So our statute would empower us and entitle us to participate in Act 181. And then furthermore, we were officially named on those working groups, which was a very productive decision, and we encourage that to continue happening. Thank

[Unidentified committee member (facilitating Q&A)]: you. Other representative Logan. Yeah, first,

[Rep. Kate Logan (Member)]: I just want to say that I'm really happy that the Environmental Justice Act and the, Act one eighty two that established the Land Access and Opportunity Board are, bearing fruit in this way, especially, in this really important process around land use. I think it you know, I am I am really concerned about the lack of investment or lack of willingness to invest in process in in our government. And it's been it's been a point of tension in our debates around a lot of policies, especially in light of environmental justice concerns. And and I'm I have to admit, I'm saddened by the politicization of this conversation right now or the the way it's been politicized. Because I think one of the things that folks who have been advocating for the Environmental Justice Act and the Land Access and Opportunity Board have been advocating alongside with that are adequate resources for public process. And that has failed. That piece of it has failed, the resourcing of the process. So getting it's a it's a challenge. You know? Like, I think the so I just wanna acknowledge that that's been an attention in all of our conversations around environmental policy over the last few years is while we're making advances on environmental policy, we've had to compromise. And the compromise has always been on process. And that wouldn't be my choice. That so that leads up to my question about, h eight twenty six. I was wondering if you would be able to talk a little bit more about the land security working group, what that is and what it would do?

[Unidentified committee member (facilitating Q&A)]: You wanna start?

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: So the land security working group is really a recommendation that we put in this bill based on our experience of all of the listening we've done over the last two years to community members and in these rulemaking spaces. We have really identified that our land use policy and permitting processes are lacking an analysis, as Ornelas said at the beginning, of economic impact and economic justice. And so that is a priority for the land security working group. The second priority is to understand and make a plan for what is the possibility of protecting our agricultural lands? Because right now, there is no coherent plan for pulling together an assessment of where are there opportunities, not just where our primag soils are, but our primag soils combined with opportunities for farming and strategic geographic location. We know this from talking to the field. We need this. Those are two priorities that we have named into our land security working group. From a resourcing perspective, the only way we have resources to actually convene that group is if the LEOB is funded at our FY 'twenty seven budget. Currently, we are not in any recommendations to be fully funded. So our ability to do, to your point, this kind of engagement and detailed planning is really hampered unless we do receive our funding.

[Ornela Mata Figueroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: The only thing I will add to that is that it's a really comprehensive group of people. I think there's 16 different organizations. 15? 18. 18. Thank you. Different organizations included in it and different representatives. And that's intentional. We wanted to make sure that we didn't like, we had a good group of people that could think through these bottlenecks, these levers, and really start making some good recommendations. And I'd

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: love to add one more thing, which is if you look at those groups that are named, there is a priority on including voices, you know, our communities, the marginalized and disadvantaged communities. And the reason for that is because the expertise, the vision, and the solutions that our communities have have been missing from the table. That's what is a direct outcome of marginalization, is that we as a system have lacked for, we have missed this essential expertise, the people who are most impacted, the people who most immediately see where the system falls apart and know how that goes, and know, because of that direct experience, how we can fix it. We haven't invited them to the table. So I would love to see a system in which all of our policy making apparatus of professionals who are paid all day long to sit and consider these issues work in service to the people who are most impacted. That we actually listen to them and say, Oh, that's an interesting question. How can we use our labor and our resources to explore those questions? Rather than to say, Oh, no, you're not an expert. You don't belong at this table, which is currently If

[Ornela Mata Figueroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: you knew what I knew, you'd believe just like me.

[Jean Hamilton (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: We are losing good solutions because of the siloed and very similar nature of who gets to make policy in this state.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: And how. One last question. We are out of time. You. Segment, and there are other I'm

[Rep. Sarah “Sarita” Austin (Clerk, Colchester)]: from Colchester, and I'm on the planning mission in Colchester. And, like, five months ago, the regional planning group from, I think, it's Chittenden County Uh-huh. Came to us with the mapping, talked about mapping, and we it was public. We were begging people to come to this, to give input into the mapping, into the tiers. Every time we do a zoning one zoning change, we're begging people to come. I mean, it's 18,000 people. We're starting a town plan with 10 different criteria. We are begging people to come to this, and no one comes. I'm what I'm wondering is, you know, we're putting it out on fake Trump porch forum. We're putting out notices. I don't know what you know, it's very frustrating to me because we're five unelected people

[Ornela Mata Figueroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: who

[Rep. Sarah “Sarita” Austin (Clerk, Colchester)]: are making these big decisions. Because I feel like it starts at the local level that people participate with the planning commission or the select board, and then it moves up regionally. Then by the time you get here, it's very difficult. So I'm just trying to understand how we can get people at the local level more engaged. I mean, we're trying to do it when after work, so people can come,

[Ornela Mata Figueroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: you know, but On a Saturday and a Sunday.

[Rep. Sarah “Sarita” Austin (Clerk, Colchester)]: Yeah, we have one meeting now on a Breakfast or brunch. Yeah. So I do think there's opportunity and I would, you know, we would love for a variety of people to come because that's the community. It's their community. You know, we're just, you know, trying to create regulations, but we wanna hear from the community.

[Ornela Mata Figueroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: It's good to hear that. It's good to hear that you wanna hear from the community. Absolutely. Thank you.

[Rep. Sarah “Sarita” Austin (Clerk, Colchester)]: But I think that's across Vermont. Yeah. Local government. Yeah.

[Ornela Mata Figueroa (Co-Director, Land Access and Opportunity Board)]: I think absolutely wants to hear. I live in Greensboro Bend. And I would say that based on what I have seen, there's a lot of double signals. Right? There's, like, a lot of, like, we wanna hear from the community. We're gonna hold public comment the moment the meeting starts, like, five minutes ahead of the actual time, and then, you know, not actually let people speak or have select board members respond angrily and not empathically to to what the community's bringing or not understanding the power that they have over their communities in a way that then causes harm. And then the more we we do that, then the less people show up. Because what's the point in saying anything? How many of you have been in this room and not said anything because you didn't think that what you had to say was gonna be respected or heard or or even, like, acknowledged. So that's what we're talking about. We wanna create an environment in which people, at the very least, can show up with what they think, And we can just even hold it with any kind with what what it needs, which is respect and recognition and empathy and collaboration. And curiosity. And curiosity. Thank you. Yeah.

[Rep. Sarah “Sarita” Austin (Clerk, Colchester)]: So thank you, Cathy. Please encourage everybody to show up at their local government because that's where this begins.

[Rep. Amy Sheldon (Chair)]: Thank you so much for your testimony. We are looking forward to learning more about what you brought us. With that, we'll go take a break till quarter past the hour. Thank you.